ART EASILY ACQUIRED.
1. Dog-breaking, so far from being a mystery, is an art easily acquired when it is commenced and continued on rational principles.
2. I think you will be convinced of this if you will have the patience to follow me, whilst I endeavour to explain what, I am satisfied, is the most certain and rapid method of breaking in your dogs, whether you require great proficiency in them, or are contented with an inferior education. No quicker system has yet been devised, however humble the education may be. The education in fact, of the peasant, and that of the future double-first collegian, begins and proceeds on the same principle. You know your own circumstances, and you must yourself determine what time you choose to devote to tuition; and, as a consequence, the degree of excellence to which you aspire. I can only assure you of my firm conviction, that no other means will enable you to gain your object so quickly; and I speak with a confidence derived from long experience in many parts of the world, on a subject that was, for several years, my great hobby.[1]
3. Every writer is presumed to take some interest in his reader; I therefore feel privileged to address you as a friend, and will commence my lecture by strongly recommending, that, if your occupations will allow it, you take earnestly and heartily to educating your dogs yourself. If you possess temper and some judgment, and will implicitly attend to my advice, I will go bail for your success; and much as you may now love shooting, you will then like it infinitely more. Try the plan I recommend, and I will guarantee that the Pointer or Setter pup which I will, for example sake, suppose to be now in your kennel, shall be a better dog by the end of next season (I mean a more killing dog) than probably any you ever yet shot over.
4. Possibly, you will urge, that you are unable to spare the time which I consider necessary for giving him a high education, (brief as that time is, compared with the many, many months wasted in the tedious methods usually employed), and that you must, perforce, content yourself with humbler qualifications. Be it so. I can only condole with you, for in your case this may be partly true; mind I only say partly true. But how a man of property, who keeps a regular gamekeeper, can be satisfied with the disorderly, disobedient troop, to which he often shoots, I cannot understand. Where the gamekeeper is permitted to accompany his master in the field, and hunt the dogs himself, there can be no valid excuse for the deficiency in their education. The deficiency must arise either from the incapacity, or from the idleness of the keeper.
5. Unlike most other arts, dog-breaking does not require much experience; but such a knowledge of dogs, as will enable you to discriminate between their different tempers and dispositions (I had almost said characters)—and they vary greatly—is very advantageous. Some require constant encouragement; some you must never beat; whilst, to gain the required ascendancy over others, the whip must be occasionally employed. Nor is it necessary that the instructor should be a very good shot; which probably is a more fortunate circumstance for me than for you. It should even be received as a principle that birds ought to be now and then missed to young dogs, lest some day, if your nerves happen to be out of order, or a cockney companion be harmlessly blazing away, your dog take it into his head and heels to run home in disgust, as I have seen a bitch, called Countess, do more than once, in Haddingtonshire.
REQUISITES IN AN INSTRUCTOR.
6. The chief requisites in a breaker are:—Firstly, command of temper, that he may never be betrayed into giving one unnecessary blow, for, with dogs as with horses, no work is so well done as that which is done cheerfully; secondly, consistency, that in the exhilaration of his spirits, or in his eagerness to secure a bird, he may not permit a fault to pass unreproved (I do not say unpunished) which at a less exciting moment he would have noticed—and that, on the other hand, he may not correct a dog the more harshly, because the shot has been missed, or the game lost; and lastly, the exercise of a little reflection, to enable him to judge what meaning an unreasoning animal is likely to attach to every word and sign, nay to every look.
HALLOING SPOILS SPORT.
7. With the coarsest tackle, and worst flies, trout can be taken in unflogged waters, while it requires much science, and the finest gut, to kill persecuted fish. It is the same in shooting. With almost any sporting dog, game can be killed early in the season, when the birds lie like stones, and the dog can get within a few yards of them; but you will require one highly broken, to obtain many shots when they are wild. Then any incautious approach of the dog, or any noise, would flush the game, and your own experience will tell you that nothing so soon puts birds on the run, and makes them so ready to take flight, as the sound of the human voice, especially now-a-days, when farmers generally prefer the scythe to the sickle, and clean husbandry, large fields, and trim narrow hedges, (affording no shelter from wet) have forced the partridge—a short-winged[2] bird—unwillingly to seek protection (when arrived at maturity) in ready flight rather than in concealment. Even the report of a gun does not so much alarm them as the command, “Toho,” or “Down charge,”[3] usually, too, as if to make matters worse, hallooed to the extent of the breaker’s lungs. There are anglers who recommend silence as conducive to success, and there are no experienced sportsmen who do not acknowledge its great value in shooting. Rate or beat a dog at one end of a field, and the birds at the other will lift their heads, become uneasy, and be ready to take wing the moment you get near them. “Penn,” in his clever maxims on Angling and Chess, observes to this effect, “if you wish to see the fish, do not let him see you;” and with respect to shooting, we may as truly say, “if you wish birds to hear your gun, do not let them hear your voice.” Even a loud whistle disturbs them. Mr. O——t of C——e says, a gamekeeper’s motto ought to be,—“No whistling—no whipping—no noise, when master goes out for sport.”