Pritch and I are less than two weeks away from the opening of dove season in South Carolina. Hard to imagine now when she was just a ball of warm brown fur that I could hold in one hand as I dashed out the door before she peed on the floor.

At nearly 8 months old Pritch still has loads to learn and plenty of room to mature, but hopefully the building blocks are in place. As for me, I’ve probably learned more than Pritch. But as I look back here are a few things I wished I’d done differently in our journey down the first few miles of Gun Dog Road:

Here instead of Come: You’ll find very few trainers today who use the Come command. It has been replaced by Here, which allows for more inflection in your voice.

The Basics: I can’t stress this enough. Sit. Stay. Here. Heel. Work on them. Reinforce them. Don’t rush to field work (like I did) for fear of being left behind by others dogs. If you have the basics nailed down, the rest is so much easier.

More Birds: Granted it’s hard for me to work Pritch on birds in downtown Charleston, but I wish I had given her more opportunities, especially at an earlier age.

Pinch Collar: I can’t imagine life without the pinch collar. I didn’t discover the advantages until recently. Perfect for teaching Heel and wonderful when it comes to a leisurely walk around town.

Don’t Spoil ’Em: Connie Cleveland, a professional dog trainer, told me that Pritch lived better than many kids in middle-income families. There might have been a touch of exaggeration, but her point was well taken. It’s tougher to be the leader if you let pup have her way around the house.

Use the Check Cord Often: I wish I had used it more frequently. Don’t be afraid to let a pup trail one in the house or on your walks in the woods. It’s the perfect tool for teaching Here.

Don’t Panic: More than a few nights I returned home from a training session devastated—sure that my pup would amount to nothing more than a couch-cushion warmer. It will happen to you. Don’t worry. Gun Dog Road takes twists and turns and hits dips and valleys. Stay with it. Stay positive. I try to remind myself of this every week.

Those are my lessons learned so far. Have any you care to share?

In the last week I’ve logged over 500 miles in the course of training Pritch. We’ve had our ups and our downs. So I’m taking it easy today and surfing the Web for a bit. I found some pretty whacky dog stuff: A fleece-like vest called Thunderwear that a canine can wear to help assuage its fear of thunder. (Honestly, I’m not making this stuff up.) and a Snuggie for dogs. (You know, the blanket with sleeves—sometimes called a Slanket. Well now Fido can have one, too.) Who buys this stuff?

But my favorite find was a treasure trove of videos of dogs retrieving beers for their masters, like the one in the video above. For the time being, Pritch has way too much on her academic calendar to fool with tricks like this. But I’m curious if any of you have taught your dog any wild stunts like this. (I watched a couple of videos of dogs diving 8 feet to pick up an object off the floor of a pool.)

It’s Friday after all, and we could all probably use a chuckle—and a beer.

Deer season opened yesterday in the Low Country of South Carolina. I know, hard to imagine if you hunt in a place like Vermont or Kansas. But take solace: it was 89 degrees today, and I heard the mosquitoes were so thick they could carry you off the treestand. I went fishing. Still, it got me thinking about Pritch’s potential as a tracker of wounded deer. She constantly has her nose to the ground, and I’m sure she’d pick up on a wounded deer trail with the proper training.

I did a bit of research and found that it doesn’t take too much effort to train your pooch to find wounded deer…at least compared to, say, teaching blind retrieves. Seems all you need to get started are a few Ziploc bags of frozen deer blood and a hide or tail.

The best—and possibly only—book on the subject is Tracking Dogs for Finding Wounded Deer by John Jeanneney. There’s also an organization in New York called Deer Search Inc. that specializes in training dogs and volunteer handlers to assist in finding wounded deer.

Believe it or not, the German Wirehaired Dachshund (otherwise fondly known as the wiener dog) is one of the best canines for the chore, but others like Labs, Goldens, and beagles work equally well. Any dog that helps find a wounded deer is a good one in my mind.

While I know using a dog to track wounded deer is not legal in all states, I’m curious if anyone else has used their dog to recover a downed big game animal.

Last night when my wife, Jenny, and I returned from the grocery store I let Pritch out of her crate, and Jenny and I began unloading the goods. A few minutes later, I looked on the kitchen floor to see Pritch enjoying a $20 bill that had fallen off the counter and was now in two pieces. I ended her cash fix as quickly as it started, and a surgical-like taping job began. (I can assure you President Jackson never looked so good.)

So far Pritch has been pretty darn good about not chewing items of interest. By those items I mean anything that has emotional or financial value. But the $20 bill incident led me to tally up the other objects Pritch has gotten her teeth around: The slipcovers on both couches have small holes near the corners. The Oriental rug has a half-dollar-size hole where the thread was pulled out. The coffee table leg looks to have been attacked by a rabid rat. Two pairs of flip-flops seem to have been hit by a meat tenderizer. The corner of a throw pillow lost some serious threads. And, ironically, my brother’s copy of Training Your Retriever by James Lamb Free has a few nibble marks on it. (Sorry, bro.)

The dollar amount? Well, that quickly gets you over $2,000 worth of goods…and I thought we were doing well. To be fair, Pritch hasn’t gotten a tooth on any of the structural elements of our house—walls, molding, doors, etc. Early on we learned that if she showed any interest in that stuff we’d quickly hit it with Grannick’s Bitter Apple spray —by far the greatest chewing deterrent I know of. And we don’t have any true horror stories like my friend who’s Jack Russell disemboweled a queen mattress. Or a fellow I met recently whose dog ate every one of his wife’s high heel shoes—the type that cost more than a fine fly rod.

In general, we typically keep a close eye on Pritch, and whenever we see her looking “chewy” we throw her a Kong toy or an indestructible bone.

How about your pooch? Has it put the big chew on your stuff? Let’s hear about it.