00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and this week's show is all about having more than one dog and how that can be a benefit but can also create some unexpected problems. Since we are Minnesotan's my family, you know, through and through we have a strong lake cabin culture. So many people we know go up north for the weekend or for their vacation to chill out next to some lake that offers up fishing and swimming and generally pretty good vibes. We are lucky in my family to have a little place at a lake, and questionably lucky that about fifty seven of my wife's relatives also have places at the same lake in the same exact spot. Many of them have dogs, so there is always a rotating cast of hounds up at the lake. And the number of times that I hear someone comment on how old dogs teach new dogs this skill or that trick is kind of mind blowing. It's also generally totally wrong, which is one of the things I'm going to get into right now. 00:01:10 Speaker 2: Beliefs are weird. 00:01:12 Speaker 1: On one hand, they can carry a lot of weight and truly help people make better decisions. On the other hand, they can convince us to dig in our heels and tighten our grip on things that simply are not true. The history of us is littered with those types of beliefs. It wasn't so long ago that it was believed that the shapier skull would determine your strengths, the depths of your mental faculties, and whether you were likely to be, I don't know, a serial killer or not. Phrenology as a belief eventually went the way of the Dodo, but not nearly as quickly or as quietly as it should have. Another theory about how our brains work, proposed by John Locke back in the late sixteen hundreds, said that we were all born as blank slates. There was nothing written on our mental chalkboard, so to speak, and we all had to gain our knowledge from lived experiences and our perception of the world once we were in it. We now know that there's plenty of writing on that chalkboard that has passed down through generations, and that we most certainly aren't born as blank slates. Einstein, that fellow who changed an awful lot about what we understand in the world of physics once proposed that the universe was stationary. Since he was the kind of guy to get the tough questions right, people believed him until Edwin Hubble discovered that everywhere we look in the night sky, objects were red shifted, meaning that they were going away from us at a rate that was hard to fathom. It also proved that the universe wasn't static but is actually expanding. For about thirty years ending in the nineteen nineties, people believed that sharks would provide the cure for cancer and humans. This is because people believe that sharks never got cancer, which has been proven wrong dozens and dozens of times now. Another belief in the sixties that was totally bonkers was that teens who went on dates had to do some type of activity so they wouldn't succumb to their desires to well get busy. I guess they were supposed to play rugby or build a small off the grid cabin on their dates so they wouldn't suddenly realize that there were all their fun things they could do. People are nuts, and it's fun to look back on some of the dumb stuff that society generally believed. It's also true that folks fifty or one hundred years down the road will look back at us like we are cave men and women just barely functioning with our dumb, primitive brains and our outdated and dangerous ideas. They might get a kick out of the flat earthers, who should just charter a plane and go find the edge of the earth so we can end this debate once and for all. We are all waiting there. Fliffers, go out and find it. Take some pictures. Can't be too hard, right, any huski. The dog world isn't immune to beliefs that just don't hold a lot of water. And one of them that I'm going to get into right now is the idea that old dogs teach puppies the ways of the world. Is if your old lab takes the new pop aside, a puppy that the old dog undoubtedly hates and resents with as much hate and resentment as a lab can muster, which isn't much, and that dog's going to say to that puppy, this is how we sit. So we get a bite of cheese or a treat, or the roosters like to hold up in the patches of willows on the edge of the cattaills, so just swing down when young grasshopper and get ready to flush them. Let me frame this up another way to maybe make it make more sense. If you want your dog trained and you aren't confident enough to do it yourself or capable enough to do it yourself, where do you look right a professional dog trainer? You don't look for someone who owns a really good dog that will train your dog. It's not like there is a market for professional trainers who just let their dogs train other dogs while they sit on the porch of their vacation homes, drinking margaritas and checking their ever increasing bank balances. If it was as simple as old dogs teaching young dogs, you can bet your happy ass that someone would have capitalized on that in some way already, because there would be some serious money to be made. 00:05:24 Speaker 2: Now. 00:05:24 Speaker 1: While there's probably are some folks somewhere who claim to do this, you know, this world's pretty big. It's not an industry that is thriving, at least to my knowledge. I'm pretty sure I know why, and so do you. So Anyway, I currently have two dogs, and one of them is eleven and the other is three. I wouldn't say the veteran hasn't taught the rookie anything because she has. For instance, the old dog is a master of finding any molecule of food she can, which often involves her licking the stove and the entire kitchen floor on the off chance that three breadcrumbs or a splatter of buck has ended up within her reach. The young dog has taken to this task several times a day as well, which might be proof that dogs do teach other dogs something. It also might be proof of parallel thinking in food driven animals with unbelievable noses. It's hard to say, and I can't really ask them. I think it's far more likely that the new dog learning from the old dog. Belief is really supported by how the old dogs work with us, not how they work with the puppies. For example, during pheasant hunts, an old dog is not going to tolerate a puppy in its personal space. A good bird dog is going to do what good bird dogs do. And if there is something that old bird dogs love, it's bird hunting. A pop out in the field for its first fall might have a tiny inkling in its mostly empty skull that birds are what it's after, but it won't be mission focused like an older dog. It'll be very excited to be there, and it will burn an awful lot of unnecessary energy just running around sniffing stuff, which is great. But when the old dog puts up a rooster and the shotgun swings just right, the puppy might realize that the entire vibe of this new outing has changed. When the old dog picks up that Chinese chicken and brings it back to you, that puppy is going to be very interested in it. It's also going to notice that everyone is happy about the new developments. And if there is a sense memory that grows deep roots in a dog's brain, it'll involve attaching the scent of something to an exciting fun experience. Add in a dash of gene deep love for game birds, and you have the recipe for the advancement of a dog's education in the realm of bird hunting. In that case, did the old dog explicitly teach the new dog anything? Nope, I take that back. The veteran might have taught the pupster, through a growl or some other avoidance behavior, that every rooster is his. And that's the final word. On the matter, there's no denying the benefit of bird exposure and the overall inns and outs of the hunt that just go way better when you have a dog along that knows what to do. A puppy or a youngster in that world is going to learn more about the hunt than one that goes solo and has less exposure to birds and gunshots. 00:08:14 Speaker 2: And the whole process. 00:08:27 Speaker 1: Another example here, which I talked about recently on an episode, just might involve water. A doc jumping dog might take off and enthusiastically hit the drink at full speed to get to a bumper. Is it possible that a young dog that watches this a few times might be more inclined to leap off the old diving board as well? Maybe it seems likely, But the old dog isn't some retired olympian teaching the next generation how to flip and twist in the air from a height to ten meters. The old dog is just doing what the old dog does, and a young dog is round it. Does it hurt? Probably not at all, and it might be some benefit. While having two dogs, in my humble opinion, is twice as good as having one dog, It's not without its downsides, of which there are many. In this way, even if it were true that old dogs are like the mentors who set out specifically to mold their proteges into something they could only dream of becoming, it's also true that one extra dog in many training situations is one dog too. Many puppies have notoriously short attention spans. Now, I'm going to get into this in future episodes about puppies and distraction training, but for now, understand this. If you have a dog under about two years of age, other dogs will pull that dog's attention so hard you will likely lose out on anything you try to do with the dog. Now, you might think, well, sure, other dogs, new dogs, strange dogs still distract my pupster, but not the old dog that I own and that lives with my young dog. While this does tend to mitigate some level of distraction, it's also not quite so simple. The easiest way to test this is to try to train two dogs at one time. If you've never done this, boy, are you in for a good time. I have extra special insights into this because I'm the father of twins, so I had to train two babies at one time, which is a job I was woefully underqualified for. I've also trained both of my current dogs at the same time, including when one was a true pupster. Even more than that, I had the misfortune of having nextdoor neighbors for a few years who did the big brain move of getting two terriers at the same time, and then I watched them try to train both of those litter mates to astoundingly terrible results. And it wasn't the dog's faults either, it was the situation in which they lived and thus were trained. Are there benefits to having two dogs? Absolutely, in the right situation, I'd risk a divorce to have more than two, because I think dogs make life a hell of a lot better, and as I get older, my tolerance for them doesn't change, but it does for being around people. I prefer the company of four legged buddies who can smell pheasants much better than I and have no aversion to swimming through cold, cold, cold water to find dead ducks and return them to me while I sit in relative warmth sipping coffee. Multiple dogs are great, and for many of us, a necessity if you want to always have one prime ish age dog with which to hunt the deal though, is to recognize when the two or more dogs are lowering the effectiveness of training sessions or just degrading the learning experiences during actual hunts, versus the times when having a season pro out there with a newbie is actually beneficial. This isn't as cut and dry as you might think. I'll give you an example here that smacked me upside the head last December while standing in the middle of head high cattails trying to get Sadie to find a rooster that had tumbled to terra firma after soaking up a load of fives. I thought, since it was Sadie's third season and she has been on a lot of birds already, that she had the hunt dead command down just fine, thank you very much. I can tell you about some badass rooster retrie if she's come up with that would have put any dog to the test. The thing, though, which occurred to me while standing in that freezing slew, was that she wasn't as good as I thought, because she always had the older dog to pick up the slack. And if there is one thing an old seasoned dog really excels at, it's finding those dead and wounded birds. Those dogs have seen every trick, the runners, the hiders, the birds that really really don't want to end up in the game bag. A three year old dog doesn't have that same resume. And it gets worse when you realize how often the old dog has found a bird while the young one didn't. That was a big blind spot on my part and didn't become evident until I only had the young dog to rely on for fine, wounded and dead birds. Maybe the key is to look at both dogs and yourself as a team, but to also really develop each dog as an individual. In fact, that probably is the only good way to go about this stuff. It probably would pay to think about it like this. All dogs need a lot of training. They just do well at least working dogs anyway. The level that you'd put into a solo dog, that's the level you should put into every dog, regardless of how many you own. Instead of looking at it like the older dog will somehow put on its teaching hat and relieve you of some of your training duties, look at it like the old dog can be an additive feature to your training. There are benefits to an older dog being around a younger one in a social setting and hell, even when the older dog corrects your pop after it jumps on the old timer's head and bites its ears with little needle teeth for the thousandth time, that's generally a better scenario than a puppy jumping on a strange dog's head, because that correction might not come softly. If you get my drift, There are benefits in hunting settings, as I've already outlined. An old dog that puts more grouse into the air for you will allow the younger dog to experience more of all parts of the hunt, including retrieves. You just have to be careful about looking past the development of your fresh recruit in order to have the best hunt you can because while those two goals aren't mutually exclusive, they often just don't play very well together. And you also have the reality that dogs are pack animals. And while this can make training pups around other dogs are real biz natcho, it's also one hell of a benefit for them in your home life. You might not always want to engage your dog in play or give it some pets or whatever, but two dogs together often seem to figure out how to keep each other entertained. All of this is to say, I fully encourage you to get multiple dogs, although not multiple puppies at the same time. Now, if you do pick up another one, as you can see the painful reality that your original dog may be aging pretty fast or a little closer to the end than you maybe really want to admit, just remember the level of inputs you need to develop that dog not only into a great working dog, but a well behaved companion. That's a heavy lift, and it can be made much heavier by thinking that an old dog is going to grab a corner and help you hold the whole thing up. They won't, but they can help in many ways, and they don't have to be a negative to the whole equation. You just have to understand how to manage both and pay attention to the subtle ways in which having multiple dogs might turn into a problem down the road. It's a new set of challenges, but it's a great problem to have. That's it for this episode. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation's podcast. As always, I want to thank you so much for tuning in and for all of your support. You know, all of us here at meet Either truly appreciate it. If you're just getting keyed up for the season and you want to keep training your dogs, or maybe you're going on that first Western haunt, or maybe it's a most white tail season for you. The meadeater dot com has so much hunting content. You can go and read articles, you can find recipes for those doves or tea or whatever early season birds you're gonna chase, or you can just fill some time on maybe a long road trip listening to Clay's Bear Grease podcasts, Wired to Haunt or whatever. So much content there to keep you entertained and educated. Go check it out at the medeater dot com and as always, thank you so much for listening.