Best Way to Train Your Gun Dog: The Delmar Smith Method by Bill Tarrant

Former Field & Stream Gun Dog columnist Bill Tarrant teamed with legendary trainer Delmar Smith to assemble one of the best instructional manuals available on working with pointing dogs. In a logical, methodical fashion the pair cover all of the important aspects of owning and training a bird dog, beginning with the factors to consider when selecting a pup and progressing through basic obedience to the finer points of bird work.

Delmar's methods seem almost too simple at times, and if you ignore this fact, you'll miss the primary message of the book. As Delmar says, "If you want to train like a pro, you've got to think like a dog." It's common sense dog training - no expensive equipment, no highly advanced psychiatry-based techniques, just fundamental methods proven over many years to work . Smith and Tarrant realize that there are neither perfect dogs nor perfect dog trainers, and accordingly they offer suggestions for working with several dozen common problems.

All in all, I strongly recommend this as a first book for any aspiring bird dog owner or trainer, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to a veteran, either. I read this book for the first time on my honeymoon (bad case of sunburn prohibited many other activities) when my first dog was seven years old and already an accomplished hunter. When I finished it, I couldn't believe I'd waited so long.