Season is almost upon us and many of us as preparing for duck and goose seasons. It is an exciting time of year and hopefully you have been putting in the time to prepare your four legged partner for the upcoming season. But as we count down the days to opening day, our training regiment should shift a little. This rings especially true if you have a young dog heading into the first or second season. This is where we go from running set ups and drills to trying to make it more of the “game time” feel. It is important to prepare our dog for anything that we think they are going to encounter on the hunt.

This is where I like to say we need to focus on what we can control. On a hunt, we can’t control how birds work or weather conditions. We certainly can’t replicate wads of greenheads or groups of Canadas trying to sit on our blinds. So we focus on the things we can control. We can get the dog working in and out of the blind he will see while on the hunt. We can condition them to calling, decoys and other dogs, but there are many things that our dog doesn’t see in our normal training sessions that he will see on that hunt. Don’t let the first time he encounters these situations be in the field.

There will always be curveballs that come up on a hunt that we aren’t prepared for but if you take the time to train for the things you can control, you will set yourself up the best you can for that first hunt.