By Randy Lawrence
They are relics from another time, another kind of dog, other ways of thinking, training, and hunting, four artifacts streaked white from the swallow nests generations of birds have built from the low ceiling.
For more than thirty years, they have hung, unused, on the top board outside the horse stalls, mute testimony to the long journey this old farm has witnessed.
Back in the 1970's, this farm was consecrated to training and hunting dogs from horseback. There were wild quail here then, as well as birds raised in seclusion, live trapped, and released in a designated "dog training" area. This canteen watered the first truly great dog to ever hunt here, a dog from Sam Light's breeding named Willie. When we hunted away from the creek that snaked through the Flagdale Road bottom, Willie would come in, put his front paws high along the fenders of my friend Bob Thompson's saddle, and drink enough to hit that next big lick along a long field edge.
The heavy hunks of iron, the bell shaped one a converted canoe anchor, rode in Bob's saddlebags. When a dog went on point, Bob dismounted, pulled the weight out of his saddle bag and clipped one rein to that metal loop. The shooting ponies Bob rode were conditioned to "ground tie," but the anchor was a reminder should a horse take a notion to meander off while his rider was walking up quail the dog had pinned.
The big bracelets of hard wooden balls are "action devices” rollers meant to irritate a horse's pasterns so that he picks his front feet up higher. The slightly exaggerated leg lift, coupled with driving the horse into the long-shanked bit, can enhance the desired four-beat gait that walking horse aficionados covet. Rollers are frowned on everywhere, outlawed in some places, consigned to a dark era before more thoughtful breeders focused on bloodstock whose smooth-riding gait comes naturally.
The fourth "museum piece" hanging on that weathered board is a lead snap tied to 8" of nylon cord, each threaded through a heavy rubber ball. Marketed back in the day as "Slo Balls," this other sort of "action device" were fastened to the D-ring of a dog's collar so that the balls dangled between the animal's front feet. As the dog ran, the balls rapped and bounced and battered the forelegs, ostensibly to distract and intimidate a dog for whom the far horizons were simply too much temptation.
I suppose they were left over from the "pro broke," horseback field trial dogs that hunted here when Bob first owned the farm, before he began to breed and train his own, before he selected for dogs that would take a fencerow to the end, but would check back and work in partnership with the handler.
I never saw the "Slo Balls" on a dog, thank God, just as I never saw those heinous rollers tied above the hooves of one of our shooting ponies. But those tools of a different trade still hang in my barn, grim reminders of a time when my friend Bob and his peers thought we should force animals to our will and tastes.
Instead of discriminating breeding practices to shape a better pointer or setter, one genetically shaped as a companion working dog for whom The Right Stuff came naturally, hard, heedless men and women from another time, another sensibility, jerked, tripped, shocked, pinch collared whipped, and bullied dogs and horses into some semblance of what they were never bred to be in the first place. More than one of the vintage training books from Bob's library shelves offer detailed instructions of how to "warm up" a disobedient dog with a "well-placed load of chilled #9's."
The ugly cruelty of "breaking dogs" never took root on this farm. As the years and the dogs and the quail changed the soul of how things were done here, this place became a haven of "frictionless learning." We devoted more time and thought to putting dogs and horse partners in positions to succeed, a philosophy built around the mantra of Delmar Smith, one of Bob's very few heroes in gun dog training: point of contact, association, repetition... and marking time on the dog's schedule, not our own. The inevitable gaffes by man and beast were turned into chances to learn, never excuses for losing composure and meting out punishment.
My friend Bob died three years before any Firelights came to live on his farm that I now call home. But Lynn Dee's English setters, bred for discerning people who want to get with, and hunt through, their canine companions are, out of the box, everything Bob Thompson came to admire: beautiful dogs that could step straight from the Rosseau or Frost or Wyeth prints he hung on his farmhouse walls; dogs that can fly in open country, then motor down to meticulously scour the thick 'n' thorny; bird dogs that point with intensity and classic style, retrieve naturally, handle deftly...and share hearth and home between hunts with an ease and devotion that can take a little of the edge off Real Life Stuff.
What more could we ask from dogs bred for covert and gun?
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