pet connection

Well, not really hounds, but pointers (who acquired their scenting ability from their hound ancestors). I went to a talk tonight by a former colleague, Tim Gallagher. Tim was editor of Wild Bird when I was at Dog Fancy, then moved on to Cornell University, where he is editor of Living Bird. You may have read his first book, The Grail Bird, a couple of years ago, about the much-disputed rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker. Tonight’s talk was on falconry, a promotion for his new book, Falcon Fever: A Falconer in the Twenty-first Century.

Tim was always a renaissance man. When I knew him, his interests ranged from opera to fencing, birding to ballet. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that he’s been a falconer since childhood. In the slide show he presented, the hawks were magnificent, the Scottish and Italian landscapes stunning, but of course it was the dogs that captured my interest. During the talk, Tim regaled us with a story about tromping the Scottish moors with some Italian counts and an English pointer named Vodka.

“Vodka would just take off and we’d be running after him, yelling ‘Vodka, Vodka.’” he said. “If anybody had seen us, they would have thought we were a bunch of lushes.”

He mentioned in his talk that the falcons are trained with positive reinforcement. Later, I found the following in an online article about falconry, which references the 13th-century book The Art of Falconry by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen:

Today we are keenly interested in “clicker training” captive dolphins through positive reinforcement; we note that the captive dolphin is free to go away to the other end of the tank. Similarly, the captive falcon is entirely free in the sky as soon as she leaves the wrist; therefore her training is analogous to training dolphins in the open ocean (as has been done). From the falcon’s perspective, the falconer is perceived as a hunting partner–and his dog–and his horse. Lucidity in “positive reinforcement” training is essential, and to admire this quality, if no other, modern dog trainers will enjoy Frederick’s book.

When I got home, I pulled down a book that’s been in my library for years, albeit rarely perused: Emma Ford’s Falconry: Art and Practice. In it was a section on dogs.

“Grouse hawking is not possible without dogs,” she writes. ” ‘Good dogs make good hawks’ is never truer than when it is applied to grouse hawking.”

Because they’re wide-ranging, fast and generally light-colored, English pointers and setters tend to be the dogs of choice for falconers. Trained to hand signals and a whistle, they must turn, stop and drop on command. Most important, and seemingly contrary to the nature of a bird dog, they must be hawk safe.

“This is generally not a problem as there seems to be a natural empathy between falcons and pointers,”
Ford writes. One of her photos shows two pointers in the back of a vehicle, one in front and one in back of a cadge–a sort of open carrying box–holding three hawks. In a New York Times obituary published in 1880 of Lundy, a famous hawk, the author writes: “Lundy, like most other good and much-used game hawks, became perfectly familiar with the dogs, notably with a red and white setter, much used as the hawk’s servant…”

But no matter how well trained, dogs are dogs. Ford finishes the section with a dryly humorous listing of canine vices. Here are a couple:

Not following commands. This is a constant hazard, often associated with the foibles of the dog in question. The dog may chase hare, find water and take a long bath, fiddle about in reeds or bracken, run for miles, then find a distant point on the horizon, meanwhile missing large chunks of ground and assuming temporary deafness.

Disappearing. At times of stress of excitement, the falconer’s first thoughts are usually for his hawks. Dogs tend to use such opportunities to slope off in search of another point.

Now, I will take off my history minor hat and indulge in some

Gratuitous puppy blogging: Harper and I went to the Cavalier national specialty last week to attend the therapy dog demonstration. David Frei, the voice of Westminster and president/CEO of Angel on a Leash, was there with his new Cavalier puppy, Angel, and did a presentation on the joys of working with therapy dogs. Luckily, I was sitting on the floor in the back and couldn’t see the video, so I wasn’t in tears at the end of it like the other people in the room. Afterward, we took our dogs through situations that we could expect to encounter in nursing homes and hospitals: people crowding the dog, trying to give it food and so on. Harper did fine. I could use some work on changing the subject when someone asks insistently if she can buy my dog. Harper’s breeder was in the audience and my first instinct was to say, “Her breeder’s right over there; let me get her for you.”

But I guess that wouldn’t work in real life.