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The issue in many cases is the deference relationship between the trainer and the dog. If the dog is running the show there's no problem, the dog will have it's own way and there isn't damned thing you can do about it.

When you are running the show, and remember that these arrangements are established by the heeling position, the dog must cue on you because you have established yourself as the hunt pack leader. Very simple but difficult to absorb if you've never thought about it this way.

Dogs have an innate signalling system that establishes and maintains the deference hierarchy,, the "understanding" of which pack member is running the show. Now deference is a variable and not a fixed fact as is, for example, dominance. What does this mean?

The simplest analogy I can make is that the dog will regularly attempt to walk ahead of you when heeling. The reason that this is so is because the heeling position coincidentally happens to be the exact positional arrangement that is innate and used in the hip bump to establish deference.

Dogs are, in effect, always checking to see "who is in charge" of the current situation. Any good dog will regularly challenge you and try to walk ahead of you when on heel. This is absolutely normal dog body language. the dog is asking you;" who is in charge now?".

You will give the dog the answer. If you allow the dog to stay there you are deferring to the dog, an absolute acknowledgement that the dog is in charge of the situation. If you force the dog back into the shoulder to leg (heeling) position you are denying deference and insisting that you are in charge. When the dog will walk at heel it has accepted your control and defers to you.

This will go on a lot in your life with your dog and it is independent of sex or dominance status. This repetitive "questioning" by dogs is the reason why hunting packs can have a very different deference hierarchy than a resting pack. The deference status is complex and shifts back and forth a lot in a pack. If you study dogs interacting in a long term group you will find that the deference arrangement will often change from day to day and it can vary dramatically with changes in reproductive status.

All of this comes together in certain behavioural sequences. One of the more obvious occurs with steadiness. If the dog defers to you it will permit you to walk past it to approach the bird. If you defer to the dog it is the dog's choice of who is in control of the locked bird. That this is so can be demonstrated empirically. At one time conventional wisdom was: "That's the dog's bird and he won't let you get near it." We talked about this for years and it gradually began to dawn on me that this was absolute nonsense. If the dog is possessive about the bird why does it bother to point at all?

Is the problem between you and the dog or between anybody and the dog? This is the interesting experiment that changed it all for me. We had a Griffon in NAVHDA that was a hell of a dog but it wouldn't let the owner get past it to flush a bird, when the owner got to the dog the dog took out the bird.

We tried heavy dacron ropes and enormous choke chains... three men on a line to dump the dog when it approached the bird at a dead run. We broke choke chains and wasted a lot of birds to no avail. Didn't make a damned bit of difference.

While setting up this for the fifteenth time, the dog on point on a planted bird and the handler 25 yards behind the dog, I made a mistake, I walked between the dog and the bird and the dog didn't move a muscle... it held the point. I called over a half dozen participants in the clinic and we took turns walking around the dog and around the bird, we did it in groups of five and singly.. every thing we could think of.. dog was rock solid...didn't blink. I signaled the handler, he walked up through the crowd and when he got within ten feet of the dog it broke and took out the bird.

It was obvious that the issue wasn't between the dog and the bird... it was between the dog and the owner. The bird didn't matter but the boss did. After some years of experimentation I finally figured out that the dog wasn't possessive of the game... it refused to surrender control of the situation to another pack member... in this case the dog's owner. I started working on task switching exercises after that and task switching training coupled with walking to heel to correct the deference arrangement started to make a dramatic difference in the steadiness of our experimental dogs.

The system is pretty good today, we can task switch the dog until it is habituated to task switching and it is no longer an emotional issue. Then we work the dog and the handler together in the absence of birds to affirm the ease of task switching and we cure most breaking problems of this type.

The task switching exercises are emphasized and mediated by the owner/trainer's body language. This exercising is done in absolute silence and the dog learns to cue on the trainer's body movements and this determines how the dog responds to the owner when in the presence of birds.

When all of the deference issues and task switching are polished and established steadiness is not a problem... it isn't even an issue. In fact I tend to think of steadiness as something imaginary... there is no steadiness.. the dog is in charge, the dog and the hunter task switch and the dog is backing, not pointing and now the trainer is in charge. Very simple... steadiness with no commands... control the dog with your body language.

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