Steady With Style: Index

An Interview with Maurice Lindley I drove to South Carolina to interview pro-trainer Maurice Lindley and watch how he used remote launchers (spring-loaded metal boxes with air holes that launch birds remotely) to teach pointing dogs to be steady-to-wing-and-shot. After three days of training, I drove home and ordered three remote launchers. What I had seen changed the way I wanted to train dogs. Maurice’s dogs were calm. Their heads and tails were up, and they were paying attention as he check-corde...

If the little Weim bitch was trying out to be a four-legged ballerina I think she'd have a great shot. On point with her nose. En pointe with her toes. Inch by ever slower inch she snuck up on the pigeon. I was in quiet agony. The bird was standing there looking around like a Sunday driver. Tude was so close she could almost snort it. Fly foolish fowl, fly! Pounce, almost...jaws snapping on a plume of desert dust and the blessed bird was up and winging back to the coop. My prayers and offerin...

The rattler was mad! Five feet of coiled fury in full buzz. The dog nonchalantly lifted his leg and pissed on the sagebrush, right at the snake! “The lights are on but nobody’s home,” says trainer Terry Chandler and we laugh. It might not have been funny if the young Weimaraner had met the Western Diamondback by accident. But the New Mexico bird dog man and snake handler had taken out both sets of the snake’s fangs earlier, so while the dog might have gotten a strike to his privates never to be ...

You won’t hear Maurice Lindley say much to his dogs. His canine students learn mostly from touch and cue off of his body language. How the South Carolina-based trainer does it, from puppy all the way to finished dog, is succinctly summed up in this little gem of a book by author Martha Greenlee. Letting the bird teach the dog is the underlying training theme. It isn’t an original concept, but Lindley adds his own touch to methods he gleaned from reknowned trainers, Bill West, Bill Gibbons and Dave Wal...