retriever training. The section on water work includes some good pointers on training against bank running, and there is some excellent material on water and land blinds. I suppose many copies of this book have been sold to dog owners at the end of their rope. I suggest and recommend this book before training commences as it is far easier to avoid problems than to overcome them. However, as I recently told a friend, "You need to get a copy of this book right now!" In reviewing spaniel books, I find it quite fascinating to look at the differences in training between the US and Britain. The differences are far more complex than the rabbit pen and delayed exposure to game. I would like to take a brief look at two books that espouse the "classic British" method of training. P.R.A. Moxon's Training the Roughshooter's Dog is one that comes to mind, and it certainly is a classic, having been first published in 1977. If you are a student of such methods you will want to have this in your library. I appreciate Moxon's gentle methods. Another book in this vein is Joe Irving's Training Spaniels. Both books seem to suffer from jumping around from topic to topic and not progressing in the linear fashion presented in most training manuals. However, it is in that very jumping around that the books remain interesting for casual reading; you really never know what is going to surface in the next page. Irving, in particular, seems to like to mix it up. The book, in fact, is organized in chapters as if each chapter was a class... say part of a 13 week series. As such, each chapter has a main thrust, but also a few other topics may be discussed to whet our appetite for the next class. Each chapter is followed by a summary with several bulleted points. "As I believe a lot more harm than good can possibly come of using pigeons, I suggest you do not introduce the dog to them until he has had a fair amount of retrieving the real thing." - Irving in Training Spaniels Moxon's book is broken up in the middle with questions and answers (all breeds) that appear as if they may have originally been published in a magazine. In the context of the book they seem incongruent. Moxon's book may also suffer from the state of the Springer in the UK during the Seventies and Page 2 | Previous Page | Next Page | Archived Book Reviews | NEW! The Bookstore |