On Labor Day weekend in 1998, I had three days off from vet school and used them to drive from Ames, Iowa, to Springfield, Missouri, to acquire my first dog as an adult. Waterfowl hunting has always been my first outdoor love, and I’ve always been in awe of its deep history and tradition. For as long as I could remember, there was only one breed that would be my first dog: a Chesapeake Bay Retriever.
Emma turned out to be the perfect dog for me. I’ve often described her as my dog soulmate, and we navigated early adulthood together. She saw me through my last three years of veterinary school, my years in Minnesota, and our eventual move to South Dakota, which was heavily influenced by living in a place where we could chase birds together. For her first couple of years, she was my only dog, and during my vacation weeks, we would be up early to chase ducks, hunt pheasants midday, and return to the slough for ducks if we hadn’t shot birds in the morning. She could go all day, every day, and until the end, she never had more than a bump or scratch to show for it. She amassed quite the life list of birds and was the perfect complement to help me find my path in the real world. To this day, when the subject of Chesapeakes comes up, I still firmly believe that there are dogs…and then there are Chessies.
Emma developed degenerative myelopathy, the dog equivalent to Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and I lost her far too early in the spring of 2008. For most of the years since, I’ve told everyone who asks that I’m a Chessie guy. At the time of her passing, I was on the Health Committee of the American Chesapeake Club and had a hand in connecting researchers who eventually discovered the genetics of degenerative myelopathy in the breed. Other dogs in the breed had been shown to have it at necropsy, and Emma was the first living Chessie to have the disease confirmed on the now widely available test. When you get to see behind the curtains of most things, too often the experience becomes tainted, and it can serve to sour you on the very thing you loved and were committed to. This happened during my tenure on the Health Committee as we navigated the discovery of this disease in the breed. The constant pushback from those within the breed who should’ve cared the most just got to be too much. Ironically, it was being too active in too many churches that also led me to stray from that flock as well, but that’s a discussion for another day.
I vowed that once the breed and its breeders got a handle on this disease, I’d eventually be back. Almost two decades have passed, and I’m still without a brown dog. Had Vi not come into my life, I would have had one by now, and my next retriever will most assuredly be a Chessie.
When I lost Emma, I ventured into the spaniel world to fill my retrieving needs. I grew up mesmerized by Dave Carty’s writings in Gun Dog, capturing his late-season duck hunts with his springers in Montana. The spaniel search took me down the path of Boykins, which then led to field cockers. Once I made the decision to get a cocker, the only requirement I had was anything but white because I wanted to duck hunt. If you were ever fortunate enough to meet Lily, not only did she have some white, but she was essentially pure white.
For the first six months of her life, I was certain I had bitten off more than I could chew and had finally met my match on the dog training front. Once that mischievous puppiness lessened (thankfully, it never went away until the day I lost her), I realized that I had the dog of a lifetime on my hands. I have never had a dog bring so much joy to my life every single day. The hole she left in my heart has not even begun to scar, and a day doesn’t pass that I don’t miss her. This Chesapeake guy had become a cocker guy, and as I’ve made plans over the last year to add a third dog to the house, I knew there was no choice other than cocker.
Funny thing is that these were all logical answers and conclusions that I had thought my way into. I had done a pretty good job of convincing myself that I was a Chesapeake guy and then a cocker guy because I thought that all made sense. The part of the story I left out, because I think even I often overlooked it, or perhaps have taken it for granted, is that over the entire course of my journey with dogs—other than Emma’s first solo three years—I have also had one, and usually two, English setters in the house.
While my logic-driven brain had convinced me that the Chesapeake and then the cocker were my favorite breeds, my emotionally driven heart had always held onto the breed it could never be without. I’m not sure exactly when this realization hit me over the last couple of months, but once I realized it, I was taken aback by my almost passive role in how this all occurred. I could not imagine life without a setter in it.
I recently read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind, and he talks about the concept of our emotional, intuitive mind being like an elephant—it is powerful, driven by instincts, desires, and subconscious feelings. The Rider represents our rational, logical mind—it attempts to steer the elephant using reasoning, but it has limited control. Over the course of all these years, my “elephant” had clearly been making my dog decisions for me.
Once I came to the realization and reflected on the dogs in my life, it became very clear why I had made those choices and why that breed had captured my heart so completely. Every setter I have owned has been purely good and purely love. They loved to perform in the field, were couch potatoes at home, and were faithful companions that just wanted to be loved and by your side.
My journey as a setter man did not start as an easy one. Maggie was a challenge for the first two years of her life and would definitely have been considered a late bloomer. As I struggled with her that first year, I had one trainer, who saw her run in the field exactly once, recommend that I cut my losses and “sell that black-hearted little bitch.” Thankfully, I didn’t listen.
This season, with Boomer turning eight, I had the sudden realization that he was no longer a puppy. It’s true what they say about time speeding up the older you get. While I had been making these plans to add a cocker to the pack in the next year, my elephant stepped in and showed me the way I actually needed to travel. Last weekend, I called my favorite setter breeder and am once again on their list for my next dog.
It’s funny how easy it is to build a story in your head and rationalize your thoughts to fit that story. For 30 years, I had convinced myself of a story that, while valid, wasn’t the whole truth. I like 80s rock, probably more than I should admit, and the more I’ve thought about this, the lyrics from Survivor’s “The Search is Over” keep going through my head: “The search is over. You were with me all the while.” I like hunting dogs and have devoted my life to them. There are some breeds I like, some I love, but only one that I guess I can never be without.
