A good duck dog can be trained in 10 minutes a day, four or five days a week, if your training program is a good one.

Without a program, the novice trainer can easily make mistakes. I pity the guy trying to teach shot steadiness and hand signals to a pup that hasn't yet learned to retrieve to hand.

Taking a 4- or 5-month-old pup on a real hunt may lead to gun-shyness or fear of water, birds and other dogs.

A good training program helps keep these mistakes from happening. It might come from books, videos or advice from trainers or hunting buddies who have trained one or more good hunting dogs.

But the important thing is to have a plan. One of the first things that plan will tell you is to keep training sessions short, maybe no more than 10 minutes a day, but frequent, at least once a day, if possible. read more