Lessons from my first lab, Otter

Over the past 15 or so years, I’ve mentioned several of my dogs in this column, including my late labs Belle (yellow) and Abbie (chocolate), and more recently, littermates Dawn and Violet. But I don’t recall ever writing a story about my first lab, Otter.

It was only about a year ago that my sister sent me the one and only picture I know exists of Otter. The original image has me in it standing aside, but I cropped it here so we could see him better. I’m guessing it was taken around 1986, probably shortly after we brought him home.

Back in the mid-1980s, my brother and I would hunt quail, duck, goose. If I remember correctly, my brother bought Otter at 7 months old. He brought the dog home, but I was to feed him, water him and do what I could to train our new dog.

I knew absolutely nothing about dog training but must have seen an ad in my Ducks Unlimited magazines for a dog training book called “Water Dog,” by Richard Wolters. Probably every duck dog trainer alive has either heard of or read that book. It’s perhaps dated by today’s standards, but a lot of the training techniques in “Water Dog” are still used today.

We managed the basics like sit, stay, back (used as the fetch command), over left and over right, but that’s about as far as we got, probably from my lack of effort and understanding of what training really entails. I’ve said it a number of times these past few years, that if I’d have known a trainer personally or had a mentor help me with training, my life might have taken a different path.

It’s been so long since we had Otter that I have but a few, vague memories of hunts. I know we took him with Dad to Duck Creek a time or two. Another time, my brother and I hunted on the Mississippi River from his boat, and I shot a ringneck duck. I sent Otter from the boat, and he took off! The river current carried the duck and dog downriver, but Otter, who weighed approximately 95 pounds, had no trouble swimming in the current. He managed to fetch the dead bird and bring it to shore. He was a bit tired by the time he got back to the boat, and I haven’t forgotten that long retrieve after all these years.

After I graduated from high school in ‘89, we still had Otter, but I took on a job that kept me at work 10 to 12 hours a day, Monday through Friday. I wasn’t around to spend time with Otter like I had been, so Dad decided to rehome the pup, who was probably 5 years old by that time. A man came by the house one day with his young son, and they took Otter to a new home.

Now that I’m older, I realize my commitment to Otter became poor, and if I had a chance to redo that situation, I would. We live and learn. I just wish I could rub Otter’s belly one more time. Miss you, buddy.