Hey there. Welcome back to drinking from the toilet. I'm your host, Hannah Branigan.

This week we're talking to Elsa, Blomster, and Lena Gunnerson, who are the authors of the book,

Retrieving for All Occasions.

And this is a book I really hope you'll check out.

I've read it and I'm going back through and taking more notes because I'm really enjoying

and I'm getting a lot out of it.

It is a book that focuses primarily on like hunting dog, gun dog, particularly retrievers, a little bit of

spaniels, types of behaviors. But I think you'll also find that there's a lot in here that's

applicable to all forms of retrieving, not just hunting dog, gun dog retrieving. And the same really

goes for the conversation that we had. Now I don't hunt and I

don't have hunting dogs and I really don't know a whole lot about that world at all except for

as generally overlaps with dog training and obedience and some of the other stuff that I do.

I do have friends who play in those games but I really don't know a lot about it. So I had a lot of

questions for them about how exactly this works. What does some of the terminology mean?

And in the first part of our conversation, we talk about the differences between spaniels

and retrievers. I didn't realize they had totally different jobs, but they kind of do.

There's specific jobs and then behaviors associated with them, but they kind of do. Their specific jobs and then

behaviors associated with them, which was really very interesting. Since I do, of course, work with

all breeds of dogs, spaniels and retrievers included, as well as pointers and other types of hunting

and gun dogs. So the differences in behaviors in how those dogs perform and the tasks that they

do, well, that was kind of interesting to me because we will often see residual effects even,

you know, with a dog in a house of those behaviors that have been selectively bred for for hundreds

...