About me
I did not pick this up. I was raised in it.
Curtis Teare. Bird dogs, horses and gun dogs first; a board-and-train in Molino because this is home and I wanted to be back in it.
My father
He was the trainer you took a dog to in Pensacola, for twenty-seven years.
For twenty-seven years my dad was the premier dog trainer in Pensacola. If you had a bird dog on this end of the Panhandle between then and now, there is a fair chance he touched it, or trained the dog that sired it, or told you honestly that the dog you bought was never going to be what the ad said.
I grew up in his kennel. I was carrying water buckets before I was carrying a gun, and I learned timing, pressure and honesty from watching him work — and from getting it wrong in front of him, which is a faster teacher. Nothing I know about a dog came out of a seminar.
He passed away two years ago. Leeward exists in large part because of him, and because of what happened to me after.
The years away
Wildlife management, high-end hunting, and a lot of windshield time.
I left the Gulf Coast to go do this at the level where the dog has to be right, because the client has paid for it to be right.
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Wildlife management
Managing habitat and game on private ground: burning, planting, timber stands, water, and building places that hold wild birds instead of released ones. It changed how I train, because it taught me what a dog is actually up against.
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High-end private hunting
Guiding and running dogs on premier private places across Alabama, Georgia and Texas. Paying guests, expensive expectations, and no room for a dog that only works on a good day.
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Professional competition
Running and handling dogs at a high level all over the country — Georgia, Arkansas, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota. Competition is a brutally honest scoreboard. It tells you exactly which parts of your program are real.
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Horses the whole way through
Bird dogs at that level are handled off a horse, so the horses were never a hobby. A horse tells you instantly when your hands are late or unfair. A dog is more forgiving, which is why so many people train dogs badly for years without noticing.
Coming home
I came back to be closer to family.
After my dad died, the math on being nine hundred miles from home for most of the year stopped working. So I came back, put the operation on fenced acreage in Molino, and built it the way I would want it if it were my dog going somewhere for a month.
Six dogs at a time, never more. One person doing the training, the feeding, the cleaning and the phone calls. Prices on the website. Pictures every day and a video every week, including the days that go badly. If you call two years from now, you get me, not a front desk.
The pet board-and-train is most of what I do, and I take it as seriously as the field work. But if you have a bird dog, you should know you are handing it to someone who has spent his whole life on the ground it will be worked on.
What that means for your dog
Field standards, applied to a pet.
A competition dog has to be right in a strange place, in bad weather, with other dogs running, with people watching and with nothing in it for the dog at that moment. That is a much higher bar than “sits in the kitchen.”
So when I say a dog will hold a place command with a plate of food on the floor and the doorbell going, that is not a sales line. It is the low end of what I am used to asking a dog for.
It also means I will tell you the truth about your dog on the first call, including when the honest answer is that you do not need a four-week program, or that the problem is not the dog.
In the field, on foot
Walking in on a point with two dogs down. Whatever the dog is for, the work looks
like this: quiet, unhurried, and repeated until it is boring.
Six dogs at a time. Never more.
Tell me about your dog on a 20-minute call. If Leeward is not the right answer, I will tell you that on the call and point you somewhere better.
Currently booking: 2 spots open for the next intake