BENTLEY -- Strength can surface from weakness. Gain can offset loss.
Bill Autrey is an example of that sort of thing. He trains dogs. In fact, he
is to dog training what Beethoven was to classical music. Despite the loss of a
faculty usually critical for success in his profession -- he cannot speak above
a whisper because of throat cancer -- the 64-year-old Autrey is one of the
foremost professional dog trainers in the world.
He currently trains 16 retrievers for competition and hunting near his Grant
Parish residence in Bentley, and their owners live in places like New York and
Nebraska and Texas, not to mention Louisiana.
"He has such a rapport with
dogs and they love him so much, they watch him constantly," said David McGraw, a
crawfish farmer in Natchitoches who was one of the charter members of the
Central Louisiana Retriever Club when it was founded in 1984, the year Autrey
underwent chemotherapy and radiation for his first bout with throat cancer. "He
relies more on training the dogs with hand signals than with voice commands.
He's a strong trainer but very gentle."
He has been the "Dog Whisperer" since 1988, when doctors at Oschner's
hospital in New Orleans removed one vocal cord from his larynx to rid him of the
cancer that had returned. When he recovered from the surgery, he chose to speak
on his own in a whisper rather than use an artificial larynx.
When he went back to dog training, he had just gotten a black female Labrador
retriever puppy named Missy.
"When I tried to train her," Autrey rasped, "she looked at me like 'What's
wrong with you?' So I went to watch Bob Region working dogs in Alexandria where
the Sam's Club is now, and saw the key was blowing a whistle to get the dog's
attention. Well, I told myself, 'I can blow a whistle.'"
"He wanted to know if he could teach (Missy) to work like my dog was, as I
was using a whistle to stop my dog and then give it hand signals to direct it to
a training dummy laying out in the field about 125 yards away," said Region, a
professional dog trainer from Deville. "I told him that he probably could but it
was going to be a tough proposition since he could not vocalize his commands.
Little did I know the determination that he had to succeed against a most
adverse condition."
Autrey and Missy were quite the pair. Neither of them appeared to be
championship material in the eyes of many, but looks can be deceiving.
"People told me she'd never amount to nothing, she was just a hunting dog,"
Autrey said. "I'd never failed at anything in my life, and I wasn't going to
start with a dog. They told me I could not train with that (whispering) voice
because I could not vocalize at a distance."
Autrey and Missy proved the naysayers wrong. Missy worked her way up to the
peak title of Grand Hunting Retriever Champion and competed well until her
retirement in 1996, but her biggest contribution to the sport was whelping a
litter that included a male pup nicknamed Cody.
With Autrey's training, Cody became the only retriever in Hunting Retriever
Club history to run 15 Grand Hunt passes and win 13 -- three better than the
next closest competitor, a female, and seven better than the next closest male.
Two things were crucial in the winning streak, said Autrey: a lot of hunting,
and a lot of training. Autrey, who retired from the Air Force after being
stationed at England Air Force Base, eventually moved from Pineville to an
isolated, woodsy haven in Bentley. He trains every day and competes two or three
weekends a month.
He has had time to do this since turning over control of Autrey
Refrigeration, Air Conditioning and Heating to his son, Marty. Hunting has been
in his blood, though, since his days as a youth in Demopolis, Ala., hunting with
a BB gun under the watchful eye of his grandfather, a house builder who was also
a market hunter during duck season.
Youth passes us all, man and beast, and Cody, now 10 1/2 years old, no longer
competes, even if he is in heavy demand as a breeding dog. Last year, Autrey
realized during a training session Cody couldn't see his hands movements. "He
had cataracts," he said, hugging and scratching the dog as it shivered and
licked his face while standing on the back of Autrey's pickup truck one day last
week. "So I knew it was time to retire him."
Professional dog training has been good to Autrey, but despite his fame in
the dog trainer world -- he has often competed in ESPN's Great Outdoor Games --
the lean, bespectacled Autrey is as approachable as a murmuring creek in the
forest. With Cody's chocolate son, Roux, Autrey is gearing up for a series of
competitions over the next few months, climaxing with the Super Retriever Series
Championship in June. When he's not so busy, he houses people at his home for no
charge who want to learn from the master how to train dogs -- without yelling at
them, to boot.
"He's one of the very few (professional dog trainer celebrities) who'll go
out of his way to help so many young folks," said Justin Tackett of Little Rock,
Ark., an analyst for ESPN's Super Retriever Series and host of the "Waterdog" TV
show.
"I don't know if it's the throat cancer that did it, but he sure has an
appreciation for life. I don't know of a single person who has said a negative
thing about Bill."
