Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2017 i Gun Dog

BACK WHEN I was a lowly high-school sophomore on the football team, we endured what my coaches called two-a-days. The idea was to take our lazy, pampered bodies and whip them into shape for the upcoming football season via morning and afternoon practice sessions. It was brutal. But far worse was the prevailing wisdom that, no matter how hot we got, we should never be given water. I can remember being so thirsty I was almost delirious. The point of that brief trip down memory lane is that there are still people who think the right thing to do for a thirsty dog is to deny it water. And they would be just as wrong as my long-ago football coaches were. If your dog is thirsty, let him drink! Dogs…

PROBLEM I have a 14-month-old German shorthair rescued when he was about eight months old. He was found as a stray and lived with a foster family with several older GSPs for about a month until I took him.There is no indication of abuse, no shyness, no aggression toward dogs or people; seemingly a solid dog both mentally and physically. He has proven to be an excellent gun dog with lots of potential. I used what I consider to be standard training practices, leash trained him and conditioned him to an e-collar. He is quiet in the house, playful and at ease meeting people and dogs. However, there is one major issue. He totally loses it when he is put in his crate and I leave the house. He…

The first time I saw my breeder’s pickup truck was a shock. Under his topper, an aluminum three-hole kennel. And beneath that, a custom-made organization system. Twin bed-length drawers rolled out to reveal more training and handling gear than most folks would deem healthy. At the time, I thought it was overkill. I mean, you need a whistle, leash and maybe an e-collar, right? What else was there? But many moons later and plenty of dogs under my belt, I’ve realized that gear—good gear—is a necessity for training any gun dog. Consider the following items part of that group. DOKKEN’S DEADFOWL TRAINERS Proper fetch and hold is key for retriever training. While the process may be rough, the results can be glorious. Getting a plethora of bumpers is key, too,…

VERSATILE REBUTTAL Loved the photo reprise of Chumlee v. Whispering Wind (also your cover dog, Dec/Jan/Feb. 2015-16) accompanying Dave Carty’s “Sporting Dog Forum” on page 28 of the June/July issue. Not so happy, however, with Dave’s dismissal of the “versatile” breeds, as that’s one quite accomplished example in the photo. Chumlee, a Deutsch Langhaar, also happens to be the papa of my pup, who just finished her NAVHDA NA and JVG VJP tests. Alan Nickelson via email LEARNING WITH RUBY The article “The Novice, the Pup and the Badlands” from the Nov. 2016 magazine immediately stuck out to me. I am also a young female hunter with my first bird dog in training. Most of the time it feels very overwhelming attempting to train a bird dog without any prior…

Sooner or later your dog is going to run into an animal that wants to hurt him...but with some common sense, you can avoid many of these animals most of the time. IT WAS TANGO’S first season. She’d run ahead and disappeared over a rise. A moment later I heard my friend’s voice: “Dave, Tango’s got a porcupine. You better get up here.” Sure enough, when I arrived she was warily circling downwind of a porkie, which had parked itself in the middle of a wheat field and rolled into a protective ball. Tango was creeping toward it, curious but cautious at the same time. She’d never seen a porcupine. This was one of the few times in my dog-training career when serendipity got the drop on bad luck. The…

“DAKOTA HUNTING FARMS is one of the few places left in South Dakota where you can easily see more than 100 roosters every day. Even with all those pheasants, however, getting a limit isn’t necessarily easy,” said a regular repeat client. “We and our dogs walk long distances in really good habitat to fill our game bags. That’s one reason three generations of our family have been coming here for 30 years. This is South Dakota hunting like it used to be.” With this sort of testimonial, the popularity of Dakota Hunting Farms is easy to understand and appreciate. Located in the northeastern region of South Dakota (40 miles east of Aberdeen on Highway 10 and 23 miles north of Groton), Dakota Hunting Farms is among the oldest commercial hunting…

“I was experienced in hunting waterfowl with a dog but not so much when it came to upland birds so I needed a dog that had great instincts and was easy to train.” In the 1930s, two Hungarians, Vasas Jozsef and Gresznarik Laszlo, set out to produce a dog that combined the color of the vizsla with a heavier coat and a more substantial build than the elegant, athletic and sensitive pointing breed native to Hungary. They wanted a dog more suitable for cold weather and for retrieving from icy water. To accomplish this objective, they crossed two vizsla bitches with a German wirehaired pointer whose sire was known to produce offspring with longer coats. Pups from the two females were then selected and bred to each other. Voila! Or…

Last fall a hunting buddy and I spent four days roaming public land in Nebraska.With us were two dogs. His was a 1-year-old chocolate Lab; mine, a 3-year-old black Lab. A single day of running the grasslands had his dog exhausted while mine spent four days working for birds. My dog was in better shape, but not to the degree where she should have been so far ahead of his dog. In fact, his pup quit hunting halfway through our trip. My dog is a hard-charger and in the fall I ask a lot of her, so it’s quality nutrition in her bowl every day. Luna also gets supplements because she performs noticeably better when I address her pre-hunt and post-hunt needs. Naturally, there’s more to having an in-field go-getter…

THE LABRADOR RETRIEVER has ascended to the zenith of American popularity while the nation’s human population has undergone a sweeping urbanization. Meanwhile, the total population of breeding ducks in North America has doubled. Of course, correlation does not prove causation, so the simultaneous occurrence of these trends may be nothing more than a coincidence. Whether causal or not, these trends mean the Lab is not merely the dog of the hour, but likely the dog of the future as well. Like many Americans, I was raised in the countryside but have lived much of my adult life in the city. Along the way I made the journey from pointing dogs to spaniels and finally to retrievers. That journey is not a mere accident of tastes. Each breed made perfect sense…

WEATHERBY, INC. IS best known for its big game rifles, but the company fields a diverse line of shotguns, as well. Their pumps and semi-autos are made to Weatherby’s specifications by ATA Arms, a huge and highly respected arms firm headquartered in Istanbul, Turkey. The SA-08 semi-autos are practical field guns available in 12 and 20 gauge. Models with wood stocks wear satin or high-lustre finishes; synthetic stocks are black or camouflage, and metalwork is available in matte or high-gloss blue. All operate with Weatherby’s “Dual-Valve System.” Some semi-autos have only one gas valve, but this system doesn’t work very well. It’s the old Goldilocks conundrum: it delivers too much gas for light loads, and too little for heavy loads. But neither is “just right” for all loads. Weatherby includes…

“Okay, so here are the guidelines: One gun dog, two shotgunners, six rooster pheasants hand-placed in the prairie grass of this 10-acre field. You will receive a score from your judge for: (1) the number of ringnecks you shoot within a 20 minute period; (2) the number of birds located and retrieved by your dog, and (3) the number of shotgun shells not fired during your hunt. Any questions about the Bird Dog Challenge?” For 15 years, Kent Shelton has been announcing the rules for “The Bird Dog Challenge.” In that time, Shelton has prepared hundreds of hunters and their gun dogs for this competitive event which has attracted participants from more than 25 states across the country. Sponsored by the Huron, South Dakota Chamber of Commerce, “The Bird Dog…

It was a typical summer morning in the Sonoran Desert. I hadn’t even finished my coffee yet and already the thermometer was pushing 90 degrees. Shaking my head, I sat down to embark on the daily routine. Delete, ignore, unsubscribe and so-on: As I monkeyed with the various electronic devices that tend to demand so much of our attention, my eyes finally landed on something worth reading. It was a message from my friend Billy—part of an ongoing conversation we’d been having about an upcoming trip to the Uintas. “If we push it back by a couple of weeks, we can hunt blue grouse on the hike in,” Billy’s message read. “Otherwise, we can just head straight for base camp and focus on ptarmigan. There should be plenty of good…

RETRIEVERS CAN BE strange creatures. Perhaps that’s to be expected from dogs bred and trained to carry out tasks that are for the most part against their natures. Such things as aggressively flushing birds rather than silently stalking, killing and eating them; or picking up downed game and delivering it undamaged to their owners. Given that trained dogs perform these jobs willingly, it’s wise to cut them slack when they do something just this side of oddball. Maybe it’s my particular set of experiences, but it seems to me that retrievers—for convenience, let’s include spaniels in this job description—go “off the rails” more than most other gun dogs. And a sizable portion of this “derailing” focuses on the reluctance of some dogs to quit a search for downed game without…