Innehållsförteckning för June/July 2019 från Gun Dog

MY COUSIN RANDY works as a shooting coach at a gun club. He recently sent me this e-mail: I worked all day yesterday at the gun club. Great day. Weather was ideal, lots of people talking about guns, shooting styles, new equipment, upcoming tournaments, etc. Then a younger guy came in with his golden retriever pup. The pup was 7 months old, happy as could be and a blast to play around with. Then the guy announced that he wanted to get the puppy used to the gunfire and my heart sank. I tried to drop some subtle hints about not doing that because the trap fields were full of shooters and it was going to be sensory overload. The guy shrugged it off like he knew better. After they…

TIME WAS, I thought the tone buttons on my e-collars were a waste of…tone. After all, I had a voice, and I had a whistle. I could (and can to this day) scream at a dog until my ears bleed. And my friends, with cause, may well consider me the poster boy for excess whistling. What’s more, if a dog continued to ignore me—hard to believe given my eminent stature in the dog-training universe, but still—I would march right out there and make him listen. So there. But nothing lasts forever, and my preconceived ideas about tone buttons, along with a whole bunch of other preconceived ideas I’d rather not go into, have fallen by the wayside. The reason? I was wrong. These days, the more I rely on my…

IT’S NOT DIFFICULT to witness companies virtue signaling these days. The green movement, like all well-intentioned societal shifts, has created a world in which it’s popular to fly the right flags and cater to consumers’ ever-evolving demands on big business. This does one of two things, typically. Either a business does the right thing and bends toward socially- and, more importantly, environmentally-responsible practices, or they do as little as possible to get lumped into the category and appear to be taking the high road. This reality has not been lost on the masses, and most consumers look to the companies they patronize with a critical eye to see if the efforts are purely to raise revenues and placate their customers, or if they are actually dedicated to responsible business practices.…

It’s amazing that with our ability to literally tap into the collective knowledge of all mankind, so much misinformation can be spread about remote trainers. Call it “Fake News” or whatever, but I’m here to set the record straight, once and for all. Here’s what e-collars are: tools. No different than hammers. In the hand of a carpenter with experience, a hammer is a beautiful thing. But give a hammer to a toddler and you’ll need to call that carpenter to fix the “work” your young child just accomplished on the home’s oak banister. In the hands of an expert (or a novice willing to listen and learn) the electronic training collar is an excellent tool to help solidify what dogs already know—even at a distance. Ever tried to holler…

This is one-year-old CROSBY. He is my first attempt at training a dog to hunt and needless to say we both have a lot to learn. Having learned the command “Place” made taking this photo a breeze! — David Jones, Whitehall, MT PIPER , my wirehaired pointing griffon, is 8 weeks old in this photo, resting at the edge of a field after bounding through the switchgrass. Although small right now, she has a good point, she can’t get enough of the water, and she’s willing to work for 5 minutes to drag a pheasant that is bigger than her over to me. — Evin Haukos St. Cloud, MN This is APOLLO CREED. He is a 2-year-old Llewellyn English setter. He loves bird hunting and swimming. — JR Gamez, Shingle…

I WANTED TO share a pic of my Boykin spaniel, Tucker. In 2018 he was the No. 3 ranked Boykin spaniel in North America Diving Dogs, with a personal best jump of 19 feet, 3 inches. He is also a waterfowl retrieving machine. Tucker is 21/2 and we hunt near Leonardtown, Maryland. Luke Martin JOE ARNETTE I was surprised to read that Joe has retired, but I respect his decision. I keep telling my son, “If I start writing crap, please tell me!” He’s a very good writer and does quite a bit for the Spokane newspaper. He thinks too much of me and the written word to not tell me. I hunted with Joe in Kansas many years ago—prairie chickens and pheasants. We hit it off very well, and…

WORKING WITH BUMPERS and dummies is a year-round affair for most of our dogs, but actual contact with live (or recently alive) birds isn’t. In fact, by the time you get into the summer your dog will probably not have had contact with the real thing in several months. This can be a problem when the season opens, which is why it’s best to start addressing the live-bird issue long before September or October. There are several considerations to be made when dealing with actual birds in a training scenario, not the least of which is access to the real thing. DEAD ONES, LIVE ONES Just as a disclaimer, if anyone reading this is dealing with a young dog that hasn’t been introduced to feathers, don’t go looking for a…

GYPSY, A ONE-YEAR-old wirehaired pointing griffon, stopped dead in her tracks. Her eyes and nose were set on a spot at the edge of a row of pine trees. Her right leg bent at the elbow and her tail stood at attention. Trusting the young pointer, I quickly made my way to her. Pushing through tall switchgrass, I readied the Blaser F16 GAME Intuition I carried. A flash of brown and gray erupted from the base of the pines as a lone quail flushed in an attempt to escape dog and hunter. Raising the Intuition to my shoulder, I swung and fired. The bird fell—my first Iowa wild quail. Elated, I placed the bird in my vest. I loaded another shell and hadn’t walked 50 feet before another quail flushed…

My wirehairs have become table scrap ninjas. Before every meal, I place them at their spot in the hallway, command them to stay, and proceed to eat. And without fail, they slink underneath my children’s chairs unnoticed, until one of the kids squeals, “Ewww, he’s drooling on me!” I take blame for this behavior. When we were focused on training, days were darn near military in routine. The dogs knew their place. They knew commands and, more important, the repercussions for not following those commands. I had my wife on board, and she kept the same high standards. That’s how, only 10 days after my first kid was born, I managed to stick a title on my first dog. But times have changed. The iron fist I held over my…

1 FOLLOW YOUR INSTINCTS Franchi has made a most formidable field gun with its new Instinct LX over/under. We have shot the L and SL models to death on skeet and roosters, and love them both. This version has a gorgeous walnut stock and Schnabel forend joined together by an engraved receiver with gold inlay. Available in 20- or 12-gauge, the safety-mounted selector allows shooters to pick which barrel fires first. franchiusa.com 2 FATHER’S DAY GIFT? We are saving our sheckles for a spendy auto-loader, and it will be tough to pass up the Fabarm L4S Deluxe if we ever get the truck, boat and house paid off...and the OK from our lovely wives. We’re suckers for intricate scroll work, and the Deluxe has a beauty of an engraving with…

A FEW YEARS ago, a friend came to me for some help with a young English springer named Wylie. At the time the dog was over a year old; he had received some basic foundation training and obedience and had been effectively socialized and conditioned to gunfire. He had even seen some birds, for which he had expressed clear enthusiasm. The dog was athletic and driven; his breeding was decent, and he had all of the raw material required of a solid, functional, hunting gun dog. What Wylie lacked, and what my friend was struggling to establish, was any sense of range. When put down in the training field the dog immediately stretched way out beyond gun range and followed his nose well out of sight. His casts were far…

PROBLEM There has been a noticeable increase in problematic behaviors such as stress-related fearfulness, excessive barking at unexpected things, fear biting, dog attacks on people and strange dogs, aggressive reactions in excess of any real aggressive context, all without an apparent cause. More disturbing than the “without apparent cause” is that these problems are happening in breeds usually known for docility and amiability like the wirehaired pointing griffon, German short-hair, springer spaniel, cocker spaniel, golden and Labrador retrievers. SOLUTION Some of the proposed basic causes of the problematic behavior with research to substantiate them are removal from litter too early (before ten weeks), and misguided selection of potential breeding stock where dogs are bred because of ribbons or trophies without regard for temperament faults or other genetic faults. But recent…

I guess you can’t fault Idaho for being steep, rocky, hot and dry, nor gravity for pulling unremittingly 32 feet per second. It is what it is. And you can’t blame a chukar for trying its best to avoid capture. Nor a setter for trying to catch up to it. So I guess it was my fault. I get full blame for not providing enough water to fully hydrate old Tilly. We were where chukar fools often are in late September—Idaho’s Hell’s Canyon. Appropriately named, it is technically North America’s deepest gorge (if you measure from the tallest peaks of the Seven Devils Range down to river level on the Snake). It is also radically steep and thoroughly littered with rocks begging for an excuse to roll, sometimes right off…