Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2020 i Gun Dog

IT’S hot—really hot. I just recently made the big move from my home in the Midwest, where the humidity is staggering, to Utah, where temperatures can reach the 90s in the summer months. Sure, it’s a dry heat, but it’s still 90 degrees, nonetheless. This makes summer conditioning tough on my Lab, Lincoln. As much as he wants to play fetch and hike every night, the heat takes its toll and slows him down. Does this mean I keep him inside where I know he is safe from overheating? Absolutely not. Conditioning Lincoln is vital for his safety in the long run. When I hit the mountains for chukar in late September, I want to make sure Lincoln is in peak shape to handle the steep terrain. His muscles need…

IN the sporting-dog world, there are athletes…and then there are athletes. At the top of the list among dogs whose names deserve to be offset in italics are sled dogs, which may run hundreds of miles over the course of a single race. At full speed. While pulling a sled with a full-grown man standing on it. But they don’t do that on grit and willpower alone. They need to be conditioned to develop the extreme endurance mandated by the sport. I wanted to find out how a sled-dog conditioning program stacked up to a serious bird hunter’s conditioning. So, I found two guys who fit those descriptions: Dr. Arleigh Reynolds who resides in Alaska...and me. Reynolds is a research scientist for the Purina company, a veterinarian, and a sled-dog…

TRAINING a versatile hunting dog can be quite intimidating, especially if you’re the new owner of a Drahthaar, Kurzhaar, Langhaar, or other very German breed of dog. It’s not like an AKC hunt test where it’s common, and countless training resources are available. The NAVHDA testing system is similar to that of the JGHV, a German-based testing organization, but Americanized. You don’t have just one type of hunting situation to train for, but rather multiple species of game, hunted in just as many different situations. Writing about training for the entirety of the testing system, or even one test for that matter, would lend itself better to a book format, and upon reaching the 20th page, I stopped and realized there is no way to condense all of it into…

My brother-in-law shot this amazing photo of my two-year-old British Lab, Breck, retrieving a hen mallard. Breck is from Double TT Kennels in Kansas, and is an incredible dog. —Ryan Frazier, Springfield, MO This is busy Bella baby. She is my six-month-old English setter out chukar hunting—but she’s looking to conquer the world. —Mark Johnson, Provo, UT Patches is our four-year-old Brittany spaniel. She is doing what she loves to do: bird hunt in northern New Jersey. —Janice Christensen, Rockaway, NJ PHOTO SUBMISSION GUIDELINES • Please make sure your phone or camera is set on the highest quality jpeg available. • Submit no more than two photos and include your dog’s name, age, breed and any additional interesting details, plus the town and state in which you live. • Submission…

ONE of the biggest questions I ask myself as a professional dog trainer is: What is the skill-retention level on dogs that we send home after we’ve trained them? The answer, of course, varies a lot. Skillsets aren’t homogenous across a group of sporting dogs any more than training skills equally transcend individual dog owners. While that’s pretty obvious, it doesn’t really answer the question of how much the dogs we’ve handled retain the lessons we’ve instilled in them. This is a tricky one, because retention isn’t simply what a dog knows, but what a dog does with what he knows. That might sound complicated, but in reality, we’ve all witnessed this with our dogs, where we know for sure they understand a command but for one reason or another,…

BOB WEST IS ONE OF THE MOST DECORATED BIRD DOG TRAINERS OF OUR TIME, having finished over 70 field champions in both pointing and retriever trials during a career that has spanned five decades. In addition to his competitive success, West has trained hundreds of gun dogs, and he also served as Director of Sporting Dog Field Programs for Purina. He has produced videos and books on dog training, and has been a frequent GUN DOG contributor since this magazine’s inception. Over the course of his career, West has also witnessed the evolution of today’s most popular gun dog training tool: the e-collar. “I’ve been using e-collars since the late 1970s,”West says. “In the early days, they were primarily used for trash-breaking dogs.” E-COLLARS ARE A SUPPLEMENT TO BASIC TRAINING…

WHEN WE TALK ABOUT POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES OF OUR BIRD DOGS, WE ALMOST ALWAYS GO DOWN A FAMILIAR ROUTE. Stops along the way will include strong prey drive, a good nose, health, perhaps size and color, and sometimes intelligence. Dog smarts are highly subjective and prone to extreme levels of owner bias, but there are canines in the world that seem to demonstrate intelligence at a level that proves (somewhat) they are capable of complex thinking, and better yet, learning. A couple of border collies have made the nightly news circuit in recent years for learning over 1,000 words. Some are said to understand complex nouns, complete with modifiers. That’s not nothing, and while it might seem like an advanced trick based firmly in an advanced ability to retain information (memory),…

QUIGLEY believes his primary purpose is to keep his head near you, in case you feel the need to pet it and scratch behind his ears. If you forget, he’ll nudge your hand with his nose, or if you’re sitting, say, on the patio sipping a beer, he’ll wedge his head under your arm and lay it on your lap to make it easier for you. He’s right, you know. There’s something therapeutic about it—petting a dog and receiving in return adoration in its purest form. He’s also known for making sure no squirrel ever sets foot on land. He’ll bolt across yards to chase them back into trees where he thinks they belong. It’s the squirrels fault because they taunt him; chattering from overhead branches, tight-roping across the back…

PRAIRIE grouse have a robust flavor that stands out in any dish, allowing you to pair them with savory spices and still know you’re eating sharptails, prairie chicken, or sage grouse. The great thing about these birds is they are big and provide lots of tasty meat to work with. Samosas are a great way to make your grouse go further and appreciate the bird and the effort it takes to bring some home. The filling in these samosas is at least 50-percent wild game bird. INGREDIENTS FOR FILLING: 3 Tbsp butter, oil, or ghee 1 lb. prairie chicken breasts (4 breasts), minced 1¼ cups potatoes, peeled and diced (about 1 medium-large potato) 1¼ cups onions, diced (about 1 medium-large onion) ½ cup carrots, peeled and diced ½ cup peas,…

TRISTAR is a well-known name in shotgun circles. Founded in 1994 in Kansas City, Missouri, TriStar offers a wide variety of pumps, over/ unders, and semi-autos, so the customer can select a scattergun with the features they want with ease, and at an affordable price. But this array of different products doesn’t come about by chance; the tail doesn’t wag the dog here. Rather than browse overseas companies to see what they have to offer, TriStar marketers do research to figure out what American consumers want, so that their engineers can draw up a set of detailed product specifications. Then they visit the manufacturing plant, present the product specs, and the desired product is produced. TriStar says that they’re founded on the principles of value and quality. In fact, they…

AT this point in my career, between writing assignments and hosting a weekly podcast on sporting dogs, I’ve interviewed well over 100 dog trainers. Most of them boast years—if not decades—of training experience, and are fortunate to get to work with dozens and dozens of bird dogs each year. When you’re lucky enough to chat with these folks, you start to see patterns emerge in their training styles and philosophies that transcend individual as well as specific dog breeds. More often than not, they reference training the dogs’ owners on what behaviors are necessary to create a quality bird dog. This rarely goes the way most of us think it should. DOGS KNOW HOW TO HUNT There’s plenty of debate on how long the canine/human relationship has been evolving, but…