Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2022 i Gun Dog

K9 PITSTOP PREHYDRATE & REFUEL Your gun dog is an athlete, and all athletes need the right nutrition and supplements to help them reach peak performance. K9 Pitstop PreHYDRATE and ReFUEL were designed to work in conjunction with a high-protein/ high-fat diet to keep your dog properly hydrated before and after activity. Proper hydration is key to reduce heat stress and keep your dog’s cognitive function at its best. PreHYDRATE the night before a hunt or field trial increases your dog’s total body water by up to 5 percent for optimal hydration. ReFUEL provides your dog with carb supplements that give it additional energy and endurance to help your dog hunt longer and recover more quickly. PreHYDRATE: $30, ReFUEL: $30; k9pitstop.com FINAL RISE SIDEKICK VEST SYSTEM The new Sidekick from…

MOST HUNTERS associate the Weatherby name with big game rifles, but the brand has been offering shotguns for 55 years. In that time, several over/under shotguns built in various factories around the world have worn the Orion nameplate, but the current iteration, which hails from Turkey, was released in 2015 as the Orion Grade I in 12-gauge with a glossy Turkish walnut stock and gloss blue finish. Recently, Weatherby released two 20-gauge versions of the Orion I, which are available with the gloss blue finish or a new matte blue. I had the opportunity to test the new Orion Matte Blue in 20-gauge, and I must say it’s quite a departure from the Weatherby guns I grew up shooting. Since its early days, Weatherby guns have been known for their…

OVERTRAINING is a unique issue. We often think about it as if someone has worked and worked their retriever to the point where its skills erode, or the dog physically can’t function, but that’s not what happens in most cases. In reality, overtraining happens when any one of us goes beyond our dog’s attention threshold in any given training session. This is almost never tied to hours upon hours of training but can instead happen in a matter of a few minutes if you’re working a young-enough dog. Knowing this, I always take a few things into account while planning a session with any dog. For starters, the length and difficulty of every training session is tied directly to the age and attention span of the dog with which I’m…

FAREWELL TO A DOG MAN I had e-mailed Ed Bailey on the 27th of October to update him on my dog and possible hunting conditions in Kansas. His wife replied to me that Ed had passed the night before. This was a heartfelt blow as I had known Ed and had hunted with him at my farm in Kansas for around 20 plus years. The last time he came down, he was 85 years old and drove 1,500 miles from his home in Eden Mills, Ontario. At a rest stop he had tripped over his dog Pepe and cracked a rib. I had to wrap him with athletic elastic bandage when he arrived. Other times, he had a kidney removed a couple months before, and another time bladder surgery a…

I LEFT THE CABIN that morning with a fly rod and an envelope of cash, excited as to how the day would unfold. Northwoods Bird Dogs is about six and a half hours west of our home, and our cabin is conveniently located just shy of halfway there. Wisconsin’s trout season opens the first Saturday in May, and by late-June, mosquitos have us wishing we’d fished more of early June. A four-hour trip from the cabin to kennel, our route took us through fine ruffed grouse and woodcock habitat and over rivers I’d read and dreamt of — the Namekagon, Flambeau, Chippewa, and St. Croix. By “us,” I mean two close friends who also were looking to put deposits on future bird dogs before wading our way back through some…

THE DIFFERENCE in jobs between flushers and pointers is fairly obvious, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand that the jobs require different skill sets. By virtue of a pointing dog’s ability to find and “hold” birds, the pointing breeds can be encouraged to run big in open country, and when properly trained, to lock onto scent and stand frozen, waiting for guns to approach. In many ways, it is important that pointing dogs learn some degree of independence. They must of course pay attention to the handler, but because so much of their work is done at a distance, they must be confident and competent enough to lose periodic “contact” with the handler but still know how to hunt and in what direction. Flushers are a bit different.…

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SPASTA CARBONARA is a famous dish that originates from Rome and can be found in many of your higher-end Italian restaurants worldwide. It’s typically made with cured porkguanciale, pancetta, or bacon—but here we are using cured quail (made possible with Insta Cure #1). You can use any upland game for this recipe, and you can use more than the eight ounces I call for in this recipe. Chopping the upland game into small bits—approximately 1/4 inch by 1/4 inch—also facilitates picking out shot, making this wild game dish ideal for both kids and any dinner guests who have yet to learn to “chew slowly.” Likely the biggest error folks make here is over- or under-cooking the eggs. I have what I consider a foolproof method for avoiding this: Heat a…

TRAINING a bird dog is quite like teaching a human in that the general goal is to create a productive, engaging experience that modifies the student’s set of skills, mindset, and/or behaviors in a specific, intentional way. As with a human, a dog’s genetics and accumulated experiences shape how they view, navigate, and react to inputs and stimuli. A dog’s proficiency on a hunt is directly correlated to their overall state of mind and their perception of events taking place around them. As we have discussed in previous articles, this mindset and perception is manipulated and refined by the experiences the dog encounters during development and training. As a result, training bird dogs encompasses much more than just training a predator to work the scent of a game bird. At…

IT IS PROVEN that dogs learn best when we teach using easily understood steps. As each step is accomplished there is sort of a “mental safe place” which builds the dog’s confidence and the basis for the next step. This in turn yields an eager learning attitude, resulting in a stylish, willing, and obedient dog. In the previous issue, we outlined steps to bring our dog to an understanding and to obey a command to hold and to carry a dowel or training dummy as the basis for teaching the trained retrieve. If you haven’t read that article, please do, it’s fundamental to the next steps outlined in this piece. Assuming you’ve followed those steps, your dog understands and obeys “fetch” and accepts, holds, and carries a training dummy we’ve…

NOTE OF CAUTION: Since bobwhite quail are native to many states, some states regulate those who raise the birds, whether through their state wildlife department or an agriculture agency. In my home state of Oklahoma, raising quail is regulated by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, which makes available either a $10 annual hobby license or a $48 yearly commercial breeder license. Be sure and check the regulations in your state before beginning any quail breeding program.…