Road

Ok, it’s now past mid-summer and if you are like most weekend bird hunters, you are starting to look forward to opening day of bird season within the next 60 days. Also, if you are like most folks, your canine partner has been spending his/her summer days lying about, spending endless days of inactivity. Fat, dumb and happy is a great way to spend the summer, but it is no way to start a strenuous hunting season, especially when you consider that this dog of ours will be doing most of the work once we take to the field.

What I will say next may anger alot of my readers, but I have hunted with alot of folks over the last ten years and I think that I can say without question that 90% of the dog owner/hunters out there have no idea what it is to hunt over a well conditioned dog that is capable of hunting hard in full possession of all of it’s bird finding tools for a full day’s hunt. Simply out of their own laziness alot of hunters have come to accept a sub-standard level of performance from their dog where from lack of conditioning, their dog can hunt fine for an hour or so but long before the morning is over, their dog is more or less just snuffling along, tongue dragging, eyes glazed over, simply plodding along with their master, any desire to hunt birds long gone. Long before lunch the dog is hoping that the boss will soon lead them back to their bed for a rest. I have seen it time and time again. (not that I am complaining as this usually means that there are more birds for my dog to find) I think that this amounts to cruelty to your dog and in fact might be endangering the dog’s life.

We were hunting in pheasants in South Dakota in December a few years back, right before the season closed. The temperature was near zero and the ground cover was crusty, icy snow. There were loads of birds to be found and the dogs were going hard to locate the many birds hidden in the cattail sloughs amongst the cut-over crop fields where we were hunting. One member of the party had a young dog with him that I had hunted over many times under less strenuous conditions and the dog had performed adequately. But on this day, when we started out after lunch, it was obvious that the dog had simply had too much already and within a half-hour the dog limped back to the truck and had to be physically lifted into it’s box, where it stayed for the rest of the weekend except to come out and eat. This dog was a house dog that was walked a few times a week and had been hunting a couple weekends already that season. The poor dog was physically exhausted from fighting it’s way through the snow crust in the cold and simply was not interested in any more pheasants. All of the fur and some skin was gone from it’s legs, neck and belly, despite having worn one of those belly-protector thingies. and it’s feet were each a swollen, pulpy mess and it’s breath came in such raspy gasps that at times I feared for it’s very life. This one day afield left the dog is such miserable shape that it was not hunted for the remainder of the season. Other dogs on the ground that weekend also took quite a beating from the conditions, but most were able to hunt hard the whole weekend and none suffered any lasting effect except for the poor beast previously mentioned.