You couldn’t have asked for a better day Saturday at the shooting preserve. The weather was mild with a slight breeze, just right for working flushing dogs. We were working working three different retrievers, Blade, Allie and Sophie. The heavy cover along the Sevier River at Rooster Valley Pheasants made for excellent training on pheasants in natural situations. The birds held pretty well and flushed strong for the retrievers. Since it is the end of the season on the shooting preserve, each dog got lots of work on birds. Lots of birds make for a good bird dog.

 

I have consistently been impressed with Dogtra electronic training collars. I just had an opportunity to test Dogtra’s newest upland collar, the 2500 T&B and really liked it. It is a training collar and beeper/locator collar all in one. The awesome thing about this collar is that the training collar and the beeper are built into one single small unit, rather than two separate units like most upland training collars.

Dogtra e-collars have consistently been of excellent quality, have great features, and best of all, come in small packages (both the transmitter and the receiver), so it is comfortable on the dog’s neck and in your hand. It has three beeper modes: running/pointing, where the collar emits a sound at regular intervals then emits a faster signal when the dog is on point; point only, where it only sounds when the dog is on point, and the Locate button, which emits a sound when the button on the transmitter is activated. I also liked the rheostat dial with the digital readout.

What I was most impressed with the collar was the small size of the unit. It will make a comfortable, durable training tool. It will be really nice to run the dog with this locator collar in the thick CRP grass looking for ringnecks this next fall. Check it out at the Dogtra website.

(Photo from Dogtra.com)

 

 We had Oakley (black lab) out last weekend trying to polish him up on both flushing and retrieving. It is getting near the end of the pheasant season on the shooting preserves here in Utah. The birds all worked great for the dog, they held fairly well and flushed strong and wild. It was a great workout for Oakley, plus it was a great time for Jake (owner) and his brothers.

 

Three times now over the last thirty days I have had people call me saying they have found my dog. While it hasn’t been my dog, they have been dogs I have trained. In each case, I sent the dog home and thankfully forgot to take off my collar, which has my nameplate. Somehow the dogs have gotten out and been running around the city and have been picked up by people in the area. Each time they had a cell phone and called right away. I have been able to call the owner and put them in touch with the person that found the dog and the dogs have been returned quickly. If those dogs hadn’t had a nameplate and weren’t microchipped, I hate to think of the heartache it might have caused.

The first thing we do when we get a new dog is to take photos of the dog, put a good sturdy collar with a metal buckle (not a fastex-type) on the dog with a name tag and get the dog microchipped (avid – home again). That way, if anything were to happen and a dog got out and was picked up it can be returned quickly. 

Since most folks now carry cell phones you have a good chance of getting a call right away if someone finds the dog. I suggest putting your name (not the dog’s), your home phone and cell phone on the tag. Some folks I know also put the phrase “Needs Medication!” or “Needs Meds” on the tag with the idea that the finder will feel a greater sense of urgency to get the dog back, or if they were considering stealing the dog they wouldn’t want something that’s going to fall over with seizures at any moment.

If you don’t have a nametag on the dog and don’t have a microchip implanted, here’s a to-do list for you:

1.) Get your nameplate on the dog: Get online and order a metal tag. They cost about $3 including shipping; some of the best money you will ever spend. Many of the hunting/training dog suppliers will provide a free name plate if you purchase a collar from them. Collars with nameplates range from $4 to $24 depending on how fancy you want. GunDogSupply.com
2.) Take new photos of the dog: Take them from different angles and photograph anything unique about the dog.
3.) Get the dog microchipped: Make an appointment with the vet or animal shelter and get the dog microchipped. If you have microchipped the dog, but have not yet sent in the paperwork, send it in. Often clinics make you fill out the paperwork there and they send it in so they insure that it gets done. Otherwise the dog registration comes back to them and they don’t often have a record of who the owner is. Make sure the paperwork has been sent in.

Jump on it and get it done today, you won’t regret it.

Every morning we let the dogs out for exercise and to do their business. (Which is a lucrative one for our kids because we pay a “by the piece” rate for clean up.) The dogs tend to pair up, the two older males play-wrestle and they do it a LOT. This reminds me of my son and nephew, both 5 year olds, when Chris took them on a scout camping trip and all they did was roam around camp and roll in the dust wrestling. They could not keep their hands off each other.  They had a blast. The two younger puppies roll around and play keep away with a stick and the new rescue dog we are trying out plays and checks things out, like he is trying to figure the pack out. This doesn’t take long; he has already gotten the hang of the exercise program every day with the roading set up. Eventually they all end up in or near the kennels waiting for the morning feeding. They get an hour or so to digest then it’s off to the run.

I was driving home from Sarah’s piano lesson and we saw this guy out sunning himself in the afternoon sun. He took to the cover pretty quickly, but I managed to get a couple of good photos.

Title: The Ultimate Guide to Bird Dog Training: A Realistic Approach to Training Close-Working Gun Dogs for Tight Cover Conditions

Author: Jerome B. Robinson
The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut
ISBN: 1-59228-161-3
Copyright 2000

What kind of dog training book do you get from a 30 year veteran gun dog editor of both Sports Afield and Field & Stream? What you get is a whole collection of good magazine articles on dog training. You get this idea right away reading the titles of the different chapters, such as: Your Kid Can Be Your Best Assistant, Don’t Let Your Hunting Companion Ruin Your Dog, and A Trick That Makes Him Whoa with a High Tail.

The book is a series of forty-three 1500 word articles (chapters) that are ready for publication in a general sportsman’s magazine. Robinson covers a broad variety of topics in the book, from picking your puppy to getting the dog steady to shot, however, most of the chapters are somewhat superficial. They cover the ideal, but don’t get into the realities of training situations. This was especially true in the chapter on force fetching a dog.

The book was published in 2000, but many of the photos look like they were taken in the 1970’s. Some of the methods and training tools discussed are similarly not current. The e-collar chapter was inserted in the front of the book as an afterthought, and is seldom mentioned in the rest of the text.

That said, I did buy myself a copy of the book, because of the breadth of issues covered. There are lots of good training tidbits and things to consider in the book. And it is apparent that he has spoken to a lot of dog trainers over the years about different aspects of training a bird dog. It may be important to note that this book is primarily written for pointers, not flushers or retrievers.