Guns, Bows, Shooting Sports, and Hunting Gun Dog Training Tips

Everyone has their own idea of the "perfect hunting dog", but I think we can all agree that a dog who knows his master's mind and the game is tough to beat. A great dog just wants to please you.

I like to keep things fun for my mutt (he's actually a purebred Golden, but I don't want him getting uppity so I call him anything but; such as "butthead, poodle, pot-licker, cookie-baker, mama's boy, fuzznuts, ****zhu-without-the-zhu, etc).

{Boy, has this site got a ridiculously anal "profanity monitor" or what?!! You can't even type the legitimate name of a legitimate dog breed like shi*zhu!! I'll bet you can't talk about breeding a ***** (female dog), either... Sure makes it tough on non-pc dog lovers... } Anyway...

Teaching to "hunt dead":

One of the most difficult, and important, things to teach a dog to do well is find downed birds in tall, heavy cover. Especially when he did not see the bird(s) go down. This happens a lot here, such as when multiple roosters flush along with multiple hens. Birds everywhere! Multiple shooters and shots. Multiple birds down. Some dead. Some crippled and hiding. Some running. And a pheasant will run a mile for every hundred yards it flies.

Add to this fast action pandemonium some very thick switchgrass, standing corn, and/or multiflora rose (danged Brits!), and lost birds become a problem even for a good dog. Many dogs have no interest in anything but "the next bird".

One ritual I have that works real well for getting my dog to "hunt dead", and to even follow my hand and voice signals as I put him in what I believe is the right vicinity, is something I do every day when I get home from work. The dog loves it, and it teaches him to use his nose very well.

I keep a large tin of milkbone type dog biscuits on my back porch. I have a large yard surrounded by thick forest and underbrush: ideal cover. Like most dogs, my pup knows when I should get home and he knows the sound of my vehicles. He is kept indoors and is a tail wagging a dog when I open the door.

Prior to doing that, I will throw, or even work very hard at hiding, one or more dog biscuits in the timber and brush or anyplace I can think of to confound him. You need to work up to that, so start it out easy until he or she figures out the game. I have tied snacks to a string and dragged them all over the yard and well into the woods and underbrush. I have hidden snacks on low tree limbs. I have buried them under leaves. Hidden them under logs. Anything I can think of.

Sundance knows this game very well and is waiting eagerly for me to open the door and tell him "dead bird"! I absolutely LOVE watching him race around to pick up the scent on his own. I learned long ago that he will track my steps as easily as the scent of the dragged dogbone. So I often throw the treat well beyond my own trail.

It is amazing how good he is at this! Doing up to 3 snacks in separate locations can keep him busy for awhile, but he always finds them as long as I send him back out. I use the multiple snacks mostly for getting him to mind my voice and hand commands as well as to grasp the concept of "more than one".

Come hunting season, this daily ritual, which we both enjoy, pays off handsomely in birds in the bag, and they are the only ones that count. It also gives an owner an idea of just how powerful a dog's nose is, and what the dog's search habits are. You also learn how weather affects scent. Rain is challenging. So is soggy-foggy weather where the air just hangs there. More than once, the shooter is terribly wrong about where a bird went down. Even more often, the bird has run a long ways. Learn to trust your dog. Teach him to trust you when you assure him there IS a "dead bird" to be found. This simple game will help tremendously.

I hope others here can and will add one or two of their own little "secrets" to this thread...

 

Here's my tip... Stop while your ahead. I'm on my first bird dog, first bird season, and first new bird gun. I've taken one shot, killed one bird, and my dog retrieved it even though neither of us saw it go down. As a bonus the 6 guys who saw me do it think I have the best dog best gun and I'm the best shot this side of the Hudson River. I went out this am after work. Not one bird flushed. I'm thinking I should quit before my average drops. :-laf:-laf :{

 

Sometimes success is its own punishment? :-laf

My nephew did that the year I first taught him to shoot a bow and bowhunt. To make a long and funny story short, he killed a MONSTER 13 point corn-fed Iowa buck in what I call "panicked self-defense" while doing EVERYTHING wrong...

(If he had missed, I'm fairly certain he would have given birth to some ugly fawns a few months later :-laf )

I have bowhunted for nearly 35 years just waiting for ONE opportunity at a buck like that... #@$%!

How will he ever top it. . ? He may as well just give me back my old Proline bow and call it quits...

 

a Guy I know has probably spent a couple hundred K on his property upstate. ( he did just put a new house up on it) puts in feed plots has spent a couple thousand on out of state hunts and has never gotten a deer while his son always gets one... and is usually standing right next to him but is just quicker with the bow

 

It's a little easier here if all you want is "a deer" for the freezer. My son got his first with his bow when he was 8 years old and has stocked the freezer every year since. No shortage of deer or turkey here. They beg bowhunters to hunt within the city limits to thin out the urban deer, which are a huge problem. We don't shoot the ones that hang out in our yard since we like to just watch them, too. That's a "safe haven" and where the biggest buck I have ever personally seen (14 point with double drop tines) likes to tease and torment me in the evenings from time to time as he chases the does eating our apples around.

 

I've had deer , turkey, snakes and fox in my backyard but I can't shoot em, Stupid laws... .