We were walking some Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) on Darrel Reinke’s recently acquired farm east of Pierre in mid-December. Darrel crippled a rooster a half-hour earlier and we saw it fly into the CRP. Our dogs, three Labs, were looking for that familiar smell that tells them the bird is near. The yellow belonged to Darrel, the chocolate to Dave Zellmer, and the black to me. Or is it the other way around? The 9-month old Springer to my left running with its nose to the ground belonged to Arnie Gutenkauf. Dogs aren’t new to Arnie. He owns a stableful of pointers plus a pair of Springers.
“I don’t know if I’d hunt without a dog,” said Darrel.
I agreed. And Darrel’s dog responded by flushing the missing rooster in front of his son Brad, who neatly dispatched it with a single charge of #5s from his 12 gauge. Spud, the Reinke dog, retrieved it.
I thought about my dog, Dee. She’s nearing her third year and has already had more birds in front of her than almost any other hunting dogs from most surrounding states. She’s lucky enough to live in South Dakota, where when conditions are right, as they have been since 1997, some south central counties raise more birds than any other equivalent piece of real estate in the world.
Most hunting breeds have instinct. Retrievers learn to flush and the retrieving part seems to come naturally. You can train basics…sit, come, stay, heel…but you can’t teach nose or savvy. If you’re lucky, your dog has a good nose and is intelligent enough to pick up the savvy part, which only comes from a lot of experience with wild birds.
Dee has a few weak points. If she’s looking for a cripple and there’s a lot of scent, she’d just as soon forget it and go find live birds. And she was a bit slow on the retrieving part. But the hunting desire was there from the start and so was her nose. A pointing Lab, she pointed from her early days and seems to get better each time out.
Yes, I know there are some dog breeders who pooh-pooh pointing Labs. I used to get angry when they did. They say if you want a pointer, get a real one. There’s some truth in that, but I forget their criticisms each time Dee locks up on a bird. No, she hasn’t the nose of an English Pointer, Setter or Shorthair, but she can do things they don’t do well. Besides, she’s a retriever (which many pointing dogs just can’t seem to master), and it doesn’t take long to realize how much more affectionate the retrievers tend to be. With most pointing dogs, it’s all about them and rarely, their masters. If you happen to be there, fine, but that closeness always seems to be lacking. The pointing dogs travel with their noses high and pick up their scent from the air while the retriever runs nose to the ground, which makes it necessary to get closer to the bird. Course, pointing breeds are born with better noses. But the thing that makes me lean toward a Pointing Lab over a real pointing breed is that attachment factor. Labs love to please. Pointers mostly love to please themselves. Sure there are some exceptions in both cases, but from a general standpoint, what I’ve said is pretty much true.
I don’t pretend to know what triggers a dog to point, but I remember Jim Marty of Baldwin, ND saying, as he placed a setter pup in front of a bird, that what followed was nothing he could teach or control; that it was between the pup and God. That seems as good an explanation as any.
And who can explain the tendency of some birds to freeze when a dog locks on that point? Quail do it. Grouse do it. So do woodcock. Even pheasants do it…sometimes…though hens do it a lot more often than cock birds.
I think Bruce “Wickerbill” Crist came as close as anyone to explaining it.
“It mesmerizes them,” he said, and for Wicker, that’s enough. I thought it a significant enough statement to allow it to become the theme and title for one of the best magazine articles I’ve ever written. But in the end, I think there’s more to this pointing thing that that. The willingness of the bird to hold and look, well, mezmerized, is a function of cover. See, I can’t recall any dog, even great pointers, successfully pointing birds where the cover resembles a PGA putting green.
I’m not suggesting you go out and buy a bird dog after reading this article. You’ve got to do some preparing for it, get yourself in the right state of mind, and make sure the lady of the house is an accomplice.
There have been a share of hassles with Dee, but the nearly three years that have passed since I brought that little black bundle home to the utter dismay of Dar, who had already put her foot down about having another dog, have been pretty damned rewarding.
It goes without saying that your life will change and I’ve certainly cleaned up my share of messes, some of which are apparent because we’ve never been able to completely remove the stains from the carpet.
Yes, there are some frustrations. I read “Pointing Lab,” and was already satisfied, based on Dee’s response to a pheasant wing tied to a fishing rod, that she had that part down pat. But I was astonished to learn that I owned a Lab that showed no desire to retrieve.
Or swim.
But man, she loved to chew. I still remember waking up in a cabin at Cleve Trimble’s ranch unable to find my glasses. And when I did, I found that she’d chewed them beyond recognition. Cleve thought it rather funny, and in a perverse way, it probably was. But this past summer, Cleve and I toured Dakota golf courses and he brought along his new Golden Retriever pup, who while we were out struggling with par, chewed up a $250 leather wind breaker followed by a brand new pair of prescription sunglasses. It served as a reminder that what goes around comes around.
But back to Dee, her teeth are great, probably the result of chewing everything in sight, including the wiring under the seat of my pickup that controls the power seats as well as the tail lights. She didn’t stop there. She destroyed the legs of two new kitchen chairs, the electrical cord that powered the lights on the Christmas tree, the upholstery of yet another chair, and countless undergarments that belonged to Dar.
Yet all this while, she managed to wheedle herself into Dar’s heart, and though I have never allowed Dee to sit on furniture, I have ceased being surprised when I walk downstairs to find her lounging on the couch alongside Dar.
I read all the stuff about force fetching and how it was supposed to solve a whole host of disciplinary problems. As far as I can see, it didn’t. She’d hold the dummy as long as I held her jaws shut. But let go and out came the dummy. After countless tries, it became apparent I’d become the dummy, maybe even a potential author of a book called, “Training Pointing Labs for Dummies.”
Then on the third trip out hunting, Dee’s mother, Jewel, a black pointing Lab that belongs to Steve Halvorson, locked on a point. Dee walked right through it and flushed the rooster. Jewel snapped at Dee who came running back to me, tail tucked between her legs.
And five minutes later, pointed her first bird.
And she continued to do it; totaling over a hundred before she was a year old.
I will not try to tell you she has mastered pointing those wild, late season pheasants. She hasn’t. But Arnie Gutenkauf, candidly admits that his high-powered pointers don’t do the job there either. Owning a decent hunting dog sometimes requires making a few compromises on the basis of just how much satisfaction you want out of the whole thing.
I think the real highlight of Dee’s second year came on the opening day of grouse season. Steve told me Jewel pointed pheasants, but not grouse. So I was pretty surprised when Dee locked on point scarcely a hundred yards from the truck. I was even more surprised when the bird turned out to be a prairie chicken, instead of the pheasant I thought she’d found.
Three days later, it happened again. Only this time, two birds flushed, and as I scored a neat double, I saw a third bird angle off to the right. I swung ahead of it and watched it fall for my first triple ever…with not a single witness to verify it. That’s not unlike hitting a hole-in-one when you’re playing alone, and the only advantage is you don’t have to buy drinks for anyone but yourself.
But the thing is, she pointed grouse. And the next time came when I hunted with Wicker, and Dee pointed a sharptail right in between Wicker’s shorthairs. That’s just about as bad as you can insult a pointing dog, but Wicker understands dogs period, and he accepted it in good humor. You’ll see it on televison in late January or early February. By the way, Dee’s been pointing prairie grouse ever since, so who needs a Lab that can swim when ducks are on their inevitable decline?
The bond that forms between a hunter and his dog is something you don’t read much about, but it’s a pretty important thing. I can’t explain it any better than that. I have enough confidence in her that I could walk into a big CRP field and be comfortable doing nothing but following her, knowing that she’d find the birds. I can watch her tail and know when she’s just searching or is serious about what she smells. I learned pretty early in the going that she knows more about where the birds are apt to be than I do, so it’s become apparent that if I start directing her to hunt this and that, it’s pretty much wasted effort. Besides, I did my part in training her.
“All you do when you train a dog is teach obedience,” a well-known dog trainer told me. “You’ve got to be able to control that dog when every instinct it has is to chase the birds.”
That’s as close to dog reality as you can get.
Consider that we refer to retrievers as “flushing breeds.” Every instinct they have is to find and flush birds. And while that raises a series of issues, if your dog doesn’t want to do that more than anything in the world, you won’t have much of a hunting dog. What you want to avoid is a situation where the dog follows its own desires and is 75 yards in front of you when he or she flushes the birds. Dog owners like that eat more chicken than ringnecks. But that’s only part of it. A good hunting dog needs a certain amount of intelligence, or whatever it is that enables it to learn.
Let me tell you a story that’s mostly true. I have a friend from another state who owns a black Lab, a dog he paid five figures for, and a near similar amount to a trainer. Now he has a dog in which he’s invested six figures of greenbacks. And before we hunted one morning, he gave us a demonstration. He’d planted dummies all over, hiding some of them quite well. Then, using nothing more than a whistle and some hand signals, he had his dog retrieve each one in rapid fashion. It was doggone impressive and pretty neat at the same time, but not nearly as impressive as the clouds of pheasants that same dog flushed far ahead of the guns until his owner put him on a check cord. You see, being from a state with almost no upland birds, that Lab had only hunted stocked birds that behave like, well, stocked birds. Now if that same dog were to spend an autumn in South Dakota, I believe it could become a decent hunting dog.
I’ll not claim any fame on the basis of my ability to train a dog. But what I did accomplish is teach Dee to be obedient, and for that I owe thanks to the man or woman who invented the electronic collar. Now, before you say that’s cruel, hear me out.
If you use an electronic collar to “get even” with your dog, someone should put it on you with the setting up to maximum. But if you follow the instructions and use it properly, it’s a wonderful and very humane training tool.
I bought a Tri-tronics Model 60. It has four controls, including one that determines just how much “juice” you turn loose. I shocked myself at each setting so I’d know what the dog felt. You barely feel a tingle at the #1 setting. The #2 gets your attention. Number 3 is more than a bit unpleasant, and zing yourself at #4 and you won’t want to try #5. I don’t ever want to experience either of the latter again. Then there’s a control that lets you just offer the dog a “nick,” another that makes the electronic attention-getter keep going until you stop pressing the button. Finally, there’s the most useful one of all, especially after your dog understands that just because you aren’t right beside him or her, you’re still in control. It’s nothing but a tiny button that emits a very high pitched tone. Once you reach a point where you use the tone to tell the dog to quit doing what it’s doing or he or she knows what’s coming next, you’ve used the tool effectively.
Truth is, I’ve never had to use the “shock” more than once or twice on Dee because she’s a retriever who wants to please me more than anything in life. Thus, there can be a couple hundred birds running in front of her, and though she wants to chase them and make them fly, when she hears me say “Whoa,” she waits until I get closer.
She also responds immediately in the same way when I say, “Too far.” I’ve been offered a considerable amount of money for her, but there isn’t enough anywhere to make me even think about selling.
Some who write training manuals tell about how some dogs get wise to electronic collars, that if they’re not wearing one, they’ll revert to their old habits. I guess that’s what I like about Dee. She wants to please and while the collar served its purpose during training, I forgot it at home several times this past fall, and it didn’t seem to make much difference.
I’ve learned enough through Dee to realize that if you want a great hunting dog, breeding is everything. Dee’s mother, Jewel, is a superb dog, one of the best Labs I’ve ever hunted with. Her sire, “Joe-Mac’s Dead on Arrival,” of Lisbon, IA, is a national champion dog. It stood to reason that Dee and her littermates had all the potential to become world class dogs. I don’t know if Dee will ever reach that potential, but I say honestly that if she stopped learning tomorrow and she was as good as she was going to get, I’d not be disappointed. But the truth is, she gets better each time out, and each time she shows me something else she’s learned, usually something she picked up on her own because I have reached my full potential as a trainer.
I’m in my sixth decade, and some of the guys I hunt with are a lot older than that. Dr. Bob Nelson, my hunting pal from Sioux Falls who’s an octagenarian now, comes to mind. And there’s John Cooper, the affable Secretary of South Dakota’s Game, Fish and Parks Department, who is fond of saying, “I’m too old to have such a young dog.” But when you sum everything up, I think we’d all agree with Darrel. We probably wouldn’t hunt if we didn’t have a good dog.
