Training gold mine or training fiasco?

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Chemist
Rank: Junior Hunter
Posts: 32
Joined: Thu Sep 15, 2022 10:15 pm
Location: Tri-Cities, WA

Training gold mine or training fiasco?

Post by Chemist » Sun May 14, 2023 5:59 pm

The real question I have is the last paragraph, the rest is for context.

I recently picked up a second GSP. The lady of the house wanted a second dog that would be a playmate to our male, match his energy but be a little smaller and easier for her to cuddle on the couch with, and she also did not particularly want to deal with the puppy stage. If we ended up with a house pet then I would be OK with that but we both agreed to look for a dog that I could at least potentially run with my male GSP as a brace, or be able to rotate dogs when I take a week off in the fall to chase birds.

We found a two year old female GSP that had been raised in a house, has a decent NAVHDA pedigree, and met the size that my lady was looking for. The guy who owned her let her go cheap because he has been working more hours and hunting less, the dog was a lot for his wife to handle, he had extensive experience with a different breed and wanted to go back to it in a couple years when his work load drops, etc. They were willing to let her go for cheap if they could be assured she would be a house dog and not end up being housed in an outdoor kennel 24/7. He had hunted her but not extensively and said she was steady on point but broke on wing and had a decent nose, and had been broke to gun. She had never been hunted with another dog. He seems like an honest guy and I am inclined to believe what he said. I was able to look up natural ability test scores from four of her full blood siblings, but not her and was comfortable with what I considered to be a very reasonable price. As a house dog she is filling all of the requirements perfectly, and I do not regret getting her.

I have had her for about a month and a half. In Washington state you are not able to run your dog on wild birds for training from April 1st until August, consequently I have only run her on birds once and I had my male down at the same time. My male had 6 points in about a half hour and on at least one occasion I witnessed her notice my male on point, run over to him, smell the birds and rush in to bust them. This was on the initial covey rise of quail. He proceeded to point 4 more singles which were flushed by me, and he locked on point on a rooster pheasant. The pheasant flushed before I could make it through the brush to see what happened but according to my Garmin he was on point and she was in the area. I did not take this as a good sign but also not the end of the world. She has a ton of prey drive for tweety birds, squirrels in the yard, etc and while I do not look forward to forcing her to point if the instinct does not come, it should be doable. I just did the wing on a string thing today (kleenex on a fishing pole) to see if there was any instinct to point at all, and I did not see her hesitate in chasing the wing at all. It is not something that I particularly plan to go back to, I more just wanted to see if she wouldn't even lock up on it.

My current plan has been to work on obedience this summer and not worry much about bird work. Sometime in August or September I figured I would get some wing clipped pigeons and work from primed hulls to 22 blanks to 20 gauge loads going slow to make sure that she truly is not gun shy since she does not seem as steady as the impression I got from the fellow I bought her from. I do not think he was dishonest with me in the least, but he is not a professional trainer and steady may mean something different to me than it does to him. I figured I would then rotate the dogs this fall and hunt them separate with me not shooting any birds over her that were not pointed for the duration of this fall and assess at the end of hunting season what progress she had made. I make it out hunting about 30 times a year, am mostly looking to go for a walk with my dogs. If she is not a very productive dog this fall it will not be the end of the world especially since my male is way better than I ever expected him to be.

A guy I shoot with lives on about three acres in a semi-rural area. He feeds and waters wild california quail in his back yard, and has been doing so for several years. I have seen pictures of ~100 quail around his feeder and he has stated that depending on the year he typically has 300-500 wild quail in his back yard. He has made the offer to let me come over an run my new dog on the birds whenever I want, even everyday if I want. Come August, would this be a good way to teach her she cannot catch quail, or will it be stimulation overload and to much of a fun game of chase? If he had a single reliable covey of 10 birds I would be all over this, but I wonder if this would be to much of a good thing.
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RayGubernat
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Re: Training gold mine or training fiasco?

Post by RayGubernat » Mon May 15, 2023 9:42 am

I think your plan to do training this summer is a good idea. You do however need to come up with a detailed plan, based on the dog's current training level and where you need/want it to be next fall.

You appear to have a year old dog that has never been properly steadied. That will take some time and yard work.

I recommend that you consider doing some daily whoa drills. I do heel/whoa drills with all my dogs, starting when they are four or five months old. The drills are basically the Paul Long method i have described many times, and take about five minutes to do. I do them with a youngster twice a day, morning and evening. you can search for previous descriptions. I also recommend that you do drills on an elevated platform, making ther dog stand, styling it up andencouraging it to stand.

The dog needs to understand that its first response to the sight or scent of a bird should be to lock up. Once that response is ingrained, the rest will likely follow.

Patience, persistence, insistence. You have all summer. If you are having fun training, the dog will enjoy it also.

RayG

Chemist
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Joined: Thu Sep 15, 2022 10:15 pm
Location: Tri-Cities, WA

Re: Training gold mine or training fiasco?

Post by Chemist » Mon May 15, 2023 10:16 pm

Thank you for the reply. I should of elaborated on what I meant by obedience, but for her I am definitely planning whoa training to be a large part of it.

Prior to this fall my real goal is solid obedience on whoa, heel, sit means sit and stay, recall, broke to gun and house manners. My dogs get some type of obedience training everyday, and that really is the priority for me because it makes subsequent training and the other 8 months of the year less stressful. Right, wrong, or just different I know how I am going to approach those parts. I have just never had the opportunity to expose my dogs to 300 birds at once before. My inclination is that it would be stimulation overload and counterproductive.

jmez
Rank: Junior Hunter
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Joined: Fri Nov 20, 2020 1:06 pm

Re: Training gold mine or training fiasco?

Post by jmez » Tue May 16, 2023 10:19 am

No such thing as too many wild birds.

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