hunting dogs

anyone ever train a dog for hunting or tracking?

My Golden Retriever is trained for Pheasant hunting. When i first got him as a puppy I was pretty serious with the training, not so much now...7 years later.

He knows how to work a field and will come and halt with both verbal and whistle commands. I used to save the wings off of pheasants I shot and would hide them to train him with finding birds by scent only.

Are you thinking about a hunting dog?

we have a 7month old Golden Retriever
shes been catching live birds in the back yard
so ive been thinking about maybe doing some type of training

Training a dog for anything more than obedience can become a full time job. I don't have any experience with goldens, but I have tried to train my two jack russells (a breed that is extremely intelligent but ridiculously stobourn.) for basic obedience. Even after some training, I would hardly call my dogs well behaved.

If you decide to train her for hunting, make sure you actually take her hunting. I believe that the actual application of training to real world experience is the most important part.

If she's gonna be a gun dog, you also may want to start shooting around her to get her used to the sound.

Here's a blog that you might want to take a look at...lots of good info on here (may have to search a bit though).

Retrieverman

for 7 months old she is pretty well behaved
and has done well with basic commands she has been taught
sit,lay,fetch,in ur crate,etc
since ive have been thinking about doing some hunting traing with her
ive been lighting off fire crackers around her at random moments to get her use to loud sounds
has not scared her one bit,so i think im going to buy a blank gun and start taking down to the
c&d canal on the weekends to the dog training ponds

the live birds she has caught are alive when she releases them out of her mouth and fly off hence the dogs quality of having a soft mouth

i think i would rather have her do more training towards tracking

Lums Pond has a seperate dog training area also if you want to do water retrieval with her...not sure how the rangers would feel about firing off blanks though...

have to check out lums pond never knew they had one over thier
in the canal traing area its fine to shot blanks

Golden Retrievers are pretty easy to train. If your dog already has basic commands down then the hard part is done. At 7 months old if your interested in training the dog for hunting then I would start immediatly. You can order retrieving dummies and different animal scents as well as bird wings from Cableas.com or a local hunting store.

The black and white dummies (or bumpers) are used for visual training and the colored dummies are generally used for scent training since dogs are color blind. My dog has a hard time locating his Orange bumper unless he sees exactly where I throw it. If he can't find it he will work a gris pattern across my yard (or field) while I say "fetch it up" until he finds it. Sometimes this works great and other times he give up after a few minutes. When I first started training him he would would work an area from just me pointing to an area but he's not that great at that now.

I used to tape bird wings to an orange bumper and hide them in my yard or in the woods and taught the dog to find it with "fetch it up" or "find the bird". Your dog having a soft mouth it exactly what you need in a hunting dog. If he will not release when command him or releases a game animal after tearing it up you will have problems.

A friend of my families wrote a book on training bird dogs. If you want to read it I can send it down. It's a pretty serious training manual if you want to go all out.

My dogs newest hobby is to try and catch one of the 4 rabbits that live in our yard. I have been letting him chase after them but only after I release him to go. He will usually heal until I say "go get em" then he hauls ass after them. I don't think he's fast enough to get one but I'm doing it more as a test to make sure he will not go after them until I say it's OK.

Let me know if you want me to mail the book down for you.