Thelma: The First Hunting Season
Well… the season’s plans just went out the window.
Here it is, August of 2020, the falconry season is just beginning. I’d planned to hunt quail this year, and just acquired a “started” pointing dog to pursue the endeavor with. After my first weeks with my new “started” dog, here is what I learned:
1) She cannot find birds on her own
2) When birds flush, she chases and barks at them
3) She has zero “point” in her
4) If/when she gets a bird, she eats it
5) She is supposedly gun shy
Ok… so that’s a fun baseline to start with. Time for plan C?
I decided to keep bringing Thelma with me to the field. They say the best way to fix a bird dog is to show them wild birds, so that is what I did. After I worked my hawks, I’d run Thelma and help her get in to birds. It was odd though, because she never seemed to figure out how to find the birds on her own, and when she did find them, she’d sniff right where they were, and then run off. I’d call her back and flush them, hoping to help her make the connection, but the leaping and barking and chasing always ensued.
I reached out via a Facebook post to my local NAVHDA chapter for thoughts. Their suggestions all centered around working on getting her to whoa, and then stop to flush. So we started working on woah. This went pretty well, although her default was always “sit”. I tried correcting her by picking her up by her belly. BIG MISTAKE! This caused an immediate screaming, flipping over, freaking out fit.
I tried it again. Same reaction. As soon as my hand put upward pressure on her belly, the screaming and flipping over started.
TO THE VET WE WENT! I figured a reaction like that had to be medical. The vet did some tests and found a bladder infection and stones in her urine. So started the new feeding and medication routine. We took a few months off of woah training while the medical stuff was resolved.
In the meantime, I decided to see if she was really gun shy. I took her out, tossed a bird for her, and fired a blank cap gun when she went to chase/eat it. The second the blank went off she ran to the car and hid under it.
Ok, yep! She really is gun shy.
Since we weren’t making any progress on anything else, and we couldn’t keep woah training until her bladder issues cleared up, I decided to just work on this gun shyness and see if we could get her through it.
Over the next few months, I would bring both dogs out (Ellie, the trained flushing dog, and Thelma). I’d toss a bird to retrieve, fire the cap gun as it was falling, and then send Ellie after it. After a few days of this, Thelma started to get jealous that Ellie was getting all the birds and attention. She started staying closer, then she started chasing the tossed bird with Ellie!
I switched to a thawed chukar so that she couldn’t swallow it whole like she did with the pigeons and quail, and kept the game going. After a few weeks, her competitive streak kicked in and she was retrieving the chukar before Ellie had a chance to get to it, and didn’t care at all about the cap gun.
Then, I put Ellie away and started only working Thelma with the cap gun and tossed chukar. She got to the point where the cap gun going off actually excited her, because she knew I’d throw a chukar.
I started putting the dead chukar in a launcher, so I could launch it, fire the cap gun, and get Thelma looking ahead of me for something to fall instead of always looking at me and my hands when the gun went off. This went well and she no longer was concerned with the gun, and was finally retrieving chukars and not trying to eat them! Progress was made!!
Once hawking season was over and her bladder issues had cleared up, we tried to pick up where we left off. I was able to get her woah-ing with some consistency, but she still pretty much sat down every time. I decided not to nit pick it. It least if she was stopping, that was good enough for now.
I started trying to see if I could woah her, and then toss a bird for her to retrieve to keep her standing. This worked pretty well, and also got her more enthusiastic about the “woah”. But every time I took her to wild birds again, the woah wagon wheels fell off and the chasing and craziness ensued.
This was when I started reaching out for help. I again reached out on Facebook to the local NAVHDA chapter asking for suggestions for trainers in and around California who were good with really soft dogs. The common theme in the responses was always Steve Klassen from Blue Ridge Kennels.
So I reached out to Steve for help, and we set up our first lesson with him for an evaluation.