"The Starting Point
"
As 
Sees It
By Roy Greffin
- Chapter 1 -
The weather was not bird dog weather. Rain showers, chilled by
unfriendly gusts of wind from the northwest. Not the golden clearness of a crisp November
day. The Grizzled One had put off venturing forth from the motorhome as long as he could
that morning. His packleader bitch, Penny, watched out the window at the other hunters
walking from the parking lot into the adjoining fields and woods to begin their days hunt
for pheasant at Illinois Chain O' Lakes State Park. One of the states parks which becomes
a controlled Pheasant hunting area during the fall months. The Grizzled One always waited
for a half hour or so after shooting time began to take his dogs out into the field. He
had no desire to be in close proximity to keyed up hunters, as you had at starting time.
And also he wanted the pheasants to be pushed around so that his dogs would have to work
for their birds. Better experience for them. After the Grizzled One had finished his 2nd
cup of coffee, Penny turned her gaze towards him and her docked tail began a hopeful
tick-tock. Penny's two sons, the swashbuckling giant King Conan and the clown prince Rowdy
Roy, lie dozing in their crates. Penny's granddaughter, Tanner lie in her crate exuding an
almost inaudible whine. She wanted to go hunting. Bad!.
The Grizzled One always made it a rule not to hunt his dogs with
each other. His feeling was that for his dogs, hunting was to be an act of pure joy . No
competition with siblings or parent, just lots of undivided attention from the Grizzled
One. His dogs were campaigned in field trials and hunting tests from August to November.
Which meant every weekend they were competing someplace in the Midwest. During the week
physical conditioning and bird work was engaged in, as the dogs were being honed to engage
in optimum performance. Hunting season was R & R. Fun Time. A time when the dogs could
be silly , commit errors that cost them in competition but now brought a chuckle from
their Grizzled One. A well trained Gun Dog is a hunting dog that has reached its optimum
in potential. Hunters that look upon field trial competition dogs as "mindless
robots" miss the point. A well trained gun dog (they are called broke dogs) that is
not proficient as a competition field trialer will almost always be a "dream
dog" for the average hunter. They are that good as compared to the average hunting
dog, which has never been trained to its optimum. Hunting season was the end of stress
time for the Grizzled One's dogs and they loved it.
The Grizzled One decided that enough time had elapsed since the mob
of hunters had started their hunt so he and his Penny left the motorhome and began their
day in the field. In a short time Penny was doing that which is the center of her being.
Working objectives that might contain game. Just to watch her was a joy to behold. Wasting
no movement, the Vizsla glided from objective to objective, always to the front and within
easy sight. During the course of an hour, Penny had located and pointed several pheasants;
all of which were downed by dogless hunters who had the good luck to be within hailing
distance when Penny "locked up" on her birds. A genial invite by the Grizzled
One to come over to where Penny was standing on point and shoot, while he handled Penny
and flushed the game. This had been a good morning so far, none of the invited hunters had
missed their shots.
The Grizzled One's hunting pleasure came from watching his dogs
perform rather than filling his gamebag. Because the Grizzled One did all of his own
training, he was out in the field almost year round. Between participating in field
trials, hunting tests and the training that this required, his "hunting" year
was virtually l2 months. As a good deal of this training was bird work, the Grizzled One
kept training birds on hand year round. A quail pen, a pheasant and Chukar pen, and of
course the good old reliable Homing Pigeons. When he put his dogs through some intensive
training he always liked to end the session with shooting a bird or two over the dogs. As
a result, he was shooting game much of the year. So when hunting season rolled around, the
Grizzled One saw this as training. That is, most of his hunting , especially on state
managed pheasant hunting areas, was really handling his dogs for the hunters who had no
dogs to shoot over. For the Grizzled One it was a good deal. His dogs were given
experiences of being shot over by strangers (most of the people who are gunners at field
trials and hunt tests are strangers to the dogs entered) and it was a good deal for the
hunters who went home with game instead of empty hands.
The showers had gradually changed to a light but insistent rain.
The temperature seemed to have dropped a bit too. The gray morning had become a chilly,
wet morning. The Grizzled One decided that Penny's aging bones had had enough and it was
time to head her back to the motorhome with its warmth and hot coffee. As he and Penny cut
through some timber, the Grizzled One heard a voice up ahead and it was not a happy voice.
The Grizzled One listened more intently. It was a hunter berating his dog for some reason.
Penny ran to the Grizzled One, stood looking at him with a "Well, what are we going
to do?" look on her face. She knew an angry voice when she heard one. Upon a
"heel" command, Penny dutifully fell in on the grizzled One's left side as they
walked towards the sounds. They came up on a young fellow whose German Shorthair pup was
attempting to get between the hunter's feet out of the cold wet. The pup was obviously wet
, cold, and by now frightened by the increasingly strident commands of its owner to
"find bird-find bird!". The puppy's hunting day, if it knew what hunting was,
was over. One look at the puppy's owner's face told the whole story. There was that taut,
grim look that is characteristic of the hunter who knows little or nothing about hunting
dogs. Who has bought a hunting dog (puppy) that is going-to-by-God hunt even if the puppy
is cold, wet, exhausted, frightened, and had probably been given little or no field
training. The Grizzled One knew that confronting the dog owner with the facts of his
ignorance would not turn the situation around: The happy, productive hunting companion the
hunter had likely envisioned when he acquired the pup. No! Confrontation would almost
certainly worsen the situation. Far better to try to turn it around in some way to a more
positive conclusion in which both man and dog would be in a happier state of mind than
they were now. This was very likely the young hunter's first time out in the field with
his puppy and it was obviously not the kind of first time experience the Grizzled One felt
a guy should have with his new hunting dog.
The Grizzled One decided to break the ice by asking questions of
the type that hunting dog people who are strangers ask. Was any game put up? Isn't the
weather terrible? How old is the puppy? Etc. During the chit chat, the Grizzled One took
some capsules out of a pocket of his battered, but favorite, hunting coat and offered them
to Penny who had been standing quietly on a "stay" command. Penny eagerly gulped
the capsules down. The pup's owner asked if the capsules were medicine. "No"
replied the Grizzled One. He went to explain that filled capsule containers with a
combination of honey, fructose sugar, and a commercially prepared high energy food paste
for working dogs under stress. "Dogs need energy pick-ups just like people do,"
he explained. "I have found, in my experience, that the concoction that I put into
these capsules works just find. Everything in them is easily processed by the dog and
there is no "sugar high and then crash" effect you can get with plain sugar. You
know a dog’s metabolism is just as tricky as human metabolism. There is a condition
us laymen sometimes call the "hunting dog syndrome". The physical stress of
hunting can cause blood sugar to suddenly drop to a unacceptable low and the dog will
actually have seizures until that sugar level goes up. Quit often such seizures are
mistaken for epileptic seizures and the dog is put on a medication regiment that is not
warranted. Usually a simple change in diet and a supply of fructose sugar will take care
of the situation. The Grizzled One asked if he could give the pup one of the energy
capsules. The young hunter consented and the Grizzled One opened a capsule and squirted
the contents on a fingertip which he slowly extended to the pup shivering between his
master's legs. The pup, cautiously at first and then with gusto cleaned the fingertip. A
good sign the Grizzled One thought. "Kids and puppies. Thank God He made them both so
resilient."
"Hey! I'm heading back to my motorhome to put Penny here up
and have a cup of something hot. You and your pup are welcome to join me. It really
wouldn't hurt to get the pup into a warm, dry spot for a while." The pup's owner
somewhat reluctantly accepted the offer as the rain was still steady and it had not become
any warmer. The offer made sense. As the two hunters exchanged names, the Grizzled One
snapped a lead on Penny's collar and the quartet headed for the parking area where the
motorhome was located.
"Why did you put a leash on your dog? Why don't you have her
hunt on the way back to your vehicle?" asked Ed, the Grizzled One's new acquaintance.
"Well," the older Hunter replied, "Penny has been hunted for about an hour
this morning. That is about the length of time I like my dogs to be down. You see Ed, I
bring four Vizslas with me when I go hunting and each dog gets out. Quite often of course,
because of situations a dog is out for more than an hour, so usually by the time I have
worked all four dogs the day is really over. Also, because I usually hunt numerous times a
week during hunting season, I don't want my dogs to become exhausted in one day's hunt.
Dogs are a lot like people in that as a person becomes more physically tired, their
performance drops off. The same is true of dogs. The "all day dog" idea that one
hears about is not, I think, a very positive concept. Oh I have seen people try to do
that, especially when a bunch of hunters are hunting over one dog and that dog is expected
to produce game for everybody in the group. Not a good situation. And then egos quite
often emerge in such circumstances. As the dog becomes more tired and its performance
declines, its owner has to resort to more and more vocal persuasion because he is not
going to let that dog make him look bad in front of his buddies even if the dog is
exhausted. The Grizzled One hopes that the point of the dissertation was being received
and hopefully accepted.
"You say you bring four dogs when you go hunting? How do you
keep them from tearing up your motorhome? Benji here is a real alligator, chews up things
when he is left alone." "That's easy." replied the Grizzled One. "My
dogs eat, sleep, and travel in crates. Whenever they are left alone at home, they are
crated. My wife and I start our dogs on crating when they are taken from the litter. They
quickly learn that their crate is a refuge, a sanctuary, a warm place where they are at
peace with the world. The crate is never used for punishment. It is a place of confinement
but you have to understand that confinement is a human concept not a dogs. To those people
who say crating a dog is cruel, I say coming home to a trashed house and getting angry at
one's dog and verbally and physically punishing the dog for its transgressions is cruel
because there a much better alternative. Isn’t it infinitely better to come home (to
a untrashed house) and let the dog out of its crate and be able to say "good
boy" or "good girl" and play with the dog and just thoroughly enjoy the
relationship. As far as traveling is concerned, think of it this way. Would you let a
three year old child travel in a car without restraints? The same law of physics applies
to the body mass of a dog that applies to the body mass of a child when the vehicle that
they are riding in abruptly stops. In both cases their bodies become missiles and terrible
things happen to them."
At that point the hunters had reached the parking lot where the
motorhome was parked and as the key went into the lock of the vehicle, greeting-barking
came rolling out of the opening door. Penny jumped into the interior followed by the
Grizzled One. "Come on in Ed", invited the older hunter. He motioned Ed towards
a chair by the dinette and tossed him an old towel. "You can use that to dry your pup
off if you want, I am going to do the same for Penny. You might even want to keep the pup
wrapped for a bit. Helps to warm him up faster." The Grizzled One disappeared into
the bathroom and reappeared with a plastic bottle in his hand. "This is eyewash. I
always flush my dog's eyes out when they come in from the field. Saves them from lots of
eye problems." He then took a steel feeding pan from a empty dog crate and poured
some of what looked like sugar into it. "I always give my dogs a spoonful of fructose
sugar after a hard workout. Penny here will sleep for a few hours now and her blood sugar
level will be normal when she wakes up and she will be fresh." He opened up a thermos
and poured some water in the pan and explained, "This is warm water. I have found
that often when you give cold water to a dog that has had a strenuous workout they can
develop stomach cramps and vomit. The warm water doesn't seem to cause that." The
Grizzled One poured a little bit of the fructose into a cereal bowl and poured a bit of
the warm water from the thermos into the bowl and offered it to Ed. "See if the pup
wants some. Dip a finger into the bowl and put it under the pup's lip." Very quickly
the pup was lapping up the bowl's contents. Ed put the pup on the motorhome floor where
the puppy began to take in the new surroundings. The Grizzled One noticed, with
satisfaction, that the dog's tail, while not yet at l2 o'clock, was up and was ticking.
Anticipating that Ed was going to call the puppy to him so that it would not be a
nuisance, the Grizzled One said "There really isn't much that he can get into trouble
with here. The most that can happen is that he will get barked at by the crated
dogs." Which happened at the same instant the words were spoken. The puppy had
positioned itself in front of Penny’s crate and she immediately let the pup know that
that was not too cool. The pup's tail, for an instant, dropped but then snapped right back
up again. "Good dog" thought the Grizzled One.
The Grizzled One poured two steaming cups of coffee, placed one in
front of Ed, sat down in the dinette chair across from him and took an exploratory sip
from the hot cup. Ed did the same. The Grizzled One sensed that the younger man was
beginning to relax so he decided to broach that questions that are universal to consummate
hunting dog people. "Who is the puppy out of? Who did you get it from?"
In Chapter 2 of "The Starting Point", the Grizzled One
will talk about picking out a puppy that will be a hunting buddy when grown. Until the
next issue, remember, dogs and kids are not with us forever. Kids grow up and dogs grow
old. Cherish them while you have them.
Squaw Creek Vizsla Works
Photo Album
To get to know more about Roy
Greffiin. Or, You can write to grizzone@windy-city.com
with any questions you may have about selecting or training your hunting dog buddy.
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