I like to do at least a post a week but life sometimes gets in the way. Monday I took Bodie up to get the cast from the broken leg removed. The vet, Dr. Becker, thought he needed to wear a cast for another 10 days. He said the blood wasn’t circulating through the bone right. So now Bodie has a brand new cast.
Bodie pointing a pigeon.
Abby on point.
Boss pointing a pigeon.
Then on Tuesday June had to have her esophagus stretched. That took most of the morning then I couldn’t leave for the rest of the day. That brings us to today. I used to say weather forecasters, I even tried weather prognosticators for a while but now I think a better term is “weather guessers”, said the temperature would be dropping all day. They got that one right.
In one of the magazines that I take there was an article about teaching your dogs how to cross fences. I thought I had done that but not like this guy did. I always just let mine learn through trial and error. That seems to work. I’ve had a few vet bills, though.
A lot of years ago, I had a dog named Lady. We were hunting just after I had been released from the hospital from a bout of flu and pneumonia. I had been sick for a week or so before I went to the doctor. Then I spent 4 days in the hospital. I hadn’t been out of the hospital long.
I was so weak when I first got out of the hospital that I would go down stairs, get on the riding lawn mower, ride it to the dog pens, clean and feed dogs then ride the mower back to the house. A few days later I was bored so I loaded dogs and went hunting.
I think this was before I had GPS collars. I found Lady hanging from the top barb wire on a fence. She had tried to cross and her leg went over the top of one wire and under another. Lady loved me a lot but I knew better than to just help her get loose. The dog is hurting and they will bite anything that gets close. I took my jacket and threw it over her head then got her leg out. She had a long cut on her leg.
It was bleeding pretty bad but I had nothing to stop it. I was too weak from the hospital stay to carry her although she only weighed about 30 pounds. We were over half a mile from the truck and we started toward it. At least I did. Lady went hunting. Bloody leg and all.
Finally, we came to the truck and I loaded her for the hour and a half drive to the vet. When I took her from the truck she had quit bleeding but it started again as she walked inside the vet’s office. I signed in and waited. They couldn’t see Lady so they didn’t know how bad she was. After a few minutes or less I said, “My dog is bleeding all over your floor.” They got her right in and sewed her up.
The wire cutters I now carry in my hunting vest.
When Tur Bo was less than a year old we were hunting a place in Kansas. By this time I had GPS collars. His collar showed him on point about 200 yards from me. As I got close I saw him just standing across a wet weather creek from me. I called him and he took a step toward me and stopped. This wasn’t like Tur Bo. He usually came if he wasn’t on point.
I got a little closer and called him again. Again it looked like he tried to come but couldn’t. I started getting concerned. I went to him. He had become entangled in a short piece of barb wire. The wire came up from the ground a short distance then went back into the ground. Just a short loop. He had torn a triangular piece of skin loose that was wrapped around the wire. I tried several different ways to get him loose but nothing worked.
I had to take my pocket knife and cut his hide loose while he licked my ear. My knife was dull but sharp enough to finally cut him loose. Bird dogs are tough. He never yelped or squirmed. He just stood and let me cut him loose. Then he went back to hunting because I didn’t have a leash with me to lead him out.
Boss honoring.
Now I carry a leash, wire cutters and several other things in my hunting vest. The wire cutters are large enough to cut through snares or barb wire or anything else that the dogs could get into, I hope.
Another thing that gets bird dogs in trouble is jumping off the tail gate of a truck. After I put the e-collars and GPS collars on my dogs I lift them and set them on the ground. When Bodie jumped for the pigeon and broke his leg, when he hit the ground, he hadn’t jumped very high. Not near as high as my tail gate on the truck.
Another thing you get from the dogs when you always set them on the ground; if their dog box comes open with them in their box, they may not jump out of the truck. Years ago I had a dog by the name of Lucky. I pulled into a store in a small town in Kansas. The door on his box had come open without me knowing. While I was in the store Lucky got out of his box but was still walking around the back of the truck when I came out.
Sally pointing a single.
If he had jumped out I may not have even known he was out of the box. I might have drove off leaving him in a town a long way from his home. I might not have ever seen him again. A friend was on a trip to the west coast or close with his bird dogs. He stopped for gas and aired his dogs out and put them away. After he went to the bathroom he jumped in his truck and down the highway he went.
Three or four hundred miles down the road he went to air the dogs again and one was missing. A dog box door was open. He had no idea where he had got out of the truck but he went all the way back to where he had seen his dog the last time. Although he had his name and phone number on the collar he never saw the dog again. An owners worst nightmare.
One year I was hunting on January the first. A dog I owned by the name of Judy cut a huge gash in her front leg. If she even yelped when it happened I never heard her. When I noticed the cut it had already quit bleeding so I just put her in the dog box. I was hunting with another guy (a lumber salesman) and he had driven.
Mann on point with Sally honoring.
We went on hunting. This was back in the day when there were a lot of quail. Leon killed a limit of quail and I never killed a bird. I was young then and could shoot but worrying about my dog was more than I could overcome. I had her at the vets office when they opened the next day.
I can only remember one other dog that suffered a cut over the more than fifty years that I’ve owned dogs and hunted quail. He, too, had quit bleeding by the time I saw it. That’s not too bad but I have a friend that owns a dog that has been sewed up at least 3 times from barb wire cuts and maybe more than that. Each time they are cut they are out of service for a couple of weeks during the best time of the year, bird season. So it would be a good thing to teach our dogs to cross fences instead of just letting them learn on their own.