00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Hooundation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about understanding the early season dangers your dog might face in the field and how you can keep them safe. We are screeching toward the next hunting season to the point where we should make sure the dogs don't have too much extra padding on them, and we should also consider that for us as well. This is a time of promise and that's awesome, but the early season can also be one of the most dangerous times of the year to let your bird dog out and let them wade through the cover. Some of these dangers are obvious, some of them aren't. That I'm going to talk about all of them right now. The outdoors isn't necessarily a super dangerous environment, but I guess compared to an air conditioned house with couches and all kinds of comfort producing stuff, it is. I know. I've had my share about door injuries and close calls. My first real injury happened while trout fishing with my buddy Tim Walker when we were in sixth grade. While waiters were a thing back then, we were broken young and just didn't even consider it. The amount of times I rode my bike home with frozen jeans after a fishing trip would give most modern parents a heart attack. Now, on that particular trip, I well kind of tripped on something in the grass along the bank, and when I checked out the damage, I had a pretty sizable hole in my shin from either a fence post or a barber bare a fence. Tim had to interrupt a wedding in town to find my parents so they could take me to the er, which had to be a site. I had a different incident later on in my life while crossing a fence in Oklahoma that was much worse than getting twenty stitches, because it almost left me singing soprano for real. I've never had an injury that scared me as much as mixing gravity, my apple bag and a fence post. Now. That was on a white tail hunt, which is a good way to get yourself injured because you work with lots of heights in the form of tree stands, and you work with lot of blades in the form of broadheads and knives on the tree stand front. A long time ago, I had a couple of screwing steps hit the eject button at the same time, which allowed me to test my safety, harness and the durability of my ribs. Turns out, metal tree stands are harder than my body, and all that summer long, when I set the hook while bass fishing, i'd scream in pain, much to the delight of my fishing buddies. I've had enough close calls with tree stands and another crazy thing, which is people shooting guns in my direction that I'm pretty careful about what I get myself into these days. And I'm pretty careful with my dogs, as I'm sure you are. When it comes to our hard charging pointers and retrievers, the opportunities are pretty high for injury, some of which can be fatal if you and your dog run out a look. Of course, the most obvious here is heat. Talked about this before. A well bred dog generally isn't going to slow down in the field in any conditions. They'll often go from berserker to collapse. Is quite a few people have figured out over the years. When states like South Dakota have kicked off their pheasant seasons during heat waves, most people would say to not hunt your dog when the temperatures reach a certain point. I guess we could use like eighty plus as a benchmark. Now, I know you Southern listeners are scoffing at that, so let me qualify it. Eighty degrees to a Chessia in northern Michigan is a different thing than eighty degrees to a pointer in Georgia. Heat tolerance is highly variable amongst breeds and individual dogs, just like it is with people, and it's something that can be worked on. Although I'm not going to recommend you condition your dog to work in blazing heat because I don't want to encourage strangers to do something like that. So I'll just say this, keep the ego in check when you bump into this kind of situation. We can look at forecasts that are somewhat accurate ten to fifteen days ahead of time, which means we shouldn't be too surprised if we have to call a trip, cut it short, or move the dates. Now, I know not every trip is that simple, but hunting your dog to a heat stroker is a worse option. Always. Of course, if you have to go, or you just can't quite find a reason to not hunt when you want to, early mornings are a better idea for obvious reasons. Sometimes the temperature never get low enough to be safe, though, and sometimes the humidity really contributes to that problem. This isn't just a weird weather issue for some pheasant hunting openers either. If you head at west for sharpiece in the beginning of September, you could be asking your dog to run in the blazing sun over oceans of knee high grass in a bad heat situation. Obviously, access to lots of water is huge inside and outside of your dog if you can facilitate that. Now, if you have a barrel chested male GSP or really any bird dog, this also presents a unique way to royally mess him up. A big dog with a deep chest that drinks a tunnel water in one shot and then goes for a run across the countryside is a prime candidate for gastric torsion. It's also true that an overweight dog is a dog that will succumb to heat stress faster than a dog that is at a healthy weight. The latter dog gets bonus points for not only being at a healthy weight, but also being highly conditioned. Again, there's a reason some folks can run two hundred mile ultra marathons in the desert and survive just fine, while some folks have major chest grabbers on their way to the mailbox because it's just a little bit too much exertion. The key to this early season issue is this, you have to err on the side of caution and be very fair to your dog. Now. I know you want to go out and get that first limited roosters. I know your buddies are going to head out and give it a go, and I know your dog will gladly hunt. But what do you think is it worth it? Is your dog ready and are the conditions such where they aren't dangerous? Heat is rough, but it comes with other dangers. When I had my previous dog podcast, I interviewed a fellow from the Southwest who is a dog trainer and who specialized in snake breaking dogs. Where I live, that really isn't even a concern, but in so many places the venomous danger ropes are all over and the early season is when they are highly active. Now, I'm always a big proponent of training things yourself if you can, because it just helps your relationship with your dog. It's fun and it's rewarding. I don't recommend you snake break your dog. However, at least on your own diwy, snake breaking is probably a bad idea. Now. While I have a weird affinity towards snakes in general, and I'm not really scared of them in the least, I'd be way out of my depths to go catch a rattler and then try to figure out a way to teach my dog. This to your clear If you dig into this, you'll see people have different methods of snake breaking. Some put a rattle snake or some other kind of snake in a plexiglass cage with plenty of holes in it. Then they'll watch a dog approach and when it gets close enough, they'll hit it with the e caller hard enough to make an impression. That fella I interviewed talked about that method, and he said it was a great way to condition dogs to be very afraid of plexiglass boxes. His method was to actually catch snakes and either milk them or defang them. I honestly can't remember, but I'd say defang sounds like the better bet. Then he could facilitate situations where people could walk their dogs through the scrub brush and wherever else and they could actually bump into a real cage free snake and then give them some electricity. Now, I know some folks are staunchly anti ecollar, and I get it, but in this situation, it's pretty hard to argue that it isn't damn near the perfect tool to keep your dogs safe in the wild. Of course, this is also a really good argument for having a very solid recall on your dog. While we don't deal with a whole lot of venomous snakes up in my world, we do have a shitload of porcupines up in grouse country, and every dog I've ever owned, and every dog I've ever hunted with in that rough grouse territory has eventually stumbled across one, and some dogs just can't hardly be called off of them. But that's a unique problem to certain breeds. Generally, a lot of dogs can be called off, and if you can call your dog off at anything dangerous, you should try hard to make that one hundred percent success type of thing, or as close as you can get. During early season hunts, you also just have the reality that grass is taller, the brush is thicker, and my old nemesis, fences can be harder to see. If you hunt a hell of a lot of places that, while birds live, your dogs will eventually hit a fence. Some trainers, like Tom Dokin will actually teach dogs how to go through fences, which is cool as hell, but that only works if you see the fence ahead of time, or your dog sees the fence ahead of time, and then you can help them. There are a hell of a lot of broken down sections of fence posts and other abandoned metal farm machinery, old cans and sheets of tin, and all kinds of things that can slice open a dog that is running at full speed or doing his best impression of coming off the top rope in five foot tall slow grass, over and over. This is often a young dog problem because they haven't learned to preserve their energy and are generally total lunatics their first few seasons in the field, but it's also something that can be as minor as a painful scrape on their undercarriage or something that can kill them. I know that seems crazy, but imagine a bird dog running full steam into a barbed ware fence. One of the most violent things I've ever seen in the outdoors happened when I was finishing up a pheasant hunt in north central Minnesota, and I happened to be driving right past a slough that had some other hunters in it. They had kicked up a two year old type of eight point buck and he wasn't bounding like deer do when they think they have time. He was going full greyhound to get the hell out of there. And my hunting partner and I watched as he hit a single strand of barbed wire. It was ugly, ugly, ugly. He went assd over apple cart hard, got up, shook it off, and kept running. But I promise you he was all cut up and definitely hurting. I also can't imagine what it would have been like if he had dipped his head and caught that strand on his neck or his face instead of square on his chest. Now this spring, I spent some time with Brent Reeves down in Arkansas where he chases coons with his hounds, and he mentioned something to me that really isn't on my radar here but makes total sense while talking about getting caught in the field, and that was that if you have a dog that gets a open wound somehow, a little scrape, little cut whatever on its paw on its belly really anywhere, and it ends up in the wrong water. You have the recipe for infection. Now up here we know about blue green algae and not to swimm our dog anywhere near it when it blooms. But in a hell of a lot of the country, the only water your dog might encounter could be awfully stagnant. This, as Brent emphasized multiple times, is a good reminder to do a post hunt checkup on your dogs and to investigate anything thoroughly if you think your dog might have gotten cut or scraped up while you're in the field. Heavier cover, even just thicker than late season grass, poses another issue. Besides just obscuring dangerous objects in the field, you can lose sight of your dog easier, and they can lose sight of you. And also anything else that might be dangerous, like milk trucks cruising down the gravel road next to the slew you're hunting. I have a good friend who is staying in a motel one time on a hunting trip and his buddy's dog ran out into the highway and that was the last of that dog. It's a cautionary tale. I know it's not exactly like running through the slow grass and popping out on a road trafficing dog's a bad, bad deal. Keep your dog in check because you can't see them in that grass a lot of times, so having that control and being aware of how they hunt is huge. You also have to factor in the reality that the wind might be blowing, that dry grass is loud to them, and their senses are just taken over by the environment. That's an opportunity for a real mistake to happen. Now there's another aspect of this, the cover game, that comes into play in the early season. One of the only times I almost accidentally shot a dog was in high school when a buddy and I were hunting grouse in southeastern Minnesota. We were young, dumb and didn't think we'd actually find one, but we did, or at least my buddy's Springer Spaniel did. It was a young bird, and it was in September, and I just happened to be walking along and a grouse popped up into a tree not very far away and sat there like a stupid feathered bowling pin. Now, I know some folks won't shoot a grouse in a tree, but seventeen year old Tony would and I almost did, but my buddy yelled out that Eddie was coming in high, and that stopped me from pulling the trigger. Now I didn't see him coming, of course, but that dog was running in there, and that grouse was not very high up in that tree. There wasn't any other reason for that grouse to do that move. And I still think about it often, even though nothing bad happened. There is something about having the safety off and being milliseconds away from shooting in a situation where you might kill your buddy's dog that sits with you for a long time, and it's one of those core memories that shows up in your brain right when you're about to fall asleep every once in a while, so you can remember that you've always been kind of a dipshit. I guess this is the last point I want to make here, and it's an important one. A hell of a lot of the bad stuff that goes wrong with dogs out there at all times of the season, but particularly the early season, is directly our fault. Think about it this way. You know how excited your dog is to get out there for the first time, Well you are too. Maybe you're with three or four buddies and you haven't seen each other since last season. The anticipation's high, the competition is there, and everyone is a little rusty from nine months off or however long the off season's been for them. Now, maybe you and your buddy's crack open a bottle of whiskey every night and by morning you're all running a little slow and a little foggy brained. This might seem crazy, and the numbers might be outdated now, but I know for quite a few years there was a safety harness company that tracked fatalities from tree stand falls. At that time, about two dozen a year died from falling out of a tree stand, and about half of those died from falling out of ladder stands, which should be the safest stands out there, given they have actual ladders for you to climb up and down with, and most have shooting rails that further envelop the hunter, but not all. And what happened with most of those fatalities was that someone would climb in hunt for a few hours and then get sleepy, and when they fell asleep, they'd pitch headfirst out of the stand. And if you're wondering, if that does you any favors. It doesn't. Now I'm not saying you have to go cold turkey on your hunting trips. I don't care if you shoot Heroin into your toes, honestly, But what I'm saying is that when things go wrong, it's often our fault, and it often just isn't like one little decision or one little moment. There's like a series of things that lead up to it. It might be that we just aren't paying attention when we should be, or we aren't on our a game because we just can't be. Of course, this is a little like a lot of things in life where something just breaks bad, and that's how life works. But if we can do our best not to facilitate that moment for ourselves and our dogs, that's always a solid move. These are things we should think of all season longer, but they won't necessarily be top of mine in September when you're woodcock hunting, as they will be by the time you're two or three months deep into the season and making your way south for something other than a worm eater hunt. Think about this stuff as the off season winds down and we approach the actual season because it's important, and think about coming back in two weeks because I'm going to talk about how we often think about dogs as individuals and we should, but they also have universal traits and behaviors that we should acknowledge and understand as well, because that's how we train them better and have a better life with them. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been The Houndation's podcast. I just want to thank you guys so much for listening. Cal and I here really appreciate it. The whole meat Eater crew does. Honestly, without you, guys, we are nothing, so thank you for showing up for us. If you need some more hunting content, you are in luck. Over at them meedeater dot com. You can find tons of articles on relevantnews, stories about the outdoors, how to stuff recipes. We have hunting videos dropping almost every week. We have more podcasts in our network than anybody out there. We've added some new shows lately, like Lake Pickles Backwoods University, which is awesome. He's doing a great job on that. That's on the Bear Grease Feed. Tons of cool content. We drop something new every day. Go to the meteater dot com check it out