Who's getting ready to go hunting with your dog(s)?

[Syreeta Caron]

I am just curious as to how many of us hunt our dogs personally? And what type of game do you go after? Personally I hunt for grouse, ptarmigan, ducks and geese with Remy. She does pretty good but she does need more work to be a good gundog.

So, lets hear what type of hunting you train your dog to do.

Syreeta

[Katariina Roiha]

This question is quite alright where it stands. Not all the topics concerning hunting need to be within one question,eh? This is about the game we hunt with our hunting friends...and about training. :-))

Here is one girlie waiting anxiously for the season to start! We hunt mainly ptarmigan(rock) and willow grouse here in Lapland. But we want to give our setters the opportunity to have contact with other game aswell, like pheasants and grey partridge,capercaillie and black grouse. So we travel every september to the middle of Finland to compete and hunt these other gamebirds. I think it is quite important for a hunting dog to get in contact with different kinds on terrain and game to become a good hunter.
What problems do you Syreeta have? I like to hear about different problems, one can learn from them...

[Jelena Kreitmayer]

here, we hunt for the city pigeons, and an occasional seagull =:)))
LOL

[Christiane Lohmann]

We hunt pheasants (goes very nicely with german SAUERKRAUT;_))), ducks (best for 90 min in the oven with nothing else than pepper and salt and maybe little lemon), rabbits (simply georgeous with tomatoes and garlic, but also acceptable in a bed of smashed carrots and spices), hares (plums, red cabbage, red wine...), pidgeons (add some fresh asparagus, white wine and rice...) and crows...
While some kind of hunt a dog is needed to find and point, other ways of hunting need dogs that retrieve or bring game 'on the legs'. Especially when hunting rabbits, our dogs have to point and chase them out of thorny cover like spaniels. Nothing for softies.;-)

Best regards
Christiane

[Katariina Roiha]

Yam,yam Christiane! I´m thinking of bying the tickets to fly to dinner...:D
At the moment our terrain(the mountain) is full of little hairy lemmings,it is a mammal , little bigger than a hamster. Our dogs retriewe those little things like 3 a piece every day. I have been thinking what would be made out of those little hairy things ;-) Lemming soup?
Good to train retriewing though :D

[Thomas Kaiser]

Hi Syreeta,
I like to hunt but never enough time. We have to travel a lot to hunt. In this area we have to buy all our birds to train with. We have a cabin neat Penn State campus and hunt grouse and pheasants. We have several NAVHDA clubs in my area and they are good to train with. There are a lot of Dove around here and i like to teach the dog to obey my command to sit until i tell them to fetch. I think it helps when it comes time to hold a point . It's all fun and the dogs love it.

Tom

[Henk ten Klooster]

Hi Syreeata, it starts here Saturday - opening of hunting season for most. That day I can walk across the road before the farm and start enjoying a day at its best. Great fun: just a setter and a gun. Much more fun than competition scenes.

We mainly hunt here ducks, hares, rabbits, roebuck, pheasants. So for us a red setter shoud not only do the specialist job but also some retrieving. Last year I did in between some falconry stuff working the goshawk was ok, the peregrine falcon spectacular.

Most enjoyed is the silence when being out there.

Happy hunting! Henk.

[Susan Stone]

Just thought I'd push in on this bit - although I don't hunt, I do train my dogs to work & would really enjoy to have the possibilities that exist in some countries. I think I'd love to go hunting with my setter on the bleak mountains of Norway... sorry, drifting away from what I intended...
Talking of falconingreminded me of a recent visit to a large falconry (is that the correct name?) in the area where I train my dogs. The Château des Aigles is located in the Vosges mountains of the Alsace in France and for the public the birds fly against a background of the Rhine valley, with the Black Forest mountains in the distance... enjoy the pictures!

[Katariina Roiha]

Beautiful pictures...

[Henk ten Klooster]

Nothing beats working a red setter with peregrine falcons...