Moving and a Shutout

For two days prior to the move Cash shook with nervousness. I got him out of the house to run, but as soon as we arrived back home he was back to the nervous shaking again. Then he decided to stop eating. It’s been two full days at the new house now and he has settled in and is comfortable again. It is crazy what can be stressful to a dog and how they react to that stress.

Sunday morning we went for a short run. Porter spotted a lady carrying a big stick for her dog, ran her down and stole the stick out of her hand. Luckily she was a very nice lady and thought that it was funny. She played with Porter for a while and off we went, Porter with his new stick. He ran with it for about two miles until he started falling behind, then reluctantly dropped it and was off and running again. Some people might frown on this so I will explain… I usually don’t let the dogs retrieve sticks for safety reasons, but if the stick or branch looks safe I let them do with it what they want. When we are just out running I try to let the dogs just be dogs, and Porter loves to run with sticks, tree limbs, etc… (my Dad saw a dog one time impale itself under the tongue with a stick and it came very close to bleeding to death/drowning in its own blood) I have always remember this and will rarely ever throw a stick for the dogs, and always pay attention to what Porter is running/playing with. Some people will tell you that safety reasons aside, you shouldn’t let your hunting dog play with/retrieve sticks because they may decide to retrieve that instead of a bird when hunting. All I can say about that is that Porter, who loves to carry sticks, has retrieved well over 1000 birds in his life and has never retrieved  a stick when he should be retrieving a bird. If your dogs has more desire to retrieve a stick then it does a bird, then despite having a hunting breed, you don’t have a hunting dog. Or there has been fundamental failure by the trainer somewhere along the line. Either way, not good. The same type of people have asked me if because I feed my dogs raw food, do my dogs try to eat the birds that they retrieve. The answer is NO! Ok, I kind of got off track there, but thought it was worth an explanation.

Last night I snuck out before dark to go fish a section of river a couple blocks away from the new house. I regret to inform you that I got shut out, blanked, skunked, whatever you want to call it. I caught nothing but a tree limb and a bad attitude. I didn’t even see a fish surface in the 1 ½ that I was fishing, and I don’t think that I was the only one having a hard time. The Fly Syndicate (Great Blog, by the way) http://theflysyndicate.blogspot.com/ was fishing just upstream from me and it didn’t look real hot for him either. Hopefully he did better than me though. So, that was a little disappointing. Good news though, only two months until bird season is open out west. If you are willing to travel and get creative, September can be a great month for upland bird hunting.

Jay Kincaid