Hunting dogs
Summer soon will be upon us, and hunting season is still months away. For the next 12 weeks or more, your hunting dog will be less active than he is during fall and winter. There will be no quail to point, no squirrels or raccoons to tree, no rabbits or deer to chase, no ducks or doves to retrieve. If allowed, your dog will lie around like a human couch potato - fat, dumb and happy - during the warm months. But when hunting season comes around, the dog won't be in any condition for the rigors of hunting, and that's not good.Hunting dogs are athletes of a sort, and like their human counterparts in the world of sports, dogs need offseason conditioning to keep them in tip-top shape. In order to make that opening-day hunting trip successful - and to ensure your dog has all the stamina and energy needed to carry it through the season - you must pay attention to physical conditioning. And the conditioning has to be year 'round, not just during the fall and winter, when hunting seasons are in full swing.Many hunters tend to take for granted their dog's performance. They fail to realize the level of stress and exertion that a dog's cardiopulmonary system experiences during a day's hunt. We should all realize, however, that if a do
Water in the flooded woods was covered with thin layer of ice. A dog in good condition actually thrives and gets stronger with each passing day. The owner of the pudgy, out-of-shape dog complained that his dog must have been sick. Ducks were abundant, and the retrievers were working hard to find and return the many birds we managed to drop. In any case, roading should always be done where traffic is not a problem, such as on seldom-traveled country roads or on a bicycle path. One friend of mine roads his dog behind a bicycle two times a week for about 30 to 45 minutes each. He proceeds with the dog at a good trot, and at times the hound actually gets out front and pulls the bike along. A dog can't spend the entire summer in an air-conditioned house, sleeping its days away, and be expected to perform well when the season starts. The hunter continues pushing the dog, getting angrier by the minute at its poor showing, never realizing he might be endangering the dog's life. In this practice, the dog is run while tethered to a vehicle of some sort with a special padded roading harness (never by its regular neck collar). "Roading" is one method for exercising your dog in this way. When developing a summer conditioning program, you should focus on three primary areas: exercise, field work and diet. After two weeks, you can gradually increase the exercise periods by several minutes over the next week, building steadily by a few minutes every week thereafter until your dog can safely handle a half-hour every day. They feed them, water them, let them sleep and that's it - that's the typical summer game plan.
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