Missing the Point : Hunting Dogs Know Their Parts; Owners Often Need the Training

The San Gabriel Valley chapter of Quail Unlimited staged its third annual Dog Trial at Raahauge’s Pheasant Hunting Club in Norco recently.

It was a chance for all the hunting dogs to get together and see who had the best owner. They should have called it an Owner Trial.

“Dogs are easy to train,” said Jim Collis, a professional trainer from Lake Matthews who won the event last year. “Owners are hard to train.”

Pigeons were planted in staked-out fields. Hunters were given five shells. The object: To down and retrieve three birds in less than 10 minutes. Fastest time wins.

One field was tough because of mud and fallen tree branches from recent storms. A dog flushed a bird, the hunter shot, missed, tripped and fell. Another bird. Stumble. Shoot. Miss. Miss again. Three shots. No birds. Two shots left to bag three birds. Tough to do.

“You print my name and I’ll come looking for you,” the hunter told a reporter.

The hunter, also a professional trainer, placed second last year. He usually is a dead shot. His dog wasn’t speaking to him. All the other dogs were laughing.

“That is embarrassing,” Collis said, “especially when the dog does his job. The dog’s got one job: Find birds. The dog did great. But everything that could go wrong did go wrong.”

Said Bob Sanchez of Tustin: “It happens to the best of them.”

Sanchez, third last year, was second this year. His little English-bred springer spaniel, Sam, found and flushed three birds in rapid succession, and Sanchez hit each one with careful, methodical aim--2 minutes 52 seconds.

Sanchez’s advice: “If you’ve got a choice, get a dog that’s already trained.”

Charlie Bittle has even better advice: Let somebody else breed them, too.

Bittle, from Midway City, used to breed dogs for sale, until he figured out it cost him $2,000 a dog in feed and care before he sold them for $400 each.

The dogs are German shorthair pointers, golden retrievers, Labradors, springers--a mix of flushers and pointers.

“Pointers to me are the best dogs,” Sanchez said, “but these (flushers) are more fun. They flush the bird. With a pointer, you flush the bird. It’s much more exciting shooting over a flushing dog than a pointing dog.”

Sam, Sanchez said, is “a very stylish dog . . . lot of good spaniel action about him. He indicates to you when there’s game right there just by his action. He’s a flusher, not a pointer, but when he finds game his tail starts quivering, and that gets you ready.”

Sadly, Sam is for sale.

“I’ve got too many dogs,” Sanchez said. “Two more Labs, I just got an English pointer, and I’ve got another springer. I’m dogged out.”

Funny, but about every other hunter there insisted he had too many dogs and was going to get rid of some.

Bittle is partial to German shorthairs. He calls Hans, age 11, “the big daddy stud of the whole kit and caboodle.”

Hans has fathered 187 pups, including many of those competing that day.

“German shorthairs, if you want a pet and a hunting dog, that’s the kind of dog you want,” Bittle said. “You can have them as a house pet, then pick up a gun--different dog. But a shorthair has to have people. It’s not like a springer or one you can put in a kennel and take him out for two weeks a year. You do that to a shorthair and he’ll die.”

That doesn’t mean that all shorthairs--or any other breed--are automatically good hunting dogs.

“That’s like saying all athletes start out with the same potential,” Collis said. “I can tell at seven weeks if a dog has potential. I put them out, let them see a bird, see if they get real ‘birdy’ and real interested . . . see if they’ll lock up and freeze. Then I’ll throw a bird out and see if they want to go after it quick. I’ve had whole litters chase a bird, they loved it so much.

“And you go by their bloodlines. If you’ve got good bloodlines and they’re interested in birds and you know they’re bold, you’ve got a good chance of having a good dog.”

Nothing can ruin a good dog as quickly as a bad owner.

“They push the dog,” Collis said. “With the first dog, they think it should do everything right away, right now. They don’t want to take time and patience. The second dog, they usually realize all the mistakes and they pay attention.”

When training a dog, Collis insists that the owner participate occasionally, so he will know almost as much as the dog.

But if an owner insists on training his own dog to hunt, Collis has this advice: “The first thing he should know is how to make his dog come back. If he can’t get control of his dog, if the dog’s going to hunt by himself, he’s no good to him. If he’s going to have a dog that runs berserk, he’ll make everybody else mad who’s hunting.”

Some dogs are naturals and require little training.

Bittle said: “All of these dogs of mine, only one has had any training--the big male, Hans. His real name is Hans von Hunter. I bought him when he was 10 months old. I’d lost a dog and didn’t want to have nothing to do with another dog because it darn near killed me.

“I went about eight months without a dog, and I started looking, and I found this ugly (pup). He was silver gray. He’d had a reaction--a calcium deficiency from over-breeding.

“He looked me in the eye, and I looked him in the eye, and then he (climbed on) me. I said, ‘All right, I’m buying you.’ He was 10 months old. Most of my dogs, by the time they’re six weeks old I want to start to train them.

“I took him into Arkansas to hunt bobwhite quail a couple of years ago. We hunted 10 days straight from morning till night, and at night when we came back, my brother-in-law would carry that dog in the house and put him on a blanket.

“My brother-in-law kept saying, ‘Shouldn’t we leave old Hans home?’ I’d say, ‘Try to leave him home.’ Next morning, he’d be there to answer the gun. He lost weight. He slept all the way from Arkansas to California.”

Despite his 11 years, Hans is still eager to hunt.

“Me and the neighbor hunted together all the time,” Bittle said. “I’d be (doing something else) and he’d just go get up in the driver’s seat of the neighbor’s Bronco and sit there until the neighbor would drag him out and bring him home. He thought if he got in the Bronco, he’d get to go hunting.”

Some trainers use electric collars. When the dog makes a mistake, they push a button and the dog receives a shock.

One hunter said an electric collar “saves all that swearing and hollering.”

Bob McCracken of Quail Unlimited uses them but cautioned, “It’s probably the easiest way to ruin a dog if you overuse it.”

Nobody has tried an electric collar on an owner. Gary Langdon of Rialto--the hapless hunter described earlier in the story--would have been electrocuted.

But later in the day, Langdon and his shorthair Katie proved their prowess by getting three birds in 2 minutes 20 seconds to win first place.

What a comeback. Katie was proud.