October 16, 2024 • 17 mins
On this week's show, Tony explains some of the more common injuries sporting dogs experience. He also breaks down the best preventative measures, and what to do when serious injuries do happen.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Houndations podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson. Today's episode is all about random injuries your
dog might suffer in the field and how to be
prepared for them. Since it's like smack dab in the
middle of October, I figured an episode focusing on dog
(00:22):
injuries would be appropriate. After all, a heck of a
lot of us are out there hunting grouse or pheasants
or ducks or whatever with our dogs, and this is
the time of year where if they're going to get
banged up by something, it's probably going to happen in
the next couple of months. This is the reality of
sporting dogs in the field. But it's not like we
can't prevent some injuries or be prepared if they do happen,
(00:43):
which is what I'm going to talk about right now.
Back in October of twenty fifteen, I spent six days
living out of a tent in southwestern Oklahoma. The goal
was for my buddies and I the hunt some deer
on the National Grassland down there, maybe take home some venison.
(01:04):
And we did just that, but we battled rainy, muddy
conditions the entire time. It was the kind of rain
that not only turned the roads to gumbo, but convinced
all of the eight legged nastiness that lives in Texas
North to try to find a warm place to hide
out in which meant we had to check our tents
and sleeping bags really well before going to sleep each night,
(01:26):
and it was no fun. On the last morning of
the hunt, I was tired, soaked, ready to go home.
We all were. I had just messed up a stock
on a decent buck when I decided that was enough.
The entire hunt, we had crossed countless barbed wire fences
because for some reason, every single national chunk of public
(01:47):
lands used to be covered in cattle these days. So
I stepped on the bottom strand of the last fence
of the trip, swung my leg over, and felt the
whole trap door give way. Instantly, I hit the ground,
and I knew that I had just used a fence
post to go from a baritone to a soprano. Seriously,
I thought I'd ripped my old apple bag clean off.
(02:09):
It didn't help that I was covered in blood from
the moment I hit the ground. Now, there was a
few tense seconds before I got my pants pulled down,
before I realized that I was actually intact, and that
the fence post hadn't penetrated into my stomach either. Now,
when you think you've lost your whole junk pile and
possibly impaled yourself, seeing that you actually haven't is an
(02:30):
amazing relief. It turns out that I got really, really lucky,
and I only cut my face in my hands on
the barb wire. I did seriously traumatize a part of
me that I'm usually very protective of, so much so
that the whole junk pile turned black with bruising, which
lasted for weeks. It was sort of a nightmare end
to a rough trip that only got worse when the
(02:51):
transmission of my brand new truck went out in downtown
Kansas City on the drive home. But before that, I
needed some medical attention. What I didn't want to do
was go to a hospital because I was soaked, I
hadn't showered in a week, and I had been hunting,
and I was just gross and ready to be home.
I explained this to my hunting buddies, one of whom
(03:13):
is married to a nurse and was actually prepared with
a first aid kid. Now, he cleaned up my cuts
and glued them, you know, shut on my hands and
my face. He bandaged me up, and he consulted with
his wife on the phone the whole time. It made
me realize that of the four of us on that trip,
we all drove at least ten hours from home to
(03:35):
hunt and camp for a week, and only one of
us had even brought a first aid kit. And we
were younger than and dumber then. And every time I
look at a Barboer fence, which is often, I think
about how unprepared we were for any type of real injury.
And Barboyer has just not treated me well in general.
I spent my summer between sixth and seventh grade nursing
(03:56):
a cut on my leg I got while trout fishing
that not only requiess twenty stitches, but got infected big
time and made life not so great for several months.
It was nasty stuff, and it puts plenty of dogs
in bad situations too. I'd say fences are probably the
number one spot for reasons for dog injuries in the fall,
(04:18):
and new fences, you know, tight strand barberere fences. They're
bad enough, especially when they are strung, you know, through
some kind of grass that I don't know the roosters
like to live in. Old fences might be worse because
they can be just about anywhere out there, and they
often have tangled strands of barbedoil rolled up in the cover,
or random fence posts bent over at weird angles poking
(04:42):
through the brush. Most dogs just kind of figure out
the fence thing, at least how to get through them.
But most dogs that spend enough time hunting around fences,
or training around fences, or just hiking with people in
places where barberare fences exist will tangle with one at
some point. I have yet to own a dog that
hasn't hit a few, and I did manage to see
(05:03):
my uncle's black lab jump right into one when we
were pheasant hunting in Iowa years ago, when that dog
was only about six months old. And that pup hit
that fence in such a way that he got his
leg twisted between the top two strands so that he
was hanging upside down, which gets your attention real fast. Now.
Some trainers teach their dogs how to go under fences,
(05:24):
which is a good idea that very few regular dog
owners think about. That is a good route, but even
a master fence crosser might not see one coming at
some point, so having a good first aid kid in
the truck is a must. It should also have a
skin stapler in there, and you should know how to
use it. His cuts happen in the outdoors, and a
lot of times you can't really pin down where they
(05:45):
even came from. Dogs are tough on a level that's
just kind of weird for us to understand. So often
when a wound happens, if it doesn't keep them from hunting,
you just won't know about it till you get them
into the truck or get them home. But it's still
important to have the tools and the understanding of how
to treat them, you know, at least in your vehicle,
(06:07):
because you know, sometimes the wild birds we love bring
us to wild places that are far far away from
a vet clinic. Of course, it doesn't have to be
a fence or some old farm machinery that injures your dog.
Quite a few of the people who love German breeds,
you know, like wirehairs and drafts, have found out just
how deep those European roots really run. When those dogs
(06:29):
bump into small woodland creatures that are out there just
mining their own business. Some breeds weren't just used for
feathered critters, but were also hell on anything small with fur.
That sometimes translates into dogs that cannot leave a raccoon
alone without trying to kill it, or they can't not
mess with every porcupine they run across, no matter how
(06:51):
painful the lessons have been about those little critters. Both
scenarios can leave you with a dog that looks like
it has gone five rounds in the octagon. I used
to hunt quite a bit with a photographer from Minnesota
who ran a draft hor and he would carry a
thick leather glove with him always so that when his
dog got into a fight with something, he could sort
(07:12):
of safely reach into the melee and extricate his dog
from the situation. Some hunters carry a wirecutters or a
bolt cutters too. The idea here is that where the
birds live, so too live the fur bearers that some
people like to trap. This is a scenario that every
bird dog owner has at least thought about, and it's
one that isn't much fun to deal with. You know,
(07:34):
there are body grip style traps out there that can
turn a rough grouse hunt into a mad scramble to
save your four legged bestie in a real hurry. There
are also those more traditional leg hool traps. I watched
my older lab Luna, step into one of these several
years ago. It was on the main trail leading out
of a parking lot on public land, not one hundred
(07:54):
yards into the woods, or in other words, right where
anyone who grouse hunts the price would start and walk.
There haven't been very many times in my life where
I would murder someone, but if that trapper had walked
up when I was trying to free my dog, I
might have shot him in the face with a load
of sixes from that little over under twenty gage. I'm
just kidding, of course, please don't report me to the
(08:17):
police for homicidal threats. I wouldn't have shot anyone over
my dog because I actually got her freed up pretty easily.
But I can tell you that my anger level was
at an eleven on a scale that only goes up
to ten, and to her credit, Luna immediately went back
to grouse hunting as soon as I stopped panicking and
looked at the problem objectively. Sometimes you don't have that
(08:37):
kind of time, I asked Tom Dock and what his
worst dog injury was once and he said with his
personal dogs, it was a lab that got a cattail
stem shoved way way up its nose. He said that
when he pulled it out, it was obvious the dog
was going to bleed out without some help. By the
time he got to the emergency vet, he said, it
looked like someone had butchered a cow in the front
(08:59):
seat of his truck. At one point, I had a
different podcast where I interviewed a whole bunch of different veterinarians,
and I almost always asked them what the worst injuries
(09:21):
were that they dealt with With sporting dogs. You know,
there were a lot of stories about dogs getting hit
by cars. One mentioned a GSP running full board down
a ranch road that hit a cattle gate in such
a way that it wrenched its front leg in the
wrong direction, in a way that was pure horror movie material.
Plenty of dogs eat fishing tackle and you can imagine
(09:43):
what happens there. And then there's the dumb stuff like
just jumping off of a tailgate of a truck and
landing wrong, or running headlong into a sliding glass door
in the hotel, or if you have the kind of
dog that I tend to have eating something that they shouldn't.
Twice Luna has eaten something that has put her in
an emergency VET clinic overnight. The first was a pound
(10:05):
of raisins, and the whole ordeal cost me well over
a grand to figure out that she could eat a
pound of raisins and not even flinch. The second was
something else. I don't know what it was because I
was driving back from a turkey hunt in South Dakota.
What I do know is that she went downhill fast,
and by the time I got there, we had to
drive two hours to the nearest clinic. And whatever they
(10:27):
did worked, and whatever she ate is a secret between
her and my wife, who still claims that she has
no idea. But I have my suspicions. Injuries happen, and
it's their nature that we will not see them coming.
I just had a neighbor pull into my driveway to
chat about hunting, and I asked him randomly about his dog.
He said that his dog died two weeks earlier from
(10:49):
a twisted stomach and he wasn't really sure how it
even happened, but his five year old German short haired
pointer went from healthy and active to laying around one day,
and the next day it was too late. So what
do we do with hard, charging, working dogs Keep them
bubbled up inside like some toy poodle owned by a
Manhattan dwelling socialite. Hopefully not. The key is to start
(11:13):
with the basics and try first to not put your
dog in danger. I know that sounds dumb, but think
about it. How often do you hear about someone who
hunted their dog in extremely cold water for a few
late season ducks and suddenly things got out of hand,
like when the dog chases a cripple into the big
waves or the opposite end where it's hotter than hell
(11:35):
on the pheasant opener and a bunch of people take
their dogs from the couch to the field and they
run them in the heat until they collapse. What about
walking a dog through a rattlesnake festival in the southwest,
somewhere out west where they're just asking to get whacked,
because it's the right spot, in the right conditions to
have a bunch of danger ropes out there looking to
(11:55):
whack your dog. What we ask of them, they'll generally do.
So we must at least think about that first. An
awful lot of the worst dog injuries and deaths happen
because we put them in risky situations when it wasn't
really necessary. This is also where the ingesting bad stuff
thing comes into play. Sure, you can't help it if
(12:18):
your dog runs into a bag of garbage out in
the field that some low life dumped out there. But
you can help it if you leave a whole freaking
pound of raisins out when you have a one year
old lab left at home, or at least you should
be able to, unless you're my better half. You can
help it if your dog gets a hold of a
whole bunch of chicken bones after a barbecue and tries
(12:38):
to do the heroic thing and wolf them all down
as fast as possible before he gets caught. I guess
what I'm saying is it's like with kids. You can't
be there all the time and prevent all the bad stuff,
but you can prevent some of it by just thinking
about the world in which you'll place them. That's the
first step I'd say. Then it's really worth thinking about
(12:59):
a good first aid. As I mentioned before, there are
several companies that make these specifically for dogs and dog owners,
and they are a small price to pay for some
good insurance. As I mentioned, a skin stapler is just
a great idea, and some kids don't have them. Most
will have a tickpull or antiseptic whites, gas and other stuff.
(13:20):
Find one that has everything you need, or build one
for yourself. Either way, having one with you, at least
in the truck is worth it, but only if you
know what to do with it. There are also times
when an injury is going to be way beyond us
to just fix with a first aid kid at our truck.
This is where every dog owner will find him or
(13:42):
herself eventually, And if you know anything about vet clinics,
you know that they are still dealing with the COVID
boom of pets of all varieties, so they aren't short
on business. They're busy. They are often though, short on
staff because it's a high demand job with an equally
high level of burnout. You can only tell people so
many times that their dogs can't eat whole birthday cakes
(14:04):
for the fun of it before you want to leave
the average pet owners behind and go live in the
woods where the general public generally doesn't go. And I
don't blame them one bit, but that means that finding
a vet clinic when you really need one might not
be so simple. This problem gets a hell of a
lot worse the more time you spend in places where
the bird hunting is really good, because those are the
(14:26):
places that are usually pretty far from concentrations of people.
In this case, not only might your dog need a vet,
but the closest clinic might be hours away. Knowing that
before you go is important, just as important as it
is to know where the closest emergency vet clinics are.
These open twenty four hour types of clinics are not
(14:48):
real common, so you better understand how to get to one,
no matter where you end up at out in the field.
This is something that I learned from a few of
my trainer buddies. But I always do some pre trip
before I head out. If I'm looking to find a
few quail or sharp tails in some forgotten corner in
Nebraska or some other flyover state, for example, I figure
(15:09):
out where my options are and save that information before
I go. Now I have yet to need it, but
that's probably just pure look. Eventually I'll run into a
situation with one of my dogs where it's literally going
to be do or die time. And in those moments,
you don't want to spend precious minutes looking for a
cell signal and then trying to google up the closest option.
(15:31):
You also don't want to think about what it'll cost,
not that you will in the moment. I just know
from experience that the two times I've had to take
my dogs to emergency clinics, it made me seriously think
about getting pet insurance. That's a topic I'll cover on
some other episodes, but for now I'll leave it at that.
So get out there with your dogs, Go hunt some stuff. Ducks, sharptails, roosters, grouse, doves. Oh,
(15:55):
maybe run the hounds on some raccoons, or let the
beagles out for some bunny busting. Just remember that out
there in that world are old fences and homesteads and
trash bandits with hair trigger tempers, and porcupines that are
chock full of quills. And of course there is the
heat and the cold, and the moving water and the
somewhat frozen water, and the lunch full of stuff that
your dog shouldn't eat. But your hunting buddy leaves out
(16:17):
anyway right on the seat of your truck while you
talk strategy for the next hunt, and suddenly Rufus has
a belly full of the bad stuff. There are a
lot of things that can go wrong out there, and
the best we can do is try to anticipate the
danger and steer clear of them, while also recognizing that
we won't be able to get that right one hundred
percent of the time and will at some point have
to address a wound or find someone who can do
(16:40):
that for us. Do that this fall when you're out
there with your dogs, and come back in two weeks
because I'm going to talk about the recall command, how
to train it, how to recognize when your dog won't
listen to it, and why it's important, you know, maybe
the most important command in the dog world. That's it
(17:02):
for this week. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been
The Houndation's podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening,
for tuning in here, for supporting us at Mediator. We
honestly truly appreciate it, so thank you for that. If
you want some more bird hunting content, some dog content,
or maybe you're getting after the white tails right now,
maybe taking a road trip and you just need some
interesting podcasts to listen to while you burn up the miles.
(17:25):
The meat eater dot com has you covered so much
good content there, from wild game recipes to articles, to
podcasts to films, you name it. Go check it out,
and again, thank you so much for your support.
Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Houndations podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson. Today's episode is all about random injuries your
dog might suffer in the field and how to be
prepared for them. Since it's like smack dab in the
middle of October, I figured an episode focusing on dog
(00:22):
injuries would be appropriate. After all, a heck of a
lot of us are out there hunting grouse or pheasants
or ducks or whatever with our dogs, and this is
the time of year where if they're going to get
banged up by something, it's probably going to happen in
the next couple of months. This is the reality of
sporting dogs in the field. But it's not like we
can't prevent some injuries or be prepared if they do happen,
(00:43):
which is what I'm going to talk about right now.
Back in October of twenty fifteen, I spent six days
living out of a tent in southwestern Oklahoma. The goal
was for my buddies and I the hunt some deer
on the National Grassland down there, maybe take home some venison.
(01:04):
And we did just that, but we battled rainy, muddy
conditions the entire time. It was the kind of rain
that not only turned the roads to gumbo, but convinced
all of the eight legged nastiness that lives in Texas
North to try to find a warm place to hide
out in which meant we had to check our tents
and sleeping bags really well before going to sleep each night,
(01:26):
and it was no fun. On the last morning of
the hunt, I was tired, soaked, ready to go home.
We all were. I had just messed up a stock
on a decent buck when I decided that was enough.
The entire hunt, we had crossed countless barbed wire fences
because for some reason, every single national chunk of public
(01:47):
lands used to be covered in cattle these days. So
I stepped on the bottom strand of the last fence
of the trip, swung my leg over, and felt the
whole trap door give way. Instantly, I hit the ground,
and I knew that I had just used a fence
post to go from a baritone to a soprano. Seriously,
I thought I'd ripped my old apple bag clean off.
(02:09):
It didn't help that I was covered in blood from
the moment I hit the ground. Now, there was a
few tense seconds before I got my pants pulled down,
before I realized that I was actually intact, and that
the fence post hadn't penetrated into my stomach either. Now,
when you think you've lost your whole junk pile and
possibly impaled yourself, seeing that you actually haven't is an
(02:30):
amazing relief. It turns out that I got really, really lucky,
and I only cut my face in my hands on
the barb wire. I did seriously traumatize a part of
me that I'm usually very protective of, so much so
that the whole junk pile turned black with bruising, which
lasted for weeks. It was sort of a nightmare end
to a rough trip that only got worse when the
(02:51):
transmission of my brand new truck went out in downtown
Kansas City on the drive home. But before that, I
needed some medical attention. What I didn't want to do
was go to a hospital because I was soaked, I
hadn't showered in a week, and I had been hunting,
and I was just gross and ready to be home.
I explained this to my hunting buddies, one of whom
(03:13):
is married to a nurse and was actually prepared with
a first aid kid. Now, he cleaned up my cuts
and glued them, you know, shut on my hands and
my face. He bandaged me up, and he consulted with
his wife on the phone the whole time. It made
me realize that of the four of us on that trip,
we all drove at least ten hours from home to
(03:35):
hunt and camp for a week, and only one of
us had even brought a first aid kit. And we
were younger than and dumber then. And every time I
look at a Barboer fence, which is often, I think
about how unprepared we were for any type of real injury.
And Barboyer has just not treated me well in general.
I spent my summer between sixth and seventh grade nursing
(03:56):
a cut on my leg I got while trout fishing
that not only requiess twenty stitches, but got infected big
time and made life not so great for several months.
It was nasty stuff, and it puts plenty of dogs
in bad situations too. I'd say fences are probably the
number one spot for reasons for dog injuries in the fall,
(04:18):
and new fences, you know, tight strand barberere fences. They're
bad enough, especially when they are strung, you know, through
some kind of grass that I don't know the roosters
like to live in. Old fences might be worse because
they can be just about anywhere out there, and they
often have tangled strands of barbedoil rolled up in the cover,
or random fence posts bent over at weird angles poking
(04:42):
through the brush. Most dogs just kind of figure out
the fence thing, at least how to get through them.
But most dogs that spend enough time hunting around fences,
or training around fences, or just hiking with people in
places where barberare fences exist will tangle with one at
some point. I have yet to own a dog that
hasn't hit a few, and I did manage to see
(05:03):
my uncle's black lab jump right into one when we
were pheasant hunting in Iowa years ago, when that dog
was only about six months old. And that pup hit
that fence in such a way that he got his
leg twisted between the top two strands so that he
was hanging upside down, which gets your attention real fast. Now.
Some trainers teach their dogs how to go under fences,
(05:24):
which is a good idea that very few regular dog
owners think about. That is a good route, but even
a master fence crosser might not see one coming at
some point, so having a good first aid kid in
the truck is a must. It should also have a
skin stapler in there, and you should know how to
use it. His cuts happen in the outdoors, and a
lot of times you can't really pin down where they
(05:45):
even came from. Dogs are tough on a level that's
just kind of weird for us to understand. So often
when a wound happens, if it doesn't keep them from hunting,
you just won't know about it till you get them
into the truck or get them home. But it's still
important to have the tools and the understanding of how
to treat them, you know, at least in your vehicle,
(06:07):
because you know, sometimes the wild birds we love bring
us to wild places that are far far away from
a vet clinic. Of course, it doesn't have to be
a fence or some old farm machinery that injures your dog.
Quite a few of the people who love German breeds,
you know, like wirehairs and drafts, have found out just
how deep those European roots really run. When those dogs
(06:29):
bump into small woodland creatures that are out there just
mining their own business. Some breeds weren't just used for
feathered critters, but were also hell on anything small with fur.
That sometimes translates into dogs that cannot leave a raccoon
alone without trying to kill it, or they can't not
mess with every porcupine they run across, no matter how
(06:51):
painful the lessons have been about those little critters. Both
scenarios can leave you with a dog that looks like
it has gone five rounds in the octagon. I used
to hunt quite a bit with a photographer from Minnesota
who ran a draft hor and he would carry a
thick leather glove with him always so that when his
dog got into a fight with something, he could sort
(07:12):
of safely reach into the melee and extricate his dog
from the situation. Some hunters carry a wirecutters or a
bolt cutters too. The idea here is that where the
birds live, so too live the fur bearers that some
people like to trap. This is a scenario that every
bird dog owner has at least thought about, and it's
one that isn't much fun to deal with. You know,
(07:34):
there are body grip style traps out there that can
turn a rough grouse hunt into a mad scramble to
save your four legged bestie in a real hurry. There
are also those more traditional leg hool traps. I watched
my older lab Luna, step into one of these several
years ago. It was on the main trail leading out
of a parking lot on public land, not one hundred
(07:54):
yards into the woods, or in other words, right where
anyone who grouse hunts the price would start and walk.
There haven't been very many times in my life where
I would murder someone, but if that trapper had walked
up when I was trying to free my dog, I
might have shot him in the face with a load
of sixes from that little over under twenty gage. I'm
just kidding, of course, please don't report me to the
(08:17):
police for homicidal threats. I wouldn't have shot anyone over
my dog because I actually got her freed up pretty easily.
But I can tell you that my anger level was
at an eleven on a scale that only goes up
to ten, and to her credit, Luna immediately went back
to grouse hunting as soon as I stopped panicking and
looked at the problem objectively. Sometimes you don't have that
(08:37):
kind of time, I asked Tom Dock and what his
worst dog injury was once and he said with his
personal dogs, it was a lab that got a cattail
stem shoved way way up its nose. He said that
when he pulled it out, it was obvious the dog
was going to bleed out without some help. By the
time he got to the emergency vet, he said, it
looked like someone had butchered a cow in the front
(08:59):
seat of his truck. At one point, I had a
different podcast where I interviewed a whole bunch of different veterinarians,
and I almost always asked them what the worst injuries
(09:21):
were that they dealt with With sporting dogs. You know,
there were a lot of stories about dogs getting hit
by cars. One mentioned a GSP running full board down
a ranch road that hit a cattle gate in such
a way that it wrenched its front leg in the
wrong direction, in a way that was pure horror movie material.
Plenty of dogs eat fishing tackle and you can imagine
(09:43):
what happens there. And then there's the dumb stuff like
just jumping off of a tailgate of a truck and
landing wrong, or running headlong into a sliding glass door
in the hotel, or if you have the kind of
dog that I tend to have eating something that they shouldn't.
Twice Luna has eaten something that has put her in
an emergency VET clinic overnight. The first was a pound
(10:05):
of raisins, and the whole ordeal cost me well over
a grand to figure out that she could eat a
pound of raisins and not even flinch. The second was
something else. I don't know what it was because I
was driving back from a turkey hunt in South Dakota.
What I do know is that she went downhill fast,
and by the time I got there, we had to
drive two hours to the nearest clinic. And whatever they
(10:27):
did worked, and whatever she ate is a secret between
her and my wife, who still claims that she has
no idea. But I have my suspicions. Injuries happen, and
it's their nature that we will not see them coming.
I just had a neighbor pull into my driveway to
chat about hunting, and I asked him randomly about his dog.
He said that his dog died two weeks earlier from
(10:49):
a twisted stomach and he wasn't really sure how it
even happened, but his five year old German short haired
pointer went from healthy and active to laying around one day,
and the next day it was too late. So what
do we do with hard, charging, working dogs Keep them
bubbled up inside like some toy poodle owned by a
Manhattan dwelling socialite. Hopefully not. The key is to start
(11:13):
with the basics and try first to not put your
dog in danger. I know that sounds dumb, but think
about it. How often do you hear about someone who
hunted their dog in extremely cold water for a few
late season ducks and suddenly things got out of hand,
like when the dog chases a cripple into the big
waves or the opposite end where it's hotter than hell
(11:35):
on the pheasant opener and a bunch of people take
their dogs from the couch to the field and they
run them in the heat until they collapse. What about
walking a dog through a rattlesnake festival in the southwest,
somewhere out west where they're just asking to get whacked,
because it's the right spot, in the right conditions to
have a bunch of danger ropes out there looking to
(11:55):
whack your dog. What we ask of them, they'll generally do.
So we must at least think about that first. An
awful lot of the worst dog injuries and deaths happen
because we put them in risky situations when it wasn't
really necessary. This is also where the ingesting bad stuff
thing comes into play. Sure, you can't help it if
(12:18):
your dog runs into a bag of garbage out in
the field that some low life dumped out there. But
you can help it if you leave a whole freaking
pound of raisins out when you have a one year
old lab left at home, or at least you should
be able to, unless you're my better half. You can
help it if your dog gets a hold of a
whole bunch of chicken bones after a barbecue and tries
(12:38):
to do the heroic thing and wolf them all down
as fast as possible before he gets caught. I guess
what I'm saying is it's like with kids. You can't
be there all the time and prevent all the bad stuff,
but you can prevent some of it by just thinking
about the world in which you'll place them. That's the
first step I'd say. Then it's really worth thinking about
(12:59):
a good first aid. As I mentioned before, there are
several companies that make these specifically for dogs and dog owners,
and they are a small price to pay for some
good insurance. As I mentioned, a skin stapler is just
a great idea, and some kids don't have them. Most
will have a tickpull or antiseptic whites, gas and other stuff.
(13:20):
Find one that has everything you need, or build one
for yourself. Either way, having one with you, at least
in the truck is worth it, but only if you
know what to do with it. There are also times
when an injury is going to be way beyond us
to just fix with a first aid kid at our truck.
This is where every dog owner will find him or
(13:42):
herself eventually, And if you know anything about vet clinics,
you know that they are still dealing with the COVID
boom of pets of all varieties, so they aren't short
on business. They're busy. They are often though, short on
staff because it's a high demand job with an equally
high level of burnout. You can only tell people so
many times that their dogs can't eat whole birthday cakes
(14:04):
for the fun of it before you want to leave
the average pet owners behind and go live in the
woods where the general public generally doesn't go. And I
don't blame them one bit, but that means that finding
a vet clinic when you really need one might not
be so simple. This problem gets a hell of a
lot worse the more time you spend in places where
the bird hunting is really good, because those are the
(14:26):
places that are usually pretty far from concentrations of people.
In this case, not only might your dog need a vet,
but the closest clinic might be hours away. Knowing that
before you go is important, just as important as it
is to know where the closest emergency vet clinics are.
These open twenty four hour types of clinics are not
(14:48):
real common, so you better understand how to get to one,
no matter where you end up at out in the field.
This is something that I learned from a few of
my trainer buddies. But I always do some pre trip
before I head out. If I'm looking to find a
few quail or sharp tails in some forgotten corner in
Nebraska or some other flyover state, for example, I figure
(15:09):
out where my options are and save that information before
I go. Now I have yet to need it, but
that's probably just pure look. Eventually I'll run into a
situation with one of my dogs where it's literally going
to be do or die time. And in those moments,
you don't want to spend precious minutes looking for a
cell signal and then trying to google up the closest option.
(15:31):
You also don't want to think about what it'll cost,
not that you will in the moment. I just know
from experience that the two times I've had to take
my dogs to emergency clinics, it made me seriously think
about getting pet insurance. That's a topic I'll cover on
some other episodes, but for now I'll leave it at that.
So get out there with your dogs, Go hunt some stuff. Ducks, sharptails, roosters, grouse, doves. Oh,
(15:55):
maybe run the hounds on some raccoons, or let the
beagles out for some bunny busting. Just remember that out
there in that world are old fences and homesteads and
trash bandits with hair trigger tempers, and porcupines that are
chock full of quills. And of course there is the
heat and the cold, and the moving water and the
somewhat frozen water, and the lunch full of stuff that
your dog shouldn't eat. But your hunting buddy leaves out
(16:17):
anyway right on the seat of your truck while you
talk strategy for the next hunt, and suddenly Rufus has
a belly full of the bad stuff. There are a
lot of things that can go wrong out there, and
the best we can do is try to anticipate the
danger and steer clear of them, while also recognizing that
we won't be able to get that right one hundred
percent of the time and will at some point have
to address a wound or find someone who can do
(16:40):
that for us. Do that this fall when you're out
there with your dogs, and come back in two weeks
because I'm going to talk about the recall command, how
to train it, how to recognize when your dog won't
listen to it, and why it's important, you know, maybe
the most important command in the dog world. That's it
(17:02):
for this week. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been
The Houndation's podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening,
for tuning in here, for supporting us at Mediator. We
honestly truly appreciate it, so thank you for that. If
you want some more bird hunting content, some dog content,
or maybe you're getting after the white tails right now,
maybe taking a road trip and you just need some
interesting podcasts to listen to while you burn up the miles.
(17:25):
The meat eater dot com has you covered so much
good content there, from wild game recipes to articles, to
podcasts to films, you name it. Go check it out,
and again, thank you so much for your support.
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