August 13, 2025 • 17 mins
This week, Tony talks heat, snakes, fences, and a whole host of early season dangers that might get your dog into trouble (and how you can avoid them).
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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 Hooundation's podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about understanding the
early season dangers your dog might face in the field
and how you can keep them safe. We are screeching
toward the next hunting season to the point where we
should make sure the dogs don't have too much extra
(00:23):
padding on them, and we should also consider that for
us as well. This is a time of promise and
that's awesome, but the early season can also be one
of the most dangerous times of the year to let
your bird dog out and let them wade through the cover.
Some of these dangers are obvious, some of them aren't.
That I'm going to talk about all of them right now.
(00:49):
The outdoors isn't necessarily a super dangerous environment, but I
guess compared to an air conditioned house with couches and
all kinds of comfort producing stuff, it is. I know.
I've had my share about door injuries and close calls.
My first real injury happened while trout fishing with my
buddy Tim Walker when we were in sixth grade. While
waiters were a thing back then, we were broken young
(01:10):
and just didn't even consider it. The amount of times
I rode my bike home with frozen jeans after a
fishing trip would give most modern parents a heart attack. Now,
on that particular trip, I well kind of tripped on
something in the grass along the bank, and when I
checked out the damage, I had a pretty sizable hole
in my shin from either a fence post or a
barber bare a fence. Tim had to interrupt a wedding
(01:33):
in town to find my parents so they could take
me to the er, which had to be a site.
I had a different incident later on in my life
while crossing a fence in Oklahoma that was much worse
than getting twenty stitches, because it almost left me singing
soprano for real. I've never had an injury that scared
me as much as mixing gravity, my apple bag and
a fence post. Now. That was on a white tail hunt,
(01:54):
which is a good way to get yourself injured because
you work with lots of heights in the form of
tree stands, and you work with lot of blades in
the form of broadheads and knives on the tree stand front.
A long time ago, I had a couple of screwing
steps hit the eject button at the same time, which
allowed me to test my safety, harness and the durability
of my ribs. Turns out, metal tree stands are harder
(02:15):
than my body, and all that summer long, when I
set the hook while bass fishing, i'd scream in pain,
much to the delight of my fishing buddies. I've had
enough close calls with tree stands and another crazy thing,
which is people shooting guns in my direction that I'm
pretty careful about what I get myself into these days.
And I'm pretty careful with my dogs, as I'm sure
(02:36):
you are. When it comes to our hard charging pointers
and retrievers, the opportunities are pretty high for injury, some
of which can be fatal if you and your dog
run out a look. Of course, the most obvious here
is heat. Talked about this before. A well bred dog
generally isn't going to slow down in the field in
any conditions. They'll often go from berserker to collapse. Is
(02:59):
quite a few people have figured out over the years.
When states like South Dakota have kicked off their pheasant
seasons during heat waves, most people would say to not
hunt your dog when the temperatures reach a certain point.
I guess we could use like eighty plus as a benchmark. Now,
I know you Southern listeners are scoffing at that, so
let me qualify it. Eighty degrees to a Chessia in
(03:20):
northern Michigan is a different thing than eighty degrees to
a pointer in Georgia. Heat tolerance is highly variable amongst
breeds and individual dogs, just like it is with people,
and it's something that can be worked on. Although I'm
not going to recommend you condition your dog to work
in blazing heat because I don't want to encourage strangers
to do something like that. So I'll just say this,
(03:41):
keep the ego in check when you bump into this
kind of situation. We can look at forecasts that are
somewhat accurate ten to fifteen days ahead of time, which
means we shouldn't be too surprised if we have to
call a trip, cut it short, or move the dates. Now,
I know not every trip is that simple, but hunting
your dog to a heat stroker is a worse option. Always.
(04:03):
Of course, if you have to go, or you just
can't quite find a reason to not hunt when you
want to, early mornings are a better idea for obvious reasons.
Sometimes the temperature never get low enough to be safe, though,
and sometimes the humidity really contributes to that problem. This
isn't just a weird weather issue for some pheasant hunting
openers either. If you head at west for sharpiece in
(04:25):
the beginning of September, you could be asking your dog
to run in the blazing sun over oceans of knee
high grass in a bad heat situation. Obviously, access to
lots of water is huge inside and outside of your
dog if you can facilitate that. Now, if you have
a barrel chested male GSP or really any bird dog,
(04:47):
this also presents a unique way to royally mess him up.
A big dog with a deep chest that drinks a
tunnel water in one shot and then goes for a
run across the countryside is a prime candidate for gastric torsion.
It's also true that an overweight dog is a dog
that will succumb to heat stress faster than a dog
(05:07):
that is at a healthy weight. The latter dog gets
bonus points for not only being at a healthy weight,
but also being highly conditioned. Again, there's a reason some
folks can run two hundred mile ultra marathons in the
desert and survive just fine, while some folks have major
chest grabbers on their way to the mailbox because it's
just a little bit too much exertion. The key to
(05:30):
this early season issue is this, you have to err
on the side of caution and be very fair to
your dog. Now. I know you want to go out
and get that first limited roosters. I know your buddies
are going to head out and give it a go,
and I know your dog will gladly hunt. But what
do you think is it worth it? Is your dog
ready and are the conditions such where they aren't dangerous?
(05:53):
Heat is rough, but it comes with other dangers. When
I had my previous dog podcast, I interviewed a fellow
from the Southwest who is a dog trainer and who
specialized in snake breaking dogs. Where I live, that really
isn't even a concern, but in so many places the
venomous danger ropes are all over and the early season
(06:13):
is when they are highly active. Now, I'm always a
big proponent of training things yourself if you can, because
it just helps your relationship with your dog. It's fun
and it's rewarding. I don't recommend you snake break your dog. However,
at least on your own diwy, snake breaking is probably
a bad idea. Now. While I have a weird affinity
(06:34):
towards snakes in general, and I'm not really scared of
them in the least, I'd be way out of my
depths to go catch a rattler and then try to
figure out a way to teach my dog. This to
your clear If you dig into this, you'll see people
have different methods of snake breaking. Some put a rattle
snake or some other kind of snake in a plexiglass
cage with plenty of holes in it. Then they'll watch
(06:55):
a dog approach and when it gets close enough, they'll
hit it with the e caller hard enough to make
an impression. That fella I interviewed talked about that method,
and he said it was a great way to condition
dogs to be very afraid of plexiglass boxes. His method
was to actually catch snakes and either milk them or
defang them. I honestly can't remember, but I'd say defang
(07:17):
sounds like the better bet. Then he could facilitate situations
where people could walk their dogs through the scrub brush
and wherever else and they could actually bump into a
real cage free snake and then give them some electricity. Now,
I know some folks are staunchly anti ecollar, and I
get it, but in this situation, it's pretty hard to
(07:38):
argue that it isn't damn near the perfect tool to
keep your dogs safe in the wild. Of course, this
is also a really good argument for having a very
solid recall on your dog. While we don't deal with
a whole lot of venomous snakes up in my world,
we do have a shitload of porcupines up in grouse country,
and every dog I've ever owned, and every dog I've
ever hunted with in that rough grouse territory has eventually
(08:01):
stumbled across one, and some dogs just can't hardly be
called off of them. But that's a unique problem to
certain breeds. Generally, a lot of dogs can be called off,
and if you can call your dog off at anything dangerous,
you should try hard to make that one hundred percent
success type of thing, or as close as you can get.
(08:31):
During early season hunts, you also just have the reality
that grass is taller, the brush is thicker, and my
old nemesis, fences can be harder to see. If you
hunt a hell of a lot of places that, while
birds live, your dogs will eventually hit a fence. Some trainers,
like Tom Dokin will actually teach dogs how to go
through fences, which is cool as hell, but that only
(08:53):
works if you see the fence ahead of time, or
your dog sees the fence ahead of time, and then
you can help them. There are a hell of a
lot of broken down sections of fence posts and other
abandoned metal farm machinery, old cans and sheets of tin,
and all kinds of things that can slice open a
dog that is running at full speed or doing his
best impression of coming off the top rope in five
(09:14):
foot tall slow grass, over and over. This is often
a young dog problem because they haven't learned to preserve
their energy and are generally total lunatics their first few
seasons in the field, but it's also something that can
be as minor as a painful scrape on their undercarriage
or something that can kill them. I know that seems crazy,
but imagine a bird dog running full steam into a
(09:37):
barbed ware fence. One of the most violent things I've
ever seen in the outdoors happened when I was finishing
up a pheasant hunt in north central Minnesota, and I
happened to be driving right past a slough that had
some other hunters in it. They had kicked up a
two year old type of eight point buck and he
wasn't bounding like deer do when they think they have time.
(09:58):
He was going full greyhound to get the hell out
of there. And my hunting partner and I watched as
he hit a single strand of barbed wire. It was ugly, ugly, ugly.
He went assd over apple cart hard, got up, shook
it off, and kept running. But I promise you he
was all cut up and definitely hurting. I also can't
(10:20):
imagine what it would have been like if he had
dipped his head and caught that strand on his neck
or his face instead of square on his chest. Now
this spring, I spent some time with Brent Reeves down
in Arkansas where he chases coons with his hounds, and
he mentioned something to me that really isn't on my
radar here but makes total sense while talking about getting
(10:41):
caught in the field, and that was that if you
have a dog that gets a open wound somehow, a
little scrape, little cut whatever on its paw on its
belly really anywhere, and it ends up in the wrong water.
You have the recipe for infection. Now up here we
know about blue green algae and not to swimm our
dog anywhere near it when it blooms. But in a
(11:02):
hell of a lot of the country, the only water
your dog might encounter could be awfully stagnant. This, as
Brent emphasized multiple times, is a good reminder to do
a post hunt checkup on your dogs and to investigate
anything thoroughly if you think your dog might have gotten
cut or scraped up while you're in the field. Heavier cover,
(11:22):
even just thicker than late season grass, poses another issue.
Besides just obscuring dangerous objects in the field, you can
lose sight of your dog easier, and they can lose
sight of you. And also anything else that might be dangerous,
like milk trucks cruising down the gravel road next to
the slew you're hunting. I have a good friend who
(11:43):
is staying in a motel one time on a hunting
trip and his buddy's dog ran out into the highway
and that was the last of that dog. It's a
cautionary tale. I know it's not exactly like running through
the slow grass and popping out on a road trafficing
dog's a bad, bad deal. Keep your dog in check
because you can't see them in that grass a lot
of times, so having that control and being aware of
(12:05):
how they hunt is huge. You also have to factor
in the reality that the wind might be blowing, that
dry grass is loud to them, and their senses are
just taken over by the environment. That's an opportunity for
a real mistake to happen. Now there's another aspect of this,
the cover game, that comes into play in the early season.
(12:26):
One of the only times I almost accidentally shot a
dog was in high school when a buddy and I
were hunting grouse in southeastern Minnesota. We were young, dumb
and didn't think we'd actually find one, but we did,
or at least my buddy's Springer Spaniel did. It was
a young bird, and it was in September, and I
just happened to be walking along and a grouse popped
(12:47):
up into a tree not very far away and sat
there like a stupid feathered bowling pin. Now, I know
some folks won't shoot a grouse in a tree, but
seventeen year old Tony would and I almost did, but
my buddy yelled out that Eddie was coming in high,
and that stopped me from pulling the trigger. Now I
didn't see him coming, of course, but that dog was
running in there, and that grouse was not very high
up in that tree. There wasn't any other reason for
(13:09):
that grouse to do that move. And I still think
about it often, even though nothing bad happened. There is
something about having the safety off and being milliseconds away
from shooting in a situation where you might kill your
buddy's dog that sits with you for a long time,
and it's one of those core memories that shows up
in your brain right when you're about to fall asleep
(13:30):
every once in a while, so you can remember that
you've always been kind of a dipshit. I guess this
is the last point I want to make here, and
it's an important one. A hell of a lot of
the bad stuff that goes wrong with dogs out there
at all times of the season, but particularly the early season,
is directly our fault. Think about it this way. You
(13:51):
know how excited your dog is to get out there
for the first time, Well you are too. Maybe you're
with three or four buddies and you haven't seen each
other since last season. The anticipation's high, the competition is there,
and everyone is a little rusty from nine months off
or however long the off season's been for them. Now,
maybe you and your buddy's crack open a bottle of
(14:12):
whiskey every night and by morning you're all running a
little slow and a little foggy brained. This might seem crazy,
and the numbers might be outdated now, but I know
for quite a few years there was a safety harness
company that tracked fatalities from tree stand falls. At that time,
about two dozen a year died from falling out of
a tree stand, and about half of those died from
(14:34):
falling out of ladder stands, which should be the safest
stands out there, given they have actual ladders for you
to climb up and down with, and most have shooting
rails that further envelop the hunter, but not all. And
what happened with most of those fatalities was that someone
would climb in hunt for a few hours and then
get sleepy, and when they fell asleep, they'd pitch headfirst
out of the stand. And if you're wondering, if that
(14:56):
does you any favors. It doesn't. Now I'm not saying
you have to go cold turkey on your hunting trips.
I don't care if you shoot Heroin into your toes, honestly,
But what I'm saying is that when things go wrong,
it's often our fault, and it often just isn't like
one little decision or one little moment. There's like a
series of things that lead up to it. It might
(15:17):
be that we just aren't paying attention when we should be,
or we aren't on our a game because we just
can't be. Of course, this is a little like a
lot of things in life where something just breaks bad,
and that's how life works. But if we can do
our best not to facilitate that moment for ourselves and
our dogs, that's always a solid move. These are things
(15:37):
we should think of all season longer, but they won't
necessarily be top of mine in September when you're woodcock hunting,
as they will be by the time you're two or
three months deep into the season and making your way
south for something other than a worm eater hunt. Think
about this stuff as the off season winds down and
we approach the actual season because it's important, and think
(15:58):
about coming back in two weeks because I'm going to
talk about how we often think about dogs as individuals
and we should, but they also have universal traits and
behaviors that we should acknowledge and understand as well, because
that's how we train them better and have a better
life with them. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony
Peterson and this has been The Houndation's podcast. I just
(16:20):
want to thank you guys so much for listening. Cal
and I here really appreciate it. The whole meat Eater
crew does. Honestly, without you, guys, we are nothing, so
thank you for showing up for us. If you need
some more hunting content, you are in luck. Over at
them meedeater dot com. You can find tons of articles
on relevantnews, stories about the outdoors, how to stuff recipes.
(16:43):
We have hunting videos dropping almost every week. We have
more podcasts in our network than anybody out there. We've
added some new shows lately, like Lake Pickles Backwoods University,
which is awesome. He's doing a great job on that.
That's on the Bear Grease Feed. Tons of cool content.
We drop something new every day. Go to the meteater
(17:06):
dot com check it out
Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Hooundation's podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about understanding the
early season dangers your dog might face in the field
and how you can keep them safe. We are screeching
toward the next hunting season to the point where we
should make sure the dogs don't have too much extra
(00:23):
padding on them, and we should also consider that for
us as well. This is a time of promise and
that's awesome, but the early season can also be one
of the most dangerous times of the year to let
your bird dog out and let them wade through the cover.
Some of these dangers are obvious, some of them aren't.
That I'm going to talk about all of them right now.
(00:49):
The outdoors isn't necessarily a super dangerous environment, but I
guess compared to an air conditioned house with couches and
all kinds of comfort producing stuff, it is. I know.
I've had my share about door injuries and close calls.
My first real injury happened while trout fishing with my
buddy Tim Walker when we were in sixth grade. While
waiters were a thing back then, we were broken young
(01:10):
and just didn't even consider it. The amount of times
I rode my bike home with frozen jeans after a
fishing trip would give most modern parents a heart attack. Now,
on that particular trip, I well kind of tripped on
something in the grass along the bank, and when I
checked out the damage, I had a pretty sizable hole
in my shin from either a fence post or a
barber bare a fence. Tim had to interrupt a wedding
(01:33):
in town to find my parents so they could take
me to the er, which had to be a site.
I had a different incident later on in my life
while crossing a fence in Oklahoma that was much worse
than getting twenty stitches, because it almost left me singing
soprano for real. I've never had an injury that scared
me as much as mixing gravity, my apple bag and
a fence post. Now. That was on a white tail hunt,
(01:54):
which is a good way to get yourself injured because
you work with lots of heights in the form of
tree stands, and you work with lot of blades in
the form of broadheads and knives on the tree stand front.
A long time ago, I had a couple of screwing
steps hit the eject button at the same time, which
allowed me to test my safety, harness and the durability
of my ribs. Turns out, metal tree stands are harder
(02:15):
than my body, and all that summer long, when I
set the hook while bass fishing, i'd scream in pain,
much to the delight of my fishing buddies. I've had
enough close calls with tree stands and another crazy thing,
which is people shooting guns in my direction that I'm
pretty careful about what I get myself into these days.
And I'm pretty careful with my dogs, as I'm sure
(02:36):
you are. When it comes to our hard charging pointers
and retrievers, the opportunities are pretty high for injury, some
of which can be fatal if you and your dog
run out a look. Of course, the most obvious here
is heat. Talked about this before. A well bred dog
generally isn't going to slow down in the field in
any conditions. They'll often go from berserker to collapse. Is
(02:59):
quite a few people have figured out over the years.
When states like South Dakota have kicked off their pheasant
seasons during heat waves, most people would say to not
hunt your dog when the temperatures reach a certain point.
I guess we could use like eighty plus as a benchmark. Now,
I know you Southern listeners are scoffing at that, so
let me qualify it. Eighty degrees to a Chessia in
(03:20):
northern Michigan is a different thing than eighty degrees to
a pointer in Georgia. Heat tolerance is highly variable amongst
breeds and individual dogs, just like it is with people,
and it's something that can be worked on. Although I'm
not going to recommend you condition your dog to work
in blazing heat because I don't want to encourage strangers
to do something like that. So I'll just say this,
(03:41):
keep the ego in check when you bump into this
kind of situation. We can look at forecasts that are
somewhat accurate ten to fifteen days ahead of time, which
means we shouldn't be too surprised if we have to
call a trip, cut it short, or move the dates. Now,
I know not every trip is that simple, but hunting
your dog to a heat stroker is a worse option. Always.
(04:03):
Of course, if you have to go, or you just
can't quite find a reason to not hunt when you
want to, early mornings are a better idea for obvious reasons.
Sometimes the temperature never get low enough to be safe, though,
and sometimes the humidity really contributes to that problem. This
isn't just a weird weather issue for some pheasant hunting
openers either. If you head at west for sharpiece in
(04:25):
the beginning of September, you could be asking your dog
to run in the blazing sun over oceans of knee
high grass in a bad heat situation. Obviously, access to
lots of water is huge inside and outside of your
dog if you can facilitate that. Now, if you have
a barrel chested male GSP or really any bird dog,
(04:47):
this also presents a unique way to royally mess him up.
A big dog with a deep chest that drinks a
tunnel water in one shot and then goes for a
run across the countryside is a prime candidate for gastric torsion.
It's also true that an overweight dog is a dog
that will succumb to heat stress faster than a dog
(05:07):
that is at a healthy weight. The latter dog gets
bonus points for not only being at a healthy weight,
but also being highly conditioned. Again, there's a reason some
folks can run two hundred mile ultra marathons in the
desert and survive just fine, while some folks have major
chest grabbers on their way to the mailbox because it's
just a little bit too much exertion. The key to
(05:30):
this early season issue is this, you have to err
on the side of caution and be very fair to
your dog. Now. I know you want to go out
and get that first limited roosters. I know your buddies
are going to head out and give it a go,
and I know your dog will gladly hunt. But what
do you think is it worth it? Is your dog
ready and are the conditions such where they aren't dangerous?
(05:53):
Heat is rough, but it comes with other dangers. When
I had my previous dog podcast, I interviewed a fellow
from the Southwest who is a dog trainer and who
specialized in snake breaking dogs. Where I live, that really
isn't even a concern, but in so many places the
venomous danger ropes are all over and the early season
(06:13):
is when they are highly active. Now, I'm always a
big proponent of training things yourself if you can, because
it just helps your relationship with your dog. It's fun
and it's rewarding. I don't recommend you snake break your dog. However,
at least on your own diwy, snake breaking is probably
a bad idea. Now. While I have a weird affinity
(06:34):
towards snakes in general, and I'm not really scared of
them in the least, I'd be way out of my
depths to go catch a rattler and then try to
figure out a way to teach my dog. This to
your clear If you dig into this, you'll see people
have different methods of snake breaking. Some put a rattle
snake or some other kind of snake in a plexiglass
cage with plenty of holes in it. Then they'll watch
(06:55):
a dog approach and when it gets close enough, they'll
hit it with the e caller hard enough to make
an impression. That fella I interviewed talked about that method,
and he said it was a great way to condition
dogs to be very afraid of plexiglass boxes. His method
was to actually catch snakes and either milk them or
defang them. I honestly can't remember, but I'd say defang
(07:17):
sounds like the better bet. Then he could facilitate situations
where people could walk their dogs through the scrub brush
and wherever else and they could actually bump into a
real cage free snake and then give them some electricity. Now,
I know some folks are staunchly anti ecollar, and I
get it, but in this situation, it's pretty hard to
(07:38):
argue that it isn't damn near the perfect tool to
keep your dogs safe in the wild. Of course, this
is also a really good argument for having a very
solid recall on your dog. While we don't deal with
a whole lot of venomous snakes up in my world,
we do have a shitload of porcupines up in grouse country,
and every dog I've ever owned, and every dog I've
ever hunted with in that rough grouse territory has eventually
(08:01):
stumbled across one, and some dogs just can't hardly be
called off of them. But that's a unique problem to
certain breeds. Generally, a lot of dogs can be called off,
and if you can call your dog off at anything dangerous,
you should try hard to make that one hundred percent
success type of thing, or as close as you can get.
(08:31):
During early season hunts, you also just have the reality
that grass is taller, the brush is thicker, and my
old nemesis, fences can be harder to see. If you
hunt a hell of a lot of places that, while
birds live, your dogs will eventually hit a fence. Some trainers,
like Tom Dokin will actually teach dogs how to go
through fences, which is cool as hell, but that only
(08:53):
works if you see the fence ahead of time, or
your dog sees the fence ahead of time, and then
you can help them. There are a hell of a
lot of broken down sections of fence posts and other
abandoned metal farm machinery, old cans and sheets of tin,
and all kinds of things that can slice open a
dog that is running at full speed or doing his
best impression of coming off the top rope in five
(09:14):
foot tall slow grass, over and over. This is often
a young dog problem because they haven't learned to preserve
their energy and are generally total lunatics their first few
seasons in the field, but it's also something that can
be as minor as a painful scrape on their undercarriage
or something that can kill them. I know that seems crazy,
but imagine a bird dog running full steam into a
(09:37):
barbed ware fence. One of the most violent things I've
ever seen in the outdoors happened when I was finishing
up a pheasant hunt in north central Minnesota, and I
happened to be driving right past a slough that had
some other hunters in it. They had kicked up a
two year old type of eight point buck and he
wasn't bounding like deer do when they think they have time.
(09:58):
He was going full greyhound to get the hell out
of there. And my hunting partner and I watched as
he hit a single strand of barbed wire. It was ugly, ugly, ugly.
He went assd over apple cart hard, got up, shook
it off, and kept running. But I promise you he
was all cut up and definitely hurting. I also can't
(10:20):
imagine what it would have been like if he had
dipped his head and caught that strand on his neck
or his face instead of square on his chest. Now
this spring, I spent some time with Brent Reeves down
in Arkansas where he chases coons with his hounds, and
he mentioned something to me that really isn't on my
radar here but makes total sense while talking about getting
(10:41):
caught in the field, and that was that if you
have a dog that gets a open wound somehow, a
little scrape, little cut whatever on its paw on its
belly really anywhere, and it ends up in the wrong water.
You have the recipe for infection. Now up here we
know about blue green algae and not to swimm our
dog anywhere near it when it blooms. But in a
(11:02):
hell of a lot of the country, the only water
your dog might encounter could be awfully stagnant. This, as
Brent emphasized multiple times, is a good reminder to do
a post hunt checkup on your dogs and to investigate
anything thoroughly if you think your dog might have gotten
cut or scraped up while you're in the field. Heavier cover,
(11:22):
even just thicker than late season grass, poses another issue.
Besides just obscuring dangerous objects in the field, you can
lose sight of your dog easier, and they can lose
sight of you. And also anything else that might be dangerous,
like milk trucks cruising down the gravel road next to
the slew you're hunting. I have a good friend who
(11:43):
is staying in a motel one time on a hunting
trip and his buddy's dog ran out into the highway
and that was the last of that dog. It's a
cautionary tale. I know it's not exactly like running through
the slow grass and popping out on a road trafficing
dog's a bad, bad deal. Keep your dog in check
because you can't see them in that grass a lot
of times, so having that control and being aware of
(12:05):
how they hunt is huge. You also have to factor
in the reality that the wind might be blowing, that
dry grass is loud to them, and their senses are
just taken over by the environment. That's an opportunity for
a real mistake to happen. Now there's another aspect of this,
the cover game, that comes into play in the early season.
(12:26):
One of the only times I almost accidentally shot a
dog was in high school when a buddy and I
were hunting grouse in southeastern Minnesota. We were young, dumb
and didn't think we'd actually find one, but we did,
or at least my buddy's Springer Spaniel did. It was
a young bird, and it was in September, and I
just happened to be walking along and a grouse popped
(12:47):
up into a tree not very far away and sat
there like a stupid feathered bowling pin. Now, I know
some folks won't shoot a grouse in a tree, but
seventeen year old Tony would and I almost did, but
my buddy yelled out that Eddie was coming in high,
and that stopped me from pulling the trigger. Now I
didn't see him coming, of course, but that dog was
running in there, and that grouse was not very high
up in that tree. There wasn't any other reason for
(13:09):
that grouse to do that move. And I still think
about it often, even though nothing bad happened. There is
something about having the safety off and being milliseconds away
from shooting in a situation where you might kill your
buddy's dog that sits with you for a long time,
and it's one of those core memories that shows up
in your brain right when you're about to fall asleep
(13:30):
every once in a while, so you can remember that
you've always been kind of a dipshit. I guess this
is the last point I want to make here, and
it's an important one. A hell of a lot of
the bad stuff that goes wrong with dogs out there
at all times of the season, but particularly the early season,
is directly our fault. Think about it this way. You
(13:51):
know how excited your dog is to get out there
for the first time, Well you are too. Maybe you're
with three or four buddies and you haven't seen each
other since last season. The anticipation's high, the competition is there,
and everyone is a little rusty from nine months off
or however long the off season's been for them. Now,
maybe you and your buddy's crack open a bottle of
(14:12):
whiskey every night and by morning you're all running a
little slow and a little foggy brained. This might seem crazy,
and the numbers might be outdated now, but I know
for quite a few years there was a safety harness
company that tracked fatalities from tree stand falls. At that time,
about two dozen a year died from falling out of
a tree stand, and about half of those died from
(14:34):
falling out of ladder stands, which should be the safest
stands out there, given they have actual ladders for you
to climb up and down with, and most have shooting
rails that further envelop the hunter, but not all. And
what happened with most of those fatalities was that someone
would climb in hunt for a few hours and then
get sleepy, and when they fell asleep, they'd pitch headfirst
out of the stand. And if you're wondering, if that
(14:56):
does you any favors. It doesn't. Now I'm not saying
you have to go cold turkey on your hunting trips.
I don't care if you shoot Heroin into your toes, honestly,
But what I'm saying is that when things go wrong,
it's often our fault, and it often just isn't like
one little decision or one little moment. There's like a
series of things that lead up to it. It might
(15:17):
be that we just aren't paying attention when we should be,
or we aren't on our a game because we just
can't be. Of course, this is a little like a
lot of things in life where something just breaks bad,
and that's how life works. But if we can do
our best not to facilitate that moment for ourselves and
our dogs, that's always a solid move. These are things
(15:37):
we should think of all season longer, but they won't
necessarily be top of mine in September when you're woodcock hunting,
as they will be by the time you're two or
three months deep into the season and making your way
south for something other than a worm eater hunt. Think
about this stuff as the off season winds down and
we approach the actual season because it's important, and think
(15:58):
about coming back in two weeks because I'm going to
talk about how we often think about dogs as individuals
and we should, but they also have universal traits and
behaviors that we should acknowledge and understand as well, because
that's how we train them better and have a better
life with them. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony
Peterson and this has been The Houndation's podcast. I just
(16:20):
want to thank you guys so much for listening. Cal
and I here really appreciate it. The whole meat Eater
crew does. Honestly, without you, guys, we are nothing, so
thank you for showing up for us. If you need
some more hunting content, you are in luck. Over at
them meedeater dot com. You can find tons of articles
on relevantnews, stories about the outdoors, how to stuff recipes.
(16:43):
We have hunting videos dropping almost every week. We have
more podcasts in our network than anybody out there. We've
added some new shows lately, like Lake Pickles Backwoods University,
which is awesome. He's doing a great job on that.
That's on the Bear Grease Feed. Tons of cool content.
We drop something new every day. Go to the meteater
(17:06):
dot com check it out
Host
Cal Callaghan
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