An American Water Spaniel in Grouse Country
He owned an American water spaniel—the state dog of Wisconsin and one of just a handful of AKC-recognized sporting breeds of North American origin. It’s never a good sign when you begin a day of hunting pacing a veterinary clinic parking lot waiting for the place to...
Wouldn’t It Be Great to Have a Permanent Puppy?
“Wouldn’t it be great?” Kjos said again, his blood up, completely dismissing the ducks, “To have a permanent puppy, to have first love over and over again?” The sun slept in that years-ago Utah morning over the Salt Lake marshes. Where Kjos and I were guests in an...
A Little Known Disease that Can Affect Man and Dog
Two days after winning an 82-dog open all-age stake in the summer of 2016, Labrador retriever Stinger was barely able to walk... We’re all suckers for a comeback story, and one is, of course, Tiger Woods. Crippled by multiple injuries, his career in limbo and his...
Good Dogs Buried
How many good dogs you gonna bury before one buries you? Blue weighed 90 pounds, with webbed feet big as biscuits, long legs and a deep chest, the biggest Lab bitch I ever saw, out of Tomahawk, Wisconsin, from a kennel of field champions. An undertaker gave her away....
Heidi, The Record-Breaking Retriever
No dog, to anybody's knowledge, has done what Heidi did and racked up all the upland birds and all the migratory birds. In the late 1990s, on a beach in Vancouver, British Columbia, George Calef's eye was caught by a smallish chocolate Lab. The dog was retrieving a...
Perks of a Pudelpointer
If you want a gundog that can do everything very well in open field or woodland or water, and then be a mellow member of the household, consider the pudelpointer. The revolutions of 1848 were a series of spontaneous and uncoordinated uprisings that began in France and...
Puppy-Training Tips from the Pro
Legendary dog trainer, Al Brenneman, promoted a simple, straightforward, common-sense approach to starting a puppy in the field. The best part of doing what I do is the cast of characters it’s allowed me to rub elbows with along the way. In other words, it’s the...
What’s the Rush? The Best Time to Neuter/Spay Your Dog
The practice of neutering at an early age may increase a dog's risk for developing a laundry list of serious health problems. In terms of wisdom-per-page, a slim little paperback called Common Sense Grouse and Woodcock Dog Training by Roy W. Strickland as told to John...
The General
Once he strikes a trail, a great rabbit dog like The General might just keep a'goin...on and on to the damn ends of God's green earth. Everybody in the piedmont had heard of the General, but nobody had hunted with him. His owner, Reverend Eddie Chapman, had become...
Half a Dog
All his life he'd wanted such a bird dog, and finally he was getting one, though problem was, he could only have half of him and dang if he could decide which half he wanted. Two old friends, been longer together than shoe leather, out huntin': The morning had been...