When learning to train a hunting dog your’e bound to make a few mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes can be easily fixed while others are costly and have a ripple effect. Jake was one of my first hunting dogs and we brought him home at 7 1/2 weeks old. He was very well socialized and had good bird and gun introduction early on. Jake had a great nose and was pointing birds solid at 6 months. When he was just about a year old I shot my first pheasant over him and things were going extremely well. I was proud of Jake and invited a few friends to come see his pointing dog skills.

Looking back it is easy for me to see that I made a mistake, but at the time I was baffled. It is a risky proposition to take a young dog hunting with 3-4 hunters and shoot 20 or so pheasants. I’m pretty sure he was not shot or peppered but I think there were just too many guns going off each time a bird was flushed. He looked great and held his points well for the first bird or two and then he started bumping birds. By the end of the hunt he was blinking birds and cowering at every gunshot. At the time I thought he just had a bad day and was making young dog mistakes. But, it was a lot worse than that.

The next time I took him out alone and planted a couple of birds, he took one look at the shotgun and headed back to the ATV before a shot was even fired. He was still interested in birds and I tried a hundred ways to coax him through it, but he was just plain done hunting. We struggled with it for a while because he was our best behaved dog and the kids liked him a lot. But, I didn’t see the point in keeping him around knowing that he would be left in the kennel every time we went out hunting with the other dogs. Jake deserved better.

Now I know there are some real pros out there that could have pulled Jake through it. But, over a year or so of trying I had no success and I was ready to move on. I ended up contacting a shorthair rescue in Arizona that was able to find Jake a happy home with an active family. We were sad to see him go but we knew he would be better of as a beloved pet than the lone dog left in the kennel. I learned some important lessons while raising and training Jake those three years. Most importantly that you can’t get in hurry with dog training. If your dog is struggling or showing signs of noise sensitivity – slow down, back up a step or even start again from the beginning. It’s never good to take a young dog hunting with a big crowd. I think one gun is plenty for the first year or so of real hunting. I’d be curious to hear of others experiences with gun shy dogs.