re: When is it safe to hunt your pup? (Gator Related)

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You can still take him and do short retrieves and to get dead birds.

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If you put out decoys every morning, you can generally run all the gators out of a pond just from the ruckus you make but then again if your gators are dead duck robbers then you might have an issue.

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Edit: this was at my parans pond in MS, so we weren’t worried about gators if that was where you were headed w/ your question

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no.. just it looked pretty hot for a vest

I'll be taking my dog this weekend. As said above I will keep her close. No long retrieves, no retrieves in vegetation and no deep water. I scouted and found a spot where we can push our boat about 150 yards in about a 6"-1' deep pond. Anything that falls close she'll go get. If it falls further than 50 yards away in the open water, I'll accompany her on the retrieve. I'm a little worried right now, but I'll be very vigilant once on the hunt.

Hunt your dog. Just be smart

In my experience a dog starts it and a nutria can can cause damage, especially if they catch the gut.

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A nutria will go after a big dog?

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I saw one damned near kill a 100 lb plus lab half it's scalp was torn off - dog was ruined after that...

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I saw one damned near kill a 100 lb plus lab half it's scalp was torn off - dog was ruined after that...

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I didn't think a nutria would fight like that. I'm glad my Aussie is a good fighter (very quick). She's never gotten a scratch and she's killed some good sized raccoons and a lot of copperheads.

I'm glad I didn't put her on a nutria that I saw one day.

I did have an odd encounter with a gator sunday. Went to spillway to work dog 1 and dog 2. Was letting puppy air out and fetch first ... once she got a little wound down and launcher threw one too far for her scope for now... Wanted to give older dog 3 open water blinds to start - so I chunked out two more and switched hounds....


send him out on 2 pretty long ones.. and.. as I am lining him up for dummy number 3.. I see him about a 9 footer that popped up out of nowhere about 40 yards from dummy. wind was favorable for dummy recovery later... so we just switched to another pond across the road(with cleaner more visible shorelines..LOL

the reptile in question then swam on the surface about 3/4 of a mile away and vanished in some canes......


made it a good teaching moment went from lining him up to NO BIRD NO BIRD.... thankfully he did not break......

dude like I have said, there is a risk in everything we do with our hounds... In my 40 years around bird dogs I have seen or heard about more getting shot when they break than gators...

the list of tragedies Ive seen befall hounds afield is really too long to list.. but...

in the spillway I saw one that was run over by a dirtbiker....

snakebit - (dogs aren't venom proof like some fools believe)

beaver cutting jabbed into a dogs belly.

a dogs collar getting caught on something and the dog getting stuck - and drowning.

BEES...... BEEES bees don't like bird dogs that pee on their hive.

skunks....

one pointer that cornered a bobcat.... big mistake...

getting run over by boats or atvs....

heck I saw an AFC get caught in a rice field drain and drown on a fetch - the sill was not supposed to be out.... but it was...


be vigilant.... if it's wet and below monroe.. there is always the chance it was 50 degrees when we lost a dog..... the other one i was with was opening day of teal season in 84... some years I hunted every day of the season - I'll take those odds...


heck another poster and I encounter a cotton mouth ACTIVE when the temps were about 39 one day in the spillway... vigilance is the key... and the better trained your pup is the more vigilance you have... I used to not hunt dogs with collars.....now as a fail safe in areas with life threatening obstacles... I do..... my wife likes our dogs better than me....


but more dogs I am aware of have gone down to cars/trucks than everything else combined.

Damn, that is a laundry list of bad times. The gist I’m getting is to be prudent on which lines you send the dog on and have fun.