When you catch yourself using vagueries to make a point, you probably haven’t made a point at all. Lessons are always learned in hindsight and birds are always missed because you shot behind them. I recently made a claim that I was planning to breed “proven dogs” together to produce a litter of puppies. When you’re looking for that special litter of pups for your next hunting companion, how can you possibly know if the parents of the pup are “proven” bird dogs?
War Paint just after whelping her first litter.
It wouldn’t surprise me to hear most people happily make the claim that they own a proven bird dog, or at least a serviceable gundog. It points - most of the time, it retrieves sometimes - when it doesn’t eat the bird, it loves hunting and its hair is the same color as the carpet so its shedding is barely noticeable…. perfect! That’s as proven as I’ll ever need! If you have such a companion bird dog, consider yourself deeply blessed. But there has to be something more to this term when it comes to bird dog breeders. The individual gun dog owner may have a well proven animal, but at what point is the decision made to add that dog to the gene pool? Are you a breeder if you happen to get a little female pup one day and a couple years later you get a male and the next thing you know there are pups everywhere? Maybe… but where’s the selection process? What other dogs have you compared these breeding animals to? What is your goal in breeding and do you know many of the dogs several generations back in their pedigrees? If there’s not a single yes answer to any of these questions perhaps something has been overlooked.
Jake - RU CH Erin’s Prometheus (on right), Sire of our last litter - winning Runner-Up Champion at the 2018 Masters Open Shooting Dog Championship. He competed against 81 of the best Pointers and Setters in the nation and had six wild quail covey finds in his hour. I’ve also seen him in his kennel and he’s extremely easy to keep, calm, quiet and intelligent. Years ago I watched dogs in Jake’s pedigree win Grouse Championships.
When it comes to genetics you can predict colors and cute things like that but you can’t toss a couple good ole bird hounds together and expect to get eight or ten more bird hounds just as good or better! Any breeder with a shred of honesty will tell you that it’s just not that simple most of the time. Canines evolve toward the genetic average and they do it very quickly. When we are looking for that bird dog of a lifetime the last thing we are aiming for is average. If we buy a pup and are blessed with an average bird dog and we own one or two, that’s probably more than we could ask for! But if I’m honest about trying to improve the breed, I’m going to start by looking at a lot of dogs and pairing above average breeding animals together, while secondarily paying attention to their lineage
War Paint (far left) placing in her very first Shooting Dog stake on wild birds, as a 2 year old, first year Shooting Dog. There were several experienced dogs in this stake who had already earned the title of Champion.
There are many ways to evaluate a dog and decide if it’s a “proven dog”. I won’t be critical of other methods, other than to say that if a breeder has not at least looked at a high number of dogs within their chosen breed and compared their animal in some way, then I would suggest you find another breeder. How can you compare your animals to others? I’ll tell you what works for us: We go to many field trials, primarily run on wild birds and we watch the dogs as well as entering our own. This gives us a wide perspective. We’ve seen terrible dogs and great dogs and everything in between. Keep increasing your sample size and your kennel blindness will correspondingly decrease. Our recent litter of pups was sired by a runner-up champion in horseback stakes who has grouse champions in his pedigree. I watched one of those grouse champions, Houston’s Belle, win over a decade ago and I’ll never forget it! It’s such an old axe to grind that you’ve heard too many times, but watch and learn… watch many and learn a lot more. Some breeders use the hunt test to compare their animals and I would say while it’s not something I’ve done, I suspect it’s a great way to see lots of dogs and compare what you have. There are many different ways to evaluate your dog against others. Avoiding kennel blindness is something we should all constantly strive for as bird dog breeders.
War Paint after pointing and running down this Kansas Prairie Chicken cripple in high winds and temperatures in the 70’s. She’s recovered cripples several times this season. There’s a bad misconception out there that Setters, particularly those from field trials lines, do not fetch. Don’t tell Blaze that, we haven’t lost a cripple yet. At two years of age, she had pointed and handled eight species of wild birds all across the country including in Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Kansas and Arizona.
We also travel the country to hunt our dogs in variable conditions and terrain, on various species of upland game birds. I recently heard someone say that they’d quit hunting for the day once it hit 60 degrees. We would never have made a single Prairie Chicken opener in South Dakota if 60 degrees was a deal breaker for the hunt and that’s usually one of my favorite hunts all year. I want our dogs to do well in variable weather conditions: heat, dry, rain, wind, terrain that challenges them. If we only ever hunted Grouse and Woodcock in our home covers, would we really be “proving” that our animals are breeding quality? What if someone wanted to hunt desert quail with one of our pups in 15% relative humidity? Have you ever taken a bird dog from its soaking wet Grouse covers and dropped it in the middle of the quail desert? Our pups are going to bird hunters all over the nation, hunting species of upland birds under all possible conditions. The parents of those pups did it before them. It’s a simple concept easily overlooked by so many puppy buyers… what have the parents done and how have they proven themselves? When you’re looking for your next bird dog pup, take the time to ask the breeder how they evaluate their dogs, compare them against others in the breed and how they decide whether their dogs have “proven” to be of breeding quality.