Have you ever been
pheasant hunting,
flushed a rooster and missed it or not been able to hit it and
had your dog make chase? As the chase goes on your buddies are
laughing at you because your face is going red from blowing your
whistle so loud or maybe you went into a full all-out yell to
get the dog to come back but to no avail; the dog has cleared
your section of pheasants and is in the next county. That is
where homing pigeons and the "gone-away" command will
come in handy.
The term "gone-away" is an old spaniel term from England.
It is a term to let the dog know that the particular bird he
or she has just flushed is not their bird. It either flew away
or the bird is to be retrieved by another dog. The reason I like
to teach this command is for the average hunter who does not
maintain a fully steady to flush and shot dog. Yes, "maintain"
it. It seems that a lot of hunters do not understand that when
your fully steady to flush dog gets shot over too many times
and he is taking chase on the bird even if it is a rooster, flying
straight away and has a thirty plus inch tail on it. That |
makes your dog "un-steady to flush and shot"
really fast. So, I tend to teach the gun dogs that come in for
training: "gone-away". Now, in some cases dogs take
to being steady very well but even the most steady dogs can and
will break sooner or later in life, you just don't want to reward
them for it by shooting a bird for them if it can be avoided.
You need pigeons. You either need to find a professional trainer
that will allow you to pay for and use his homing pigeons or
you need
 |
to build a pen and train your own pigeons. The easiest may
be to seek out a professional.
The time to start teaching this is early on in life, not after
the dog has been chasing for a number of seasons. So, before
you start shooting birds over your new pup you want to get him
confidant in the field as far as quartering and retrieving. Then,
introduce the "Homing Pigeon". Plant your pigeons by
dizzying them and tossing them into a clump of grass. Then get
pup and set him up to start quartering up the field. Pup will
get a whiff of the bird, go in for the flush and if all is perfect
the bird will fly. Pup will then take chase after the bird. When
this happens it is very important that you let pup take chase.
He will only go so far. Some will get twenty yards; others will
go two hundred yards. Either is fine. Once pup gets to the point
that he slows down and almost comes to a stop but, is still looking
at the bird flying off say "gone-away" and give a couple
of pip pip pip pip's (your recall on your whistle). Do this a
few times and pup will eventually just turn and come off of fly-aways
once you say "gone-away".
There are extremists out there that will take the amount of fly-aways
to the "nth" degree. You have to use common sense here
and have a bit of dog sense. For a young dog just learning this
command you
|
