By Chad Love

Unless you're lucky enough to live in one of the states with an early September opener for grouse and other upland birds, Thursday's dove season opener marks - for most of us - the traditional September kick-off to the fall bird hunting season. Both my dogs, however, are staying in their kennels this week.

Why? For a whole host of reasons I've never been a big fan of taking dogs along on the dove opener. I think one of the worst things you can do to a young dog or a pup--especially one that hasn't had much exposure to gunfire--is to take him or her into a hot, dry, dusty dove field, surround them with strangers blazing away on all sides and then expect them to retrieve your birds. Not to mention, all the while as everyone up and down the line continues to shoot and birds are falling all over the place. The chaos of the typical opening weekend dove field is no place for a young dog.

By Chad Love

In writing a blog devoted primarily to the training of and hunting with dogs, it's sometimes interesting to change things up a bit--to put aside the practicalities of training tips, gear reviews and other fact-based topics and just tell a story, a personal story (albeit a short one) that, on some level, I think we can all identify with, because eventually we will all be the man in the story to one degree or another. Is it sad? Perhaps, but that's the devil's bargain we make when we give ourselves to our dogs...

There he was, sitting on his customary stool at the gun counter when I walked into the shop, shooting the bull with the other regulars, just like always. Except that it was mid-August, which meant he was supposed to be in Montana with a truck full of dogs. Like many pro trainers, his was the gypsy life: South Texas in the winter, Montana in the summer, interspersed by a few brief interludes back home in the spring and fall.

He pulled a travel trailer behind his dog truck and would spend the summers camped out right on the grounds, training dogs, running a few trials or hunt tests and laughing at all us suckers back home who were sweltering in the heat while he lived the kind of grand, carefree, nomadic lifestyle that only a retired lifelong bachelor, whose nuclear family consisted wholly of labs, can have.

I hadn’t seen him since spring, and when he turned to see who was walking through the door, I noticed immediately how tired he looked, as if some unseen force had left a patina of fatigue on his face--in his voice.

By Chad Love

by Chad Love

It's the Ides of August, which means that a lot of gundog owners are getting excited about the early bird and waterfowl seasons set to kick off in a few short weeks. Dove, September teal, and early resident Canada goose seasons are just around the corner. Unfortunately, those early hot-weather hunting opportunities also bring the opportunity for your dog to come in contact with a toxic blue-green algae bloom. Blue-green algae has been implicated in dozens of dog deaths this summer across the nation, and with this season's drought and heat expected to continue into September, gundog owners need to be especially vigilant while training and hunting around water. 

As I blogged earlier this month I've lost many of my usual training ponds to drought this summer, and I'm leery of what water remains. But if you are training or hunting around water, be smart, safe and choose your water carefully.

By Chad Love

As noted in an earlier blog, I recently attended a writer's event at the Purina Events Center in Missouri. As part of that experience my writers' group was treated to several informative seminars from noted trainer Tom Dokken, who has been instrumental in the exploding popularity of using your gun dog to find shed antlers.

Dokken has a wealth of information on his website devoted to hunting sheds with dogs. There's even a new world shed dog hunting championship. Shed hunting with your dog is something a lot of guys seem interested in, so it's definitely something I'll be writing about in the future. Today, however, I'd like to talk a little about a training product Dokken makes and sells called Rack Wax.

Basically, Rack Wax is deer antler-scented wax that you can smear on an old shed to give it a little scent. We all got a tube of Rack Wax at the event, and I decided to play around with it a bit this weekend. It comes in a Chapstick-sized tube, looks pretty much like Chapstick, and even smells sort of like Chapstick. In fact, if you were to absentmindedly pick up a tube of Rack Wax and smear it over your lips, I'd be willing to bet you wouldn’t even notice it until it was too late. And if you were a really unobservant dumba**, you might even apply it twice before realizing your mistake.