Chad,

I have to tell a story!

A few years back, I went with some friends to ski a peak in late March. A woman who went on the trip with us had two husky-mix type dogs, and these dogs were...ahhh vegans, due to the beliefs of their owner that carnivory was tied in to innocent prey animals being torn limb from limb, to feral energies that we are all WAY PAST! and that there was no use waiting for the lion to lie down with the lamb, we can make that happen Right Now! and start with making sure that dogs never get any of that tasty evil meat and its attendant blood lust. Since the dogs were comletely untrained in every way ("power issues": ie. humans don't have the right to impose their will on other species!), they bounded forth from the truck and immediately disappeared. Much calling ensued.
I postholed in my ski boots through the snow to the edge of the trailhead parking lot, where the land fell off into a creek bottom. Somebody had thrown a load of elk ribs and legs down off in there, and the dogs were savaging the old dried and frozen carcass pieces in a kind of ecstasy, growling at other as they chomped pieces of hide and ripped away bleached white tendon material and wolfed it down. At one point both looked up at me, bones in mouth, and stared, in what seemed like A) pure aggression, ie. "come close to my carcass an I'll rip you a new one! yeah, that's right, you!"
and B)"Please, mister, I can see we got something in common. Just don't tell on us!"

I just turned around and didn't say a word.

The only downside was that around mid-day I ended up having to follow the dogs in the ski track and they were both bugling out these vast clouds of carcass gas all the way up the mountain. Like melt your eyebrows off kind of carcass gas, blasted out with enough force to straighten the dogs tails. "I don't know why this is happening" said the dogs' owner. "They never have have gas like this. What could it be?"

Feeding a dog a vegan diet is simply foolish cruelty, nothing more, nothing less.

How would the vegans like it if we fed them nothing but meat? This is the equivalent to what they are doing to their dogs.

I would rather have chewed up birds than a Tofu eating dog, my friends would never let me hear the end of it. I eat meat, and so it would be unfair to my favorite hunting partner to rob him of the same.

If I had a tofu eatin' dog, I would be excluded on all of the manly-man things I'm used to doing:}}

I still g-r-o-w-l if any one of my sons or daughters looks at my steak a little to long.
I always tell 'em, "eat your salad ...it's good for ya!"

Did anyone notice that the vegan hounds appeared to be thick?

Funny story, Hal Herring!

Sounds like a plan that would work. I just wonder if the dogs would like the vegan diet. I would think you have to start them off young or else it would be quite hard going from meat to a vegan diet.

My uncle thought letting his lab eat a dove was a good training method until the dog wouldn't stop eating the damn birds. He never really broke her of that. Don't let them start and you'll be o.k. Go to dovehunting101.com, I've started a series on bird dog training. Click on the posts page and scroll down to read part one, or here is the permalink: http://www.dovehunting101.com/2009/04/16/bird-dog-training/ . Let me know what you think

My Lab has never been allowed to play with a bird after the retrieve, although he usually feels compelled to tote one duck or goose from the blind back to the truck at hunt's end or from one spot to another during the hunt. I oblige him this small pleasure, but whipped his butt a couple of times his first year at the first feather pulled...