On Being Dog Adjacent

Or, 'Dog People Really Love Dogs'

If I had a dollar for every time a bird hunter told me I should get my own gun dog, I could eat at the French Laundry. Twice. Sorry, everyone, not gonna do it.

I travel too much, have zero experience training dogs, I like a clean house, hate barking, and, frankly, the idea of walking a dog in a blizzard doesn’t thrill me. And gun dogs, especially pointers, are notoriously nervous, jumpy and sensitive.

I have no problem hunting behind other peoples’ dogs, however. I’ve seen maybe a hundred in my time. Most are decent, some are amazing, a few oughta be sent I dunno where… I am a dog-adjacent hunter.

Solo, I have been reasonably successful hunting mountain quail, ruffed grouse, blue grouse, woodcock, and even pheasants without a dog. And when I was hunting ducks in California, I almost always hunted dogless. And you definitely don’t need a dog for doves and pigeons.

If you choose your shots or locations, you can shoot most birds consistently without a canine companion. (Keep in mind I am also perfectly OK with killing a non-flying bird.)

It’s a different story with sharp-tailed grouse and Hungarian partridges, which I recently hunted in western North Dakota. Bobwhite, Mearns, Gambels and scaled quail are also fairy tough to find without a dog.

I’ve spent a lot of time with dog people recently. One thing that stands out, is, well, they love to talk about their dogs. Different breeds, hunting stories, mishaps (like the one dog that can’t stop fighting porcupines), sad tales of injuries, death or disease — as when some troglodyte coyote hunters shot and killed a dog while it was on point in Idaho. Basically every gun dog owner in American is talking about this one. And don’t even get me started about South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s decision to kill one of her hunting dogs, a move that likely cost her the vice presidential nomination.

The past couple weeks have cemented in me the notion that the bond between hunter and dog or dogs — many, like my friend Tyler, own veritable packs of pointers — is more important than the actual hunting.

I hunt to eat. A humane kill is my aim, and I am interested in coming off the prairie or out of the woods with dinner. This is why I don’t bat an eye about whacking a grouse or quail on the ground. This is not the case with hunters with dogs. Yes, the vast majority eat what they kill, to the point where the few woodcock hunters I encountered last year in the grouse woods who didn’t eat them were eyebrow-raising.

A dog-owning hunter’s true joy is, frankly, being leader of the pack. I hunted ducks last weekend with Cal, a very young lab who is still learning to retrieve. He was goofy and just not very good, but that’s to be expected at less than a year old. My friend Wes, whose dog this was, was ecstatic when Cal managed to retrieve a teal I’d shot. It was Cal’s first duck, worthy of a rare picture.

Tyler, who has four dogs, might as well be a proud father when his youngest dog Jessie (known to me as Shoe Eater for an incident when she was a few months old), absolutely crushed it on a grouse and partridge hunt. She was fast and efficient and happy and pointed birds perfectly. Even I can see how gratifying that is, because this sort of success only comes after many months of training.

Dog breeds separate the hunters into odd subgroups. First, there’s the pointer vs. retriever/flusher split.

Pointing dogs, like setters and, well, pointers, run madly around the landscape sniffing for birds. When their nose locates them, they creep up to the covey or flock and point at them, stock still. This has the effect of freezing most birds, who are paying attention to the ferocious canine predator that’s just found them. The hunter walks in close, the birds freak out, fly off, giving the hunter a shot within range.

Flushers/retrievers — the labs, mostly — wander around sniffing for birds and will flush them into flight when they get close. Their demeanor changes when they’re on the scent. This is known as “getting birdy.” Those same labs shine as duck dogs because once a hunter downs a duck or goose, the lab, who has been watching the whole time, rockets off to catch the bird in its mouth and return it to the hunter.

Duck guys invariably use retrievers. Upland hunters usually use pointers, but you do see flushers, too. Flusher/retriever people aren’t overly opinionated about these breeds, largely because most own labs and there are only a few main retrieving breeds. Upland hunters, however, can argue until dawn (usually over many glasses of bourbon, which is the official drink of upland hunting) over which breed of pointer is “the best.”

Usually it’s all in good fun, but I’ve seen real anger come out sometimes. And while you can disparage a breed in general, it is taboo to bad mouth a hunter’s dog. With some hunters, it’s worse than bad-mouthing his or her kids. And never discipline another person’s dog. Ever.

I love watching it all, the dog work, the bantering, even the mistakes… mostly. The one I do get genuinely irked about is a dog with a “hard mouth,” which means that it has likely mauled your bird while retrieving it, typically leaving the bird so damaged you can’t pluck it later.

But if I am honest, it is my nature to be, well, adjacent. To most things. I’ve never really fully fit in with any group ever. This can be difficult. I have little to add when I’m surrounded by a bunch of guys telling dog story after dog story. But being a perpetual observer has also helped me see things insiders cannot. It’s one of the traits that made me a successful journalist. It guides me to this day.

So no dog for me. But I respect and admire the good ones, like Finn and Junie, Fur Missile and Bo and Rusty and Jessie, Shiloh and Megan and all the others. Good dogs all.