A dog is a dog is a dog, unless the dog is one of my dogs.
All dog owners have different levels of attachment to their dogs. Some keep a dog around only as a family pet. Others hunt with them on special occasions. Most of these dogs with little time afield or with limited training do as much or as little as the owner expects of them.
Others will train their dogs extensively or even have a professional trainer turn them into a finely synchronized operating hunting companion.
I have the latter. My dogs are valuable to me both as loving companions and in terms of money. It is not usual for a trained hunting dog, at least a Labrador, to bring in the neighborhood of $5,000 to $7,500 depending on their age and breeding pedigree.
When I hunt birds, my dogs are rarely ever out of my sight. Some owners will let their dogs run over the hill out of sight and not start to worry until the dog has been gone for more than 20 minutes.
Most often these dogs come down from the Metro area. The owner loses track of the dog and after looking for a few hours just abandons it and goes home with the hope that someone would call him if it were found.
Over the past 20 years I have had at least 15 examples where people would call and ask me if I would hold on to a dog they found out wandering around on a Sunday evening.
I have heard many stories where a dog gets lost and the owner will leave his hunting coat on the ground at the parking area, and upon his return the next day, the dog would be lying on the jacket.
If the dog had an ID tag, we boarded these dogs at Round Lake Kennels which has since moved to Bemidji, Minnesota. We’d call the owner and make arrangements for pickup.
When the owner came back the next weekend, they would argue over the $15 per day boarding fee. Some dogs had no tags and were never claimed.
How could you or would you ever just abandon your dog? No flyers on telephone poles, no calls to the dog catcher, no Facebook posts, no radio ads looking for your lost dog. Some people should just not ever own a dog.
With my dogs, I use training collars for corrections if they fail to listen to a known command. This is what most hunters will use. If they get to the point where they cannot find their dog, they will just turn up the intensity and the dog will yelp and they will know what direction to move to retrieve it.
It’s not the best method by any means, but it’s better than losing the dog completely.
You can buy a collar that has a GPS receiver and you use the handset to track and follow the dog up to five miles away. My dogs are never more than 50 yards away from me so I don’t need a 5-mile range.
I use a collar that has a beeper on it. These can be used to track your dog as it runs in the tall grass. It makes one sound when running and a different sound when the dog is standing still. These can be heard from a quarter of a mile away under most weather conditions.
I just can’t stand the collar sounding off all the time, which reminds me of a garbage truck backing up.
I don’t use the run or point modes. I only use the locate mode. This is a button on the hand set that you can push to make the collar beep. Don’t push the button and you get no sound. Push the button and you get a beep.
I was hunting a few years back and could not locate my dog. I called and called and he was nowhere to be seen.
I used the locate button and found him about 50 yards behind me lying on his side. He had run a 30-inch-long stem of blue grass down his throat, punctured the throat lining and impaled the grass stem into his lung. He was just lying there shuddering.
I removed the stem and made haste to the veterinarian. He lived through the incident — barely, but without the locate beeper on the collar, it’s unlikely I would ever have found him on the 80 acres of 6-foot-tall native grass.
It would have been like finding a needle in a haystack. This beeper could also save your dog’s life if they ever got caught in a conibear trap that kills the animal within a minute or two.
My dogs mean everything to me. A more expensive collar with a beeper locate is worth every penny.
There are many brands out there, but if you want help picking one out, contact me at scottarall@gmail.com. I have lots of experience with these collars over the past 20 years and will make sure you don’t buy the wrong one. Remember, Christmas is just around the corner.
Scott Rall, Worthington, is a habitat conservationist, avid hunting and fishing enthusiast and is president of Nobles County Pheasants Forever. He can be reached at scottarall@gmail.com. or on Twitter @habitat champion.