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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Alan Liere: Sometimes gun-shy dogs are due to operator error

I’ve always said life is too short to own a bad bird dog, and in this regard, I’ve been fortunate. Only one dog – my current yellow Labrador, Jill – has been gun shy. But defying the odds, she overcame this enervation.

I didn’t get Jill until she was nine months old, and I had no idea what she had experienced before I brought her home. Perhaps her gun-shyness was the fault of the previous owner, but I suspect it was I who caused her to quake at loud noises.

Right after I got her, I loaded Jill in the car and drove to see my daughter in Montana. Two bad things happened to Jill on that trip. The first was that she got “limp tail,” a painful but temporary condition common to some long-tailed dogs that over-exert in cold water. The two hours she spent enthusiastically retrieving sticks for me in a small lake just after ice-out did the damage.

Then, I compounded her misery by walking her on a leash to a nearby trap and skeet range with my son-in-law’s very gun-shy pointer. I stupidly thought the exposure to gunfire would be good for her, but in her compromised condition and with the other dog as a negative model, she tried to run away. I reprimanded her and insisted she stay. Long story short – she came home terrified of loud noises.

It took seven months for Jill and me to work through her problem, starting with me firing a cap pistol as soon as I went out the door in the morning to release her from the kennel. Gradually, I worked up to louder guns, but even so, I think it was still a stroke of luck that Jill eventually became my go-to bird dog.

She was getting better but she wasn’t cured. I started taking her hunting with me. She didn’t hunt, but I counted it as progress when she didn’t run away when I shot. Then, one day toward the middle of the season, I knocked down a close-flushing cock pheasant that came down running.

My heart sank as I watched the wing-clipped bird disappear into a deep ravine choked with cattails. There was no way without a dog I would ever recover that bird. But as I stood there bemoaning my poor shooting, there was a flash of gold coming towards me through the weeds. It was Jill, and she had the big pheasant in her mouth! A switch had been flipped on, and she’s been a bird-hunting dynamo ever since.

My friend Seldon, the psychologist, wasn’t as fortunate. Seldon currently has Jack, a gun-shy retriever that developed the enervation for no particular reason. Seldon didn’t like the lengthy cure I suggested, so he began experimenting with subliminal intervention. He took some classical music and recorded it over the sound of him shooting clay pigeons, starting from far away and moving right up to the muzzle. Then he made DVDs. He figured his dog would so enjoy the strains of Debussey’s Clair de Lune or Pachebel’s Canon in D Major he wouldn’t mind the occasional sound of gunfire. Eventually, over a three-DVD set, the gunfire would become louder, but by then the dog would theoretically be making positive associations.

Seldon didn’t want to leave his DVD player in the dog house, so he put Jack in the cab of his pickup to listen to the tapes. After two sessions, the dog was loving the soft seats as well as Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Next, Seldon put on his orange hunting vest and marched around the truck with his shotgun to “provide further reassurance through association.”

I hated to admit it, but it almost made sense to me until Seldon took Jack out after four weeks and fired a few rounds over him in the field. The dog ran straight back to the truck and scratched up the door trying to get in. Then he crawled underneath and hid behind the rear tires. Jack is now a house dog and Seldon’s looking for a new retriever.