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Published September 24, 2006 01:56 am - The afternoon teal hunting at Schell-Osage Wildlife Area was good last week, and the young chocolate-colored Labrador was having a great time. Larry Dablemont: Teaching young dog new tricks By Larry Dablemont
Globe columnist The afternoon teal hunting at Schell-Osage Wildlife Area was good last week, and the young chocolate-colored Labrador was having a great time. He had already retrieved five of the little biscuit-sized ducks, and we hid them up on the roof-top of the wooden blind, which was sunk down into the earth. We weren’t using the blind, we were just standing out in the high weeds around it, and when a flight of teal came streaking across the decoys right at us, we dropped two more. They fell in the weeds behind the blind, or so we thought. One was found quickly by the young dog, and retrieved, but the other fell farther out than we thought, and we were down in the edge of the water, coaxing him to hunt for the “dead bird.” Barlow was confused. There was no other bird to be found. But he wanted to please his master, so finally he just ran up to the blind, grabbed one of the ducks we had placed there, and came back with it. We wanted a dead bird, and he found one. Remarkably, when we finally gave up, that pup charged out into the water and found that second teal, in a clump of smartweed several yards away. Then later, on the final bird to finish my limit, I watched it fall and marked it well, but couldn’t keep Barlow hunting where I thought it was. I finally let him go, and he found it with his nose, several feet away. I would have never found the duck on my own. That young Lab shows exceptional promise. He has only been on a handful of hunts, but he watches the incoming ducks and trembles with excitement. When told to retrieve, he charges into the water with with tremendous eagerness. Only a two-year-old, he has the instinct to retrieve, and he descends from dogs bred to be companions and hunters. Every breed has changed over the decades, and Labradors are no exception. Many of today’s Labs are fast, high-strung, small and wiry. That is a result of field trial breeding, and someone like me, who has no interest in competition, despises such breeding. I don’t want a small fast Labrador. I want a heavy bodied, calm retriever with stamina and strength above speed. I want the intelligence found in the early Labs, bred more than 100 years ago to bring in tow ropes of ships off the east coast provinces of Canada. Old-style Labrador men like me don’t much care for the little Labs, and the pointing Labradors bred today from years of crossing Labs and solid-colored German Short-Hair Pointers. If you want a pointing dog, choose a good pointing breed, don’t ruin the Labrador by hybridizing it. There never was a better dog, to my way of thinking, for hunting waterfowl than the Labrador. The Chesapeake Bay retriever is right there with the Lab, but is a one-man, aggressive breed developed decades ago to work for the market hunter, and guard his hunting gear as well. I’ve raised Labrador retrievers now for almost 40 years, and I love to hunt grouse with my Labs, and pheasants, because I train them to hunt close, flush birds from heavy cover and retrieve them. But mostly they are with me to find and retrieve crippled ducks, the ones which fall in cover, the ones in complicated places a hunter can’t get to. 
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