Puppies-  All Shady Meadows Gundogs puppies are given shots at 5, 7 and 9 weeks old. We use Galaxy 5 way plus Corona and then at 16 weeks old we give a standard adult 7 way shot.   What your new puppy will need will depend on how old it was when it left our facility.  We also start worming at 3 weeks old and continue that every 2 weeks until 12 weeks old and then switch to once a month.  Please take care to keep your puppy properly vaccinated.  Vaccinating is extremely easy and you can save a ton of money by just going to a feed store and buying your own vaccines and giving it to them (assuming local ordinances allow it, most do except for Rabies).  You will spend at least 10 times as much if you go through a vet. 

Care should also be taken to play with the new puppy as much as possible and show it as many new situations as possible.  Walks through the woods, tall grasses and down to ponds are very beneficial for “expanding their horizons”.  Get them used to water at a very early age.  Depending on the time of the year, we may have already done that for you and if so, continue on with it.  Nothing beats a nice pointing dog that will hit the water hard to get the pheasant that you accidentally shot over a pond or river!  Personally, we don’t bother with the wing stuff.  That is more for you as an owner than it is for the pup and often times does way more harm than good.  If you ever carelessly let the pup catch the wing on accident you may have just set your pointing back a good little bit.  I recommend not doing it at all as it is completely unnecessary to achieving the end result which is a fine, polished gun dog.  Most people don’t have the patience or ability to resist the temptation though so if you are one that just can’t control it, please, at least be careful enough to not let them catch it. 

After the early stages, the pup can be as good as it’s genetics and trainer shape it up to be.  Obviously, professional training will produce a more polished gundog and if that’s the route you choose to go, we may be able to recommend a trainer for you.  If you do it yourself, invest in some good books or videos and be patient.  It takes years and years to learn how to properly train a dog and realize it or not, you will probably mess some stuff up and create holes in the dog so again, just be patient and work your way through them.  If it goes really poorly, please, don’t call us.  LOL  It’s a lot harder to fix a dog that has been messed up than it is to train one from the start and there’s nothing a trainer hates more than having to fix mistakes.  Also, I get asked all the time what is a good book or video to watch for training and I have to apologize up front here because I can’t answer that for you.  I have read one book on dog training and that was robert Wehle’s Wing and Shot way back when I was just a pup myself and I’ve never watched a video on it so I can’t tell you what a good one to look for is.  I did like some of Roberts techniques in Wing and Shot however I don’t use may of them anymore.  Training has advanced with leaps and bounds since then though and there are a lot easier and less time consuming ways to achieve a finely polished finished dog now a days.

Trained dogs-  We strive to train most of our dogs the same way now, for the wild bird hunter that hunts from foot or UTV.  Of course, any dog that can hunt wild birds can even more easily hunt the “pet and kill birds”.  They are all whoa broke, collar conditioned (both to reinforce commands or you can knick them and they will turn.  We use this silent form of communication due to the fact that we hunt a lot of wild pheasants), whistle trained (2 short blasts of the whistle means turn, 1 long blast means “here”), here broke-depending on which trainer can either mean come to me or come to me and put your head in my hand which is the preferable way because that really helps with natural retrieving but some trainers are still stuck in old habits of training and have not figured that one out yet.  The old saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” sometimes applies more to the “old dog trainer” that the “old dog” LOL!  From that point, there’s a few differences, some of the dogs are natural retrievers, some are force broke and some are broke steady to wing and shot and don’t retrieve at all because they are trained to let a retrieving dog do that job.  Almost all the finished dogs are trained to back other dogs.  They are also trained to “kennel” when told to.

What to do with a trained dog when you get it home----NOTHING for the first few days or so except bond with it and get to know it.  If you want to take it for walks, use a lead rope or leash.  After a few days, run through some of its basic commands with it.  Put it up on your tailgate and tell it “whoa”.  If it moves an inch, pick it up and give it a good shaking and put it back down in the same spot that it was told “whoa” before and tell it “whoa” again.  When you’ve got that down, do the same thing on the ground (with a check cord or e-collar on of course) until you can walk away and it will stay there.  Once you’ve got that, you’ve got a pretty good amount of its respect.  If you have an e-collar (and EVERYONE should) you can now take it out without the check cord (unless of course you live in town or other high traffic areas).  Tell it “here” a few times.  Give it some praise for coming to you.  If it ever doesn’t respond the first time, tell it “here” again and knick it with the collar at the same time.  For those who don’t know, “knick” does not mean “cook it”.  The point in all this is to establish a mutual bond of respect.  I’m sure that there are a million ways to do this and I’m sure everybody has their own.  This has worked fine for me though so that’s why I am “putting it out there” for those of you that buy a dog from us.  When running your dog, if you want it to turn, just hit the whistle a couple times, knick it with the collar or do both.  All will achieve the same result.  You can always back up the whistle or the “here” command with the collar if you need to.  The more patient a person is the first few days after they get their new dog the better success they will have.  I have seen all too many times when a new owners impatience causes them a whole mess of problems and then they call and blame me.  If you have that problem and get into trouble with your dog, feel free to call and I’ll help you through it however please don’t call and blame me.  I’d much rather get the phone call that the guy says “I don’t know a whole lot about dogs and I’m honest with myself about that” than get one from someone who thinks they know a bunch about dogs and gets a dog all messed up and then calls to chew me out.  From years of experience, I can say that most of those people don’t know near as much about dogs as they think they do and the proof is in the results so please, be realistic with yourself about your knowledge.  The more most people learn about dogs, the more most people find out how much more there is to learn.  Bird dog training is a many, many year adventure and there’s always somebody that knows a lot more about it or different ways of doing it and always remember that the key is patience.