Hitman,
The Rick Smith article I posted goes into good detail on the chain. And as I previously posted, I did basically the same thing with the gunshy labrador having him chained out at a distance while I worked my Brittany. It does not have to be a "gang", but the more the merrier.

Life on the chain gang with my Dash....

Thank y'all both for the interesting debate and I found the link a very helpful.

Op, you need to quit shooting over your dog and address the gunshy issue if you want your dog to become a bird dog. In my opinion there are better ways to address gunshy than repeatedly exposing the dog and hoping it turns the corner.

My advice is to start with noise conditioning while feeding. Get progressively louder as the dog adjusts. As the dog adjusts, slowly transition to a 410 at distance fired away from the dog. Move at the dogs pace. It will show you how much if any progress you are making. Slowly work the gunfire closer to the dog as it adjusts at the dogs pace. In the meantime work the dog with birds and stoke its desire to have them in its mouth with retrieves with birds. When and if the dog accepts the gunfire while eating you can use its love of birds to transition the gun fire to birds. Get a helper 60-100 yards away with a 410. Throw a bird for the dog to retrieve. With the dog in full chase and fully focused on the bird, have your helper fire the .410 180 degrees away from the dog from a distance of 60-100 yards. Slowly work your way closer and don't rush it. I have used this method with success but depending on how deep seated the problem is, it may or may not work.

I don't think the starvation method has any place on a public forum.. My two that were soft to the gun were also picky eaters, as well as, grass burr shy, boot shy, and bird shy to varying degrees.

Bill, My post has been edited so as not to offend the mamby pamby over sensitive. I don't buy into PC, nor was I advocating old world methods. The old world breeders who developed the continentals culled mercilessly. A dog that was deemed deficient or lacking in temperament was not given the potential to spread that gene. While harsh by today's standards, it shaped some fine gun dogs. It's not something I do or promote, but it is a part of history.

Take the dog to a gun range when it opens and chain to tree, pick dog up when gun range closes and dog is cured. Just kidding, but I know some of you guys think this is a good idea.

I agree with this. Are there some dogs that are not gun shy, even if you shoot over them the first time they’ve ever been exposed to gun fire? I’m sure there are. I’d say the majority of dogs need to be trained to it in some way. Every dog is different. Some will need a lengthy step by step training and others can be exposed to it without much training and will be ok. Some dogs don’t care about shotgun blasts but hate thunder.

My dog doesn’t care about thunder at all - has never flinched even when we are camping - but this duck season didn’t like the nine guys 100 yards away and slightly facing us all sky busting a gadwall on opening day. (I didn’t much care for it, either, but public h7nting has its own challenges for hunters.)

Very thought provoking discussion

I guess that is one way to put it. But I stayed with my dog and reassured him that it was ok.
But I’m pretty used to the keyboard smart azzes on here.
It also works a lot of times.

I don't recommend doing it that way as there is too much one does not have control over and there is no real birds, no retrieves, or similar type rewards to build enthusiasm around. Your reassurance is the only reward. The timing would be best timed to praise the dog for something while not showing fear to the gunshots rather than giving praise or reassurance at the fear of the gunshots. The dog may leave the sporting clay event tail wagging, but the first time on a real hunt when the dog gets out front enough to feel a strong muzzle blast, many dogs done that way may just end up looking to you for reassurance rather than mark for the retrieve. Or worse reverting back to the previous full blown problem. I can only assume you never had another gunshy event with your dog after that season of sporting clays, but every dog is different. That reassurance might work for an aggressive dog once used to the gun that had some single event make it gunshy, but your gun range method has way too much to go wrong IMHO if your trying to fix a young inhibited dog that has been made gunshy likely before it ever got started or reinforced through multiple events as Hitman has been doing with his dog.

Bill likes to bring up Delmar Smith, so I will use this quote from his son that may better explain what I am trying to say about being careful with reassuring the dog.

"What if the dog shows some fear? Go back to working on enthusiasm around birds, and move the gun farther out. One important caution: Many people react to a dog’s fear by petting talking to them, but this will give us the opposite result. The verbal and physical comfort rewards the dog for showing fear. If your dog learns that cowering will give it affection and comfort, it will continue to cower."

I always read all of these "gun-shy" posts and mostly bite my tongue (keyboard) when they start to get a little bizarre with some of the "methods" people say they have had success with on varying things... especially gunfire. Some make me cringe... and some of you guys mistake success and luck.

Bottom line, really, is that dogs (and almost all other animals for that matter) learn by association, whether it be negative or positive. That very simple fact or concept of associating a negative or positive response should always be thought through before trying to apply training on any animal. There have been many good examples of both given on this thread. Positive experiences will mean positive association thereby creating positive acceptance. Negative experiences will mean negative association thereby creating a negative acceptance (this is also called "avoidance training")

Getting a pup all jazzed up on a live bird and letting him chase while you add some low level of noise moving up to gunfire will condition him to associate positive things with noise. Back when there weren't GPS units on dogs, I have had times where I have taken out my shotgun and fired it twice into the air to get a missing dog to come back in because they thought they were missing out on "the fun" because birds must be around those shots. The exact opposite scenario would be to let a dog chase a rabbit and then bounce him real hard with a shock collar without ever saying a word... usually it only takes once or twice before the dog will stop in his tracks when he see a rabbit thereby avoiding a negative response he associates with chasing it. You want the dog "thinking" the rabbit is shocking him. as pointed out earlier in this thread, Snake avoidance works the very same way.

Associations for an animal are fairly simple, but when the human factor gets involved, we tend to muck them up as we tend to give the animal far too much credit for being able to "think" like we do. A good example of this is a dog coming back to you and not wanting to drop the bird or give up the bird or hard mouthing it, etc. I have seen guys hammer a dog with a shock collar to make them drop a bird and then be totally dumbfounded when a dog doesn't want to pick up any more birds! It simple association. they have made the dog associate bird with bad. All the while "thinking" that the dog should "understand" that he is supposed to give him the bird.

The point SJ makes above is a very good one. By starting a dog at a gun range, what are you associating with the gunfire? praise? attention? love? in my book... that can be pretty flimsy on a gundog, especially, as he says when a dog is out in front of your shotgun and gets his ear blown forward by some guy shooting a 12 gauge. unless he's conditioned properly, there no guarantee you wont lose than dog to gun-shyness.

I believe the most successful, low-risk way to introduce a pup to gunfire (or noise) is to fully engage the dog in a pleasurable activity and get them really amped up and then gradually add noise. whether its food, a ball, or just playing with the pup and clapping your hands loudly... take the time, and I mean time, like months to bring the dog along in his training so that he has a good association with many aspects of his training before you ever introduce gunfire. When I am training a new pup... gunfire is almost always one of the last things i introduce.

As far as curing gun-shyness... most will tell you that your best odds, at best, are about 50/50 and the best way to do it is to basically start over with noise association and take baby steps, all the while watching the dog for any sign of negative response. if you see it, back up or start over again. this is not a quick process and can take a long time to fix if ever. Using birds on strings, clipped wings, etc help tremendously. Some will disagree with me, but I would even suggest letting a dog catch a bird or two if I thought it would get him over gun-shyness.

Good Post First Chance.

This is very good advice First_Chance. You do not bring the gunfire along with the birds but make it just part of normal life....socialization. For more application here, try a .22 blank pistol handled by a helper from a very far distance(this could be a couple of hundred yards depending on severity) and then get closer assuming no negative response from the dog. This person should also stay out of sight. Repeat with a .209 primer (shotshell primer load or .209 blank pistol) and eventually with a shotgun. Again, start at a very far distance. When you decide to use birds or a bumper have a large delay between the gun fire (first) and the bird or bumper toss. Shorten the delay as training progresses.

For those with a puppy, I use this same approach. This noise just becomes part of early socialization. I have seen some breeders hang trash can lids just inches above the concrete so the puppies bang into them all the time. Personally, I could not handle that type of noise all the time

Best post on this subject I have ever seen written on this board.

My belief is that a lot of what we expose a pup to in the first 6 months has a lot to do with how bold that pup will become. During that first 6 months a dogs brain is like a sponge sucking up every experience. It sets a foundation you can't get back years down the road. I make a hit list of things to expose a pup to. Not just the gun, but all kinds of sounds and socialization like thunder, fireworks, boat motors, big dogs, little dogs, different types of people, the mailman, the vacuum cleaner, campfire, rides in a boat, moving water, fields of cactus, cattle, horses, and so on. One thing my breeder of my Dash did was expose the litter the moment they started eating on their own to things like thunderstorms, fireworks, banged pots and pans, etc. She would play a CD of thunder and fireworks sounds near the pups when being fed. To this day when Dash hears thunder, he busts out the door to run around in the rain like an idiot. He does the same thing when the city does it's fireworks show nearby.

As an opposite example, the years I was running a pack of hounds I had taken in an adult Redbone from a local family that was having a baby. They felt the dog would be too aggressive to have around the baby and was going to take it to the pound if I had not adopted it. This hound had never been out of it's back yard. Never been in the woods, never been hunting, never been in a vehicle, never been exposed to anyone or any animal other than the couple that owned her. It presented to me a bold strong willed dog, but it turned out this was only while living in the small simple world it had grown up in. Every first was a challenge for this dog. Simple things like navigating how to cross a log, cross a moving stream, exposure to gun fire, exposure to the pack of hounds she was to be hunted with, and so on. I was able to make her into a hunting dog. A beautiful voice and strong on tree, but she never became confident enough to be first on strike. I truly felt that if she had been exposed to all these things as a pup rather than later in life, she would have had great potential to be a pack leader rather than a follower.

Haha! That was standard issue in my puppy pen long ago. I used baling wire to hang it and a 1 lb coffee can sitting right above the trash can lid. It did make lots of noise.

I used to shoot 209 primers as I came out the back door to go feed. They began to associate the gunfire with mealtime and would be bouncing off the pen gates before I could get to them. Never had a gunshy dog.

Same with me. Never had one, but I had two soft ones that came back soft to the guns after their first year. Ronnie Smith eliminated those in his article.

You wanna get your pup amped-up on gun fire, get one of these 22 cal dummy launchers and make an extender with PVC, looks like a gun. This is like crack for a pup.



3rd (last) retrieve here I use it, does not sound loud in the video but it is, so loud I wear ear plugs. It launches it a long ways!

I think your first two sentences are spot on. I’ve heard breeders will leave newborn pups outside to be exposed to everything possible (thunder, rain, lawnmowers, car sounds, etc) to get them used to everyday sounds and experiences. This is not just hunting dogs, either.

I read a blog about a German Shepherd breeder that had a construction crew working outside the kennel where the pups were being held outs right after birth and before they were sold to people. She told the construction workers to not pay them any attention, no matter how much they wined or how cute they were or whatever. The point was to ignore them and have the pups get used to loud noises around them through experience, just like we do with dogs socializing them by exposing them to scenarios like crowds, bycicles, joggers, walking on a leash, etc.

I think that type of exposure is the biggest key, and then introducing them to gunshot with a plan as you see fit.

I like this approach, too.