Good Running Today
Even though training dogs on wild game shuts down in Michigan between April 15 & July 15 I am now able to run my pup. An aquaintance who is a Beagler has a 40 acre unfenced running area that is a licensed dog training area. It's a couple hours south of me and he has groomed this parcel for over 20 years now for rabbit habitat. It is surrouned on all four sides by his crop fields. Which at this time of year are just bare disked fields. So the rabbits don't run out of the 40 acres of thickets and brush. Barney is eleven months old now and until today had only given voice on the snowshoe hares. Even though he has circled a cottontail. Well today I got him running on four rabbits and he opened up on the last two. And circled the last one. I was even able to perform electro-anti deer treatments on him. I have been putting the dummy collar on him every day for the past couple of weeks. So when we hit the running grounds I put the live one on him. We pushed quite a few deer out of there so I had no trouble walking him across fresh tracks. He was darn stubborn at first wanting to run the first even after getting zapped twice. But the third poke made him give up on it. The next one I we walked across he wanted to run also. He even opened up on it this time. It took a couple of pokes to get him to lose interest. A little bit later after one of the rabbit runs I saw another deer. So I walked him across where it had went. When he crossed the trail he did a quick U-turn and came back over to me. I got him on the last rabbit soon after that and then we headed home. I'll find out if the lessons on deer stuck with him as I am going back down there to run in the next day or two. Stubborn damn hound! :roll: