Early Goose Season Means Learning Opportunities for Retrievers

With many states holding early Canada goose seasons, retriever owners have a top chance to introduce their young dogs to waterfowling, and for experienced dogs it’s a good time to give them a refresher in hunting manners. Let’s yarn about a few things you can do to make sure that the early season turns out to be a ripper learning experience for your dog.

I can tell ya from experience that if there's ever a time when your retriever will break (when a dog leaves the blind and takes off before you've released it) it's gonna be during goose hunting. A big reason for this is that the action in a goose hunt unfolds much more slowly than it typically does during a duck hunt. From the time you start calling to a distant flock to the time they've committed to dropping into your decoys could be three minutes, and maybe even longer. That is a LOT of time for your dog to get antsy as the excitement builds, and the temptation to break is gonna be huge.

So, first, anticipate this issue and plan for it. Well before the season you should make sure your dog is acclimatised to a ground blind. This is its field-hunting uniform. Your dog should understand that being in that blind means it’s game time, and that means paying attention and staying put. You’ll be way ahead if you run some drills and marks with your dog positioned in the blind. Opening day is NOT the time to introduce your retriever to a new piece of gear.

You might want to hedge your bet by using a ground stake to make sure your dog can't break free. Alternatively, you could let someone else do the shooting while you keep your dog on a lead. I highly recommend this for young dogs. It's worth your time to leave the gun at home for the first couple of hunts so you can focus on making sure your dog obeys and has a good experience.

Another thing you can do to take the edge off some of the excitement is to limit the number of shooters. Consider hunting with just one or two mates so there isn’t so much gunfire and multiple birds raining down all at the same time.

There's one more new learning experience for a retriever when it comes to goose hunting that you can easily deal with once the season kicks off. This is about the fact that Canada geese are big birds, definitely bigger than anything else your dog's had to wrangle during training. Especially in the early season if you're dealing with a local adult bird that's been chowing down on lush golf course grass and snacks at the local park, that goose could weigh 12 pounds or more. That's a whole heap of bird for a young dog to manage.

My suggestion is that after you've knocked over that first goose of the year, take a few minutes to do some training with it right there in the paddock. If your dog is a reliable retriever on bumpers, pigeons and ducks, then as soon as it figures out how to get a good grip and carry an oversized goose, that should sort out that new challenge.

Treat the early goose season as a learning opportunity for your retriever and you'll have a great head start on preparation for the best part of the waterfowl seasons yet to come this fall.