The Meat Dog

“There are lots of ‘meat dogs’ out there that you can keep in the house and take out on weekends and kill birds over.” Says professional dog trainer Dave Alvarez. “They have medium to advanced hunting and retrieving skills, and they’ll hunt their tails off.” For the past twelve years my father and I have been hunting with his female black lab Cullie, and she is defiantly a ‘meat dog.’
My father picked Cullie up at a bar in Sheldon, Wisconsin. The owner of the bar was the owner of her mother and she was sired by one of Tom Dokken’s males. Cullie has always had an excellent nose, a trait my father says she got from her mother. In her retrieving career Cullie has lost very few birds, according to her breeder, Cullie’s mother accomplished a similar feat.
Many experts and non-experts have differing opinions on what to look for when picking out a puppy. Once I asked my father what method he used to pick out Cullie. He simply replied that she was the only black female available and that is what he desired. For me, that works.
Growing up in Saint Paul there was not a ton of opportunities to properly train a gundog. Cullie’s early training consisted mainly of plastic bumpers and basic obedience. Not having access to training birds, she was brought into the game with on-the-job training. She learned how to hunt through hunting, not re-enactment, which is not perfect but has worked out great in the long run.
Cullie has never been able to run a true blind retrieve. One can cast her with hand signals while hunting or looking for a dead bird but she doe not sit on a whistle blast. If someone in our hunting party shoots a bird that Cullie does not see fall you simply have to walk her to the fall area. Repeat ‘dead’ to her a few times and she will circle with her nose to the ground until she picks up the scent. Ninety-nine percent of the time she will recover the bird, sometimes tracking cripples multiple yards away from the fall.
Trust in a retriever is a must. Typically dogs have to earn trust, but they always have better sense of smell than humans. Often I have thought a bird went one way, when Cullie ultimately recovers it in a different direction. Time in the field will build teamwork and trust.
At twelve years of age Cullie is very calm and sleeps a lot around the house. To the untrained eye it would appear that she is not an energetic birddog. Get out the guns and start packing the camouflage and she seems to transform into a different creature, a hunting machine. The night before duck opener at the lake, no one is more excited than Cullie.
My mother has an orange jacket and whenever she wears it Cullie starts jumping up and down. It is kind of amusing; the dog thinks she is going pheasant hunting.
The past couple falls my father and I have limited Cullie to half days in the field and kept better tabs on her physical abilities. Cullie’s eyes and ears are starting to go but she still has an excellent nose. She has been kept in pretty good shape, especially with the addition of the new pup Stella. Cullie would hunt all day still if you let her, but as humans we must use some rationale and restrict her from pushing to the limits.
After a great opening weekend of duck hunting where she made many retrieves and hunted like a dog in it’s prime at ten years of age, my cousin Bill Hirschey told me he thought she would hunt at least four more years. That would be awesome if the prediction holds true, but I feel like it may be a difficult accomplishment.
The same season Cullie made a 100-yard retrieve on a crippled diver in large waves on a North Dakota slough. She is not steady to shot, or I would have probably stopped her from pursuing the bird. My hunting companion, Matt Gouette and I were a little nervous until she returned with the bird twenty yards down shore then proceeded to sprint down the shoreline and deliver the bird to hand. Although she was never force broken, she has always delivered to hand.
Matt has confided to me that he has had dreams where retrieves like that are Cullie’s last. She probably wouldn’t want to go any other way and I plan on allowing her to hunt until the end. I have always thought that Cullie would be the best hunting dog my father ever owned. I guess the jury is still out on that one for now. However, Cullie will forever be the ultimate meat dog.