question

[willt]

What do yall prefer when finishing a dog wild birds or use launchers. Kind of a dumb question but I am curious.

[gonehuntin']

Do all preliminary work with launchers, finish with wild birds.

[DonF]

What do you call "finish"?

[Redfishkilla]

IMO, It's impossible to have a finished dog without lots of wild bird experience unless you just want a fully "broke" trial dog that will only hunt pen raised birds.

[DonF]

Whaat ever it is you call finished, I would take it completely thru to where I wanted it on pigeons and when it was right there, introduce pen birds. Theen when it was right there, introduce wild birds. Keep everything in an orderly progression.

[slistoe]

Whaat ever it is you call finished, I would take it completely thru to where I wanted it on pigeons and when it was right there, introduce pen birds. Theen when it was right there, introduce wild birds. Keep everything in an orderly progression.

Yep. Much easier than trying to do it all on wild birds alone.

[Wenaha]

I guess that I have it backwards. In the first year or so of my dogs' lives I have always run them on wild birds and just worked on bird exposure and staying to the front. No formal training until they were hunting and finding (pointing) birds. THEN I would go to formal training on pigeons, then quail or chukars.

I would complete their training on by going back to wild birds. I do this with my gun dogs and trial dogs (most of them have done both hunting and trialing).

[slistoe]

Weneha the question was about finishing the dog. I assumed it had already been started on wild birds to the point that it was ready for finishing.