Gun Dog Forum

I have a 1 1/2 yr old lab who is excellent with retrieves and has a great nose. She has a problem with using up all her energy in the first 15 mins of the hunt and after that she is on for a brisk walk for the remainder. Anyone else have this problem? Is there anything I can do? She is bird-crazy so I don't know how I could get her off this routine.

I had an English Pointer that was like this. He would run hard for ten or fifteen minutes and then just settle in to a fast walk. It really drove me crazy. I solved the problem by giving him away. His new owner loves it.

Young enthusiasm...she'll learn to pace herself as she matures. In the meantime, her endurance will build the more you hunt her.

Is she getting the job done at her "brisk walk"?

If the dog is on a conditioning program and is in good shape then rinkers solution may be the only one. You can't train or condition "heart" or "hunt".

Endurance is gained through endurance work. This is called specificity. Train for what you want . If you want the dog to be able to run for two hours train the dog by running it for two hours. This needs to be done over a period of time starting with LSD long slow distance . The dog should have at least ten weeks of this several times a week to build stamina before the dog is allowed to run at a fast speed. The fact that your dog is burning up in 10 minutes means the dog is out of shape. Run the dog slow with a mountain bike or quad to build its endurance.

thanks for the advise.. I will try to get in more running type of activities.

my my dog does the same thing except up one level, he flies around for about the first 10-15 minutes and then he just resorts to running for the rest of the day

4dabirds wrote:Endurance is gained through endurance work. This is called specificity. Train for what you want . If you want the dog to be able to run for two hours train the dog by running it for two hours. This needs to be done over a period of time starting with LSD long slow distance . The dog should have at least ten weeks of this several times a week to build stamina before the dog is allowed to run at a fast speed. The fact that your dog is burning up in 10 minutes means the dog is out of shape. Run the dog slow with a mountain bike or quad to build its endurance.

Well said

Conditioning and maturity should help.

But if your dog is not doing what you want, do not allow him/her to continue -- you'll just be telling the dog that this behavior is OK with you. Let the dog run, when it quits, put it in the crate. If the dog has any brains it will figure out that it will not get to hunt unless it is going hard.

Ideally, condition him on gravel roads. Blacktop can ruin their feet. No matter how good a shape he is in, he'll never hunt at full speed all day; no dog can. The average hunter won't even get two hours out of a dog at top speed.

What they do is to settle into their own gate and hunt all day at their own speed. The dog I have now hunts an eight hour day at an average of 5-6mph. The dog gets breaks between covers.

I only have one dog now, and that dog hunts all day, every day, in the Dakotas for me while I'm out there. I condition her starting in July by running her 6-10miles a nite, four nites a week, alongside my bike on gravel bike trails. That gives my 10-12 weeks to get us BOTH in shape. Huge pain in the butt though.

Genetics. All the conditioning in the world will not help some dogs and others can go hard for hours with little conditioning at all, the Pointer mentioned earlier is exactly like many, MANY or the dogs I have worked from one line. heck outta the gate not worth a dang down the stretch and no amount of roading or field running helps