Dogs or not should never be the determining factor in pheasant hunting. If one doesn't have a good dog, then they'd be far better off hunting without one than putting an dumb dog on the ground in a good pheasant field.
Having kept track of this over the past decade or so, visiting dogless hunters have an ever so slight advantage in birds bagged per day. Most people's dogs are a disadvantage to actually getting wild birds.
Fun and enjoyable, yes. Even close to necessary, no.
Even though I've never hunted wild birds, only release birds, I can see where an inexperienced dog might become a problem. I used to do a lot of rabbit hunting. Every time we took dogs, even though they were trained for running rabbits, it became a pain in the ass. We'd spend more time F-ing with the dogs than shooting rabbits. I always found it better and funner to just put on the brush pants and plow my way through it myself.
