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have no experinc with gun dogs but looking for one that can do a few new to us jobs.

fall turkey hunting finding and busting turkey

blood tracking big game

shed hunting

and water work.

my first thought was a lab but open to other ideas,


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Most certainly a Lab would work...

Had a Springer that would fit in...He would bust a flock, then lay beside me to call them in during the fall. Found Deer without any special training other than put his nose to the track and telling him to find. Never used him to hunt sheds, but that would only entail additional training...Never did nasty, cold big water retrieves...but he handled the small water, creek waterfowl work fine...

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Originally Posted by jonboy900
have no experinc with gun dogs but looking for one that can do a few new to us jobs.

fall turkey hunting finding and busting turkey

blood tracking big game

shed hunting

and water work.

my first thought was a lab but open to other ideas,


What’s your idea of water work, creeks, ponds, flooded timber? Or are you thinking open water like big lakes and sounds?

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Originally Posted by wilkeshunter
Originally Posted by jonboy900
have no experinc with gun dogs but looking for one that can do a few new to us jobs.

fall turkey hunting finding and busting turkey

blood tracking big game

shed hunting

and water work.

my first thought was a lab but open to other ideas,


What’s your idea of water work, creeks, ponds, flooded timber? Or are you thinking open water like big lakes and sounds?


creeks and rivers retreving beaver and muskrats


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I think a lot of dogs would work. A boykin or wachtelhund would be my picks for what you stated.

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If you're doing a lot of hunting for fur and the dog is retrieving, take a look a the Deutch Drathaar. You'll want a dog that can defend itself and dispatch wounded critters then bring it back to you like it's the king of the world. That would be a DD.

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Originally Posted by jonboy900
Originally Posted by wilkeshunter
Originally Posted by jonboy900
have no experinc with gun dogs but looking for one that can do a few new to us jobs.

fall turkey hunting finding and busting turkey

blood tracking big game

shed hunting

and water work.

my first thought was a lab but open to other ideas,


What’s your idea of water work, creeks, ponds, flooded timber? Or are you thinking open water like big lakes and sounds?


creeks and rivers retreving beaver and muskrats


Dang! A beaver is a pretty big critter. I believe I would go with something large and rather tenacious, like a Chesapeake.

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Originally Posted by ryoushi
If you're doing a lot of hunting for fur and the dog is retrieving, take a look a the Deutch Drathaar. You'll want a dog that can defend itself and dispatch wounded critters then bring it back to you like it's the king of the world. That would be a DD.


This is what I was thinking too.


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Originally Posted by wwy
I think a lot of dogs would work. A boykin or wachtelhund would be my picks for what you stated.

never heard of them can you tell me more?


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Originally Posted by ryoushi
If you're doing a lot of hunting for fur and the dog is retrieving, take a look a the Deutch Drathaar. You'll want a dog that can defend itself and dispatch wounded critters then bring it back to you like it's the king of the world. That would be a DD.
those are one of the few i have heard of but i have a hard time beliving some of the stuff you hear. whice i run hounds most of the time i just named beaver and muskrat becuse i heard a guy talking about a game call that would work on beaver and muskrats. it was easier to bag a few for the table then trapping. so mostly looking for something that can take cold water and fish game out after the kill shot


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Originally Posted by jonboy900
Originally Posted by ryoushi
If you're doing a lot of hunting for fur and the dog is retrieving, take a look a the Deutch Drathaar. You'll want a dog that can defend itself and dispatch wounded critters then bring it back to you like it's the king of the world. That would be a DD.
those are one of the few i have heard of but i have a hard time beliving some of the stuff you hear. whice i run hounds most of the time i just named beaver and muskrat becuse i heard a guy talking about a game call that would work on beaver and muskrats. it was easier to bag a few for the table then trapping. so mostly looking for something that can take cold water and fish game out after the kill shot


I can’t think of anything that can take cold/rough water conditions like a Chesapeake. Those dogs are tough!

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The DD's are great dogs but I would not suggest for an inexperienced owner.

Start with a good lab

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Add to the Boykin and Wach. the AWS it is the kind of work it was bred for, it was the trappers/market hunters dog of the north country. Turkeys can be trained, they are pretty good in big water also, I hunted the major estuaries of the PNW and inland reservoirs for waterfowl pheasants, quail, grouse and woodcock.. Her ashes are buried on the shores of Grey's Harbor and made her last big water retrieve at 14.

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Originally Posted by wilkeshunter
Originally Posted by jonboy900
Originally Posted by ryoushi
If you're doing a lot of hunting for fur and the dog is retrieving, take a look a the Deutch Drathaar. You'll want a dog that can defend itself and dispatch wounded critters then bring it back to you like it's the king of the world. That would be a DD.
those are one of the few i have heard of but i have a hard time beliving some of the stuff you hear. whice i run hounds most of the time i just named beaver and muskrat becuse i heard a guy talking about a game call that would work on beaver and muskrats. it was easier to bag a few for the table then trapping. so mostly looking for something that can take cold water and fish game out after the kill shot


I can’t think of anything that can take cold/rough water conditions like a Chesapeake. Those dogs are tough!

cool the only one i had seen was one that belonged to a lady my grandma lived next door to. it was just a pet but it seemed like it take some time to use to us. can you give me some idea what they are like as far as handling and tranining, and how they are around livestook and other pets.


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Originally Posted by erich
Add to the Boykin and Wach. the AWS it is the kind of work it was bred for, it was the trappers/market hunters dog of the north country. Turkeys can be trained, they are pretty good in big water also, I hunted the major estuaries of the PNW and inland reservoirs for waterfowl pheasants, quail, grouse and woodcock.. Her ashes are buried on the shores of Grey's Harbor and made her last big water retrieve at 14.


ok if that means american water spniel i looked it up. seems they were breed for water wor pluse upland game and fur bears have you seen or heard that?


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Like Wilks mentioned...

Most of the breeds mentioned are likely to come out on the short end if a kicking Beaver gets a chance to grab on....no place for a Springer, AWS or Boykin, And a waterlogged Beaver will test the retrieving weight limit of all three. It may take a Kangal...


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[quote=battue]Like Wilks mentioned...

Most of the breeds mentioned are likely to come out on the short end if a kicking Beaver gets a chance to grab on....no place for a Springer, AWS or Boykin, And a waterlogged Beaver will test the retrieving weight limit of all three. It may take a Kangal... lol i know of a guy in far nourth tha has a black lab that hunts beaver ever year with little or no problems


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Well a Lab isn't anyone of the three I mentioned, and the Kangal was tongue in cheek....LOL... And most are not up to handling a Kangal anyway.....

Seems like your first thought is the answer.....Get a Lab from his stock.....

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Originally Posted by battue
Well a Lab isn't anyone of the three I mentioned, and the Kangal was tongue in cheek....LOL... And most are not up to handling a Kangal anyway.....

Seems like your first thought is the answer.....Get a Lab from his stock.....
i only queston the lab becuse i head mixed things on how well they do for turkey


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Labs are trained to sit quietly in the blind....no reason they wouldn't naturally flush Turkeys, or that it would be a problem having them sit quietly while you called one in. Labs easily retrieve Geese, so a Turkey should not be a problem..

Not uncommon to find others using Labs in the Uplands...A good one will take after Turkeys the same as it would Pheasants....

An average adult Beaver will go 50 pounds, dry....again, as much as I like the small Spaniels, scratch them off the list....

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Originally Posted by battue
Labs are trained to sit quietly in the blind....no reason they wouldn't naturally flush Turkeys, or that it would be a problem having them sit quietly while you called one in. Labs easily retrieve Geese, so a Turkey should not be a problem..

Not uncommon to find others using Labs in the Uplands...A good one will take after Turkeys the same as it would Pheasants....

An average adult Beaver will go 50 pounds, dry....again, as much as I like the small Spaniels, scratch them off the list....

the thing i heard was getting to bark when they best a flock


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Originally Posted by byd
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can you even find one anymore that not had the hunt breed out of them


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When they “bust” a flock you will know...it is not a quiet event and most often there is a visual going on also..

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A good lab can do a lot of work.

That said, I would send my neighbors dog after a beaver unless I was 100% sure it was dead. A beaver can flat fugk up a dog, especially in the water.


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Originally Posted by jonboy900
Originally Posted by wilkeshunter
Originally Posted by jonboy900
Originally Posted by ryoushi
If you're doing a lot of hunting for fur and the dog is retrieving, take a look a the Deutch Drathaar. You'll want a dog that can defend itself and dispatch wounded critters then bring it back to you like it's the king of the world. That would be a DD.
those are one of the few i have heard of but i have a hard time beliving some of the stuff you hear. whice i run hounds most of the time i just named beaver and muskrat becuse i heard a guy talking about a game call that would work on beaver and muskrats. it was easier to bag a few for the table then trapping. so mostly looking for something that can take cold water and fish game out after the kill shot


I can’t think of anything that can take cold/rough water conditions like a Chesapeake. Those dogs are tough!

cool the only one i had seen was one that belonged to a lady my grandma lived next door to. it was just a pet but it seemed like it take some time to use to us. can you give me some idea what they are like as far as handling and tranining, and how they are around livestook and other pets.


I have never owned one, but have had friends that did. The are certainly smart, but a bit strong willed and somewhat hard headed. They can be darn protective, but should fit into most any setting that they are raised in. I sure wouldn’t want to piss one off, as they are a very physically powerful breed. Like many breeds, they have a cult like following among their owners. All this said, I have seen a few that are easygoing, and accept strangers easily. Go to a field trial or hunt test and talk with some owners/handlers about them.

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Originally Posted by MadMooner
A good lab can do a lot of work.

That said, I would send my neighbors dog after a beaver unless I was 100% sure it was dead. A beaver can flat fugk up a dog, especially in the water.


Without any doubt...a Beaver with some life left is a different fight than a wing tipped Goose on the ground.

I’ve seen a Groundhog mess up a Dog-although I had one that killed them rather easily-and a Raccoon take the fight out of one rather quickly. I have little doubt I wouldn’t want my Dog latched onto a Beaver that decided to go home..

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We have a lot of river otters here. That's a critter I will never let my dog in the water after.
She's retrieved a couple of nutria before luckily without incident. Though my buddy's Patterdale terrier, a much smaller dog, got torn up by one pretty badly.

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Originally Posted by longarm
We have a lot of river otters here. That's a critter I will never let my dog in the water after.
She's retrieved a couple of nutria before luckily without incident. Though my buddy's Patterdale terrier, a much smaller dog, got torn up by one pretty badly.


No kidding. Otter = 20+ pound water leopard. Not too long ago a grandma and grandson inadvertently got too close to an otter while swimming in a river out here.

Otter put an azz whoopin’ on both of them. Grandma ended up with a hundred or two stitches and the otter swam off with her eyeball. shocked


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My last lab would retrieve (and kill, if he could) beavers, and could trail anything. He was unusual for most labs in the ‘kill fur’ department....hated wild fur bearers of any sort. Never had any trouble with otters or otters vs dogs here, although we have lots of them. Generally, we don’t provoke them, and nothing prevents us from seriously discouraging or ending one that got aggressive, if need be. Spend more time worrying over gators when I’m in the Louisiana coastal zones.

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Originally Posted by hh4whiskey
My last lab would retrieve (and kill, if he could) beavers, and could trail anything. He was unusual for most labs in the ‘kill fur’ department....hated wild fur bearers of any sort. Never had any trouble with otters or otters vs dogs here, although we have lots of them. Generally, we don’t provoke them, and nothing prevents us from seriously discouraging or ending one that got aggressive, if need be. Spend more time worrying over gators when I’m in the Louisiana coastal zones.

do you know what line he was from?


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Sadly, other than knowing he had some British lineage, I don’t know exactly. That one was gifted me by a breeder after one of my brittanies passed, I wasn’t too worried about papers/pedigree at that time, and wasn’t sure he wanted him registered, since he was free.....and I got him for a farm companion, while planning to buy another one for hunting. When I realized a few months later that he was full of potential, the owner had passed away, and I was loathe to bring it up with his widow, and lost touch with her over the years. Hindsight, THAT was a bigger oversight than I ever imagined.....best hunting AND family lab I’ve had in 40 years of dealing with dogs. He had initiative and judgement, an unbelievable nose, and a three way switch: off/full blast bird machine/kill bad things. LOL

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Putting a dog in the water after an otter or especially a beaver
is like hunting African lions with dogs. It's been done, it works,
But don't do it with a dog you really want to bring home.

Raccoons have been known to beat a dog in the water, and
they aren't the water animals either of the above are.


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I’d agree, as a rule of thumb, and I wouldn’t send him n a beaver, unless it was stone dead, and dead a while.....and never on an otter. That’d be insanity....mini water badger. However, he’d jump a beaver you never saw and kill it, dug out and killed huge ground hogs, ran into packs of coyotes and slung coyotes 6’ in the air, would kill a big boar raccoon before you could blink.....he had a ‘thing’ for that, unlike any lab I’ve ever had. Glad he never got mixed up with the bobcats around here, though. He left out one night after a pack of coyotes, and I had two dead ones in the yard the next morning......but temperament of a service dog around people or other dogs. He even ran loose at my Uncle’s Veterinary clinic.....could mediate all the cats and dogs in the waiting room....or let them all out at night, too. LOL

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Wire haired pointing Griffon, the 4x4 of hunting dogs, PUDELPOINTER is great but a little high strung, we have one.

The Drahtar’s are great dogs but as said earlier in the posts, for the experienced handler. Definitely a dog you would want to have trained.


We had our PUDELPOINTER trained at Quinebaug Kennels, Jennifer Broome’s operation in Connecticut.

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So your recommendation for pulling Beavers, Otters and such out of the water is Griffs and Pudelpointers?

The training to do either would be interesting...Perhaps start them out on muzzled/declawed Badgers before getting into the water work....The Badger would probably still come out on top...

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Originally Posted by battue
So your recommendation for pulling Beavers, Otters and such out of the water is Griffs and Pudelpointers?

The training to do either would be interesting...Perhaps start them out on muzzled/declawed Badgers before getting into the water work....The Badger would probably still come out on top...


Yep......This thread has gotten a bit weird.

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Originally Posted by battue
So your recommendation for pulling Beavers, Otters and such out of the water is Griffs and Pudelpointers?

The training to do either would be interesting...Perhaps start them out on muzzled/declawed Badgers before getting into the water work....The Badger would probably still come out on top...


so true

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Originally Posted by jonboy900
those are one of the few i have heard of but i have a hard time beliving some of the stuff you hear. whice i run hounds most of the time i just named beaver and muskrat becuse i heard a guy talking about a game call that would work on beaver and muskrats. it was easier to bag a few for the table then trapping. so mostly looking for something that can take cold water and fish game out after the kill shot


The woods, lakes and streams would need to be devoid of pretty much anything else for me to decide to eat beaver and muskrat on anything but a money on the table bet. sick

Good luck on your pup quest though.


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And he went into the water, killed it, or not, but into the water and carried it up onto the land?


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It was the last one he retrieved. Obviously, that one was too big for him to ‘kill’, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. First we knew of it was the dog on back of the beaver, in about 2.5-3’ of water, biting it all over the head.....beaver finally spun out from under the dog, made a run back towards the lodge, and son (in pic) shot it when it went by. You can see the water got shallow quick there, and I think it just had one run/ditch to work with, or it was out of its element. Dog drug it out and up there by me. He killed small beavers, but that’s probably the biggest beaver I’ve ever personally seen.....and yeah, the big ones are bad news, but the dog didn’t know/care.

Not sure if you can see, but there’s a vertical scar on his snout, where a ground hog got a claw clean through his upper lip, while he was nose on to it in a burrow. He racked up some stitches on that one.

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Bad ass...

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Originally Posted by battue
Like Wilks mentioned...

Most of the breeds mentioned are likely to come out on the short end if a kicking Beaver gets a chance to grab on....no place for a Springer, AWS or Boykin, And a waterlogged Beaver will test the retrieving weight limit of all three. It may take a Kangal...


I'm with Battue...Use enough dog. I would not send any of my springers to retrieve a beaver and an AWS or Boykin isn't any bigger/tougher. I'd vote chessy or a lab. Years ago I had a chocolate that didn't care if something had feathers or fur. If I shot it, she was going to get it. Took an incidental deer while duck hunting one day. While it wasn't my intent to use the dog, she ran into the brush and held onto it for a close finishing shot. Wouldn't chase fur unless the gun went off.

ETA- There's some posts somewhere about a guy hunting seals for tablefare. I think it was Norway. Anyhow he snipes seals from the beach and uses a lab to retrieve them. Said that you couldn't send the dog until they were dead or they'd kill the dog.

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^^^^

Sure. None of my current labs are the game-aggressive bruiser that that dog was. He was 95# of solid athlete, and was 11 or 12 years old in that last picture....too old for that crap, and why we raced to try to kill that beaver as soon as they’d separate enough for safety. My current dogs are in the 65-75# class, and while plenty athletic, they’ve not shown that ‘killer’ gene, outside a gopher rat. LOL I’m sure they’d retrieve fur, but it would 100% need to be stone dead. You’d need a dog that could handle things whenever Murphy showed/plans went bad....and that’s a bigger dog, period. That dog was an outlier for what I’m used to with waterfowl dogs, and none of it was something I had anything to do with....it was just his natural nature.

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Find an old line of big Wirehaired Pointing Griffons. The original breed was designed perfectly for your purposes, and they are great upland gundogs as a bonus.

What abbydog said!

"Wire haired pointing Griffon, the 4x4 of hunting dogs"

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Acquit v. t. To render a judgment in a murder case in San Francisco... EQUAL, adj. As bad as something else. Ambrose Bierce “The Devil's Dictionary”







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