Shed hunting dogs

I see more and more of this each year. My question is does anyone know any tricks to train one? I have a 4 year old Shorthair trained for upland hunting would it be ok to try to train her, or bad idea? Any tips would be great thanks you much!

John,
I was going to answer your pm, but figured that I would just answer here as I’ve been getting some pm’s wondering about training a shed dog.

I started BB at 8 weeks old on her antler training but I’m sure an older dog can be taught the same way. I started with scent recognition by sticking a fresh shed (that was free of human scent) in front of her nose before every feeding. I would just let her smell it and say “shed” then let her eat. I figured that this would reinforce the shed as being a good thing associated with food.

As far as searching for them, I started by hiding sheds in easy to find spots around the house. Then progressively hid them in tougher spots and even started placing them under dirty shirts to force her to really use her nose to find them. Once she seemed to get the hang of it I started tossing them around the house in tall grass and the woods and then just working her downwind of where they layed. That is pretty much all that I did with BB for training. In season I let her pick up every shed that I find and just give lots of praise and usually a chunk of Jerky for motivation.

One thing that I never do is let her play with antlers around the house. I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination but I feel that it would be easy to create “antler boredom” in a dog if they get to chew on them around the house. In my mind the antler is a special treat and it should be something special for the dog to help keep their hunt drive high.

Best of luck with your dog and hopefully this will give you a starting point on your training work. If nothing else it’s alot of fun to have a hiking partner, and the spring can be a great time for your dog to work birds too. Yesterday a buddy and I walked two farms and didn’t find a single shed, but BB flushed a couple grouse and probably around 50 or 60 woodcock so she had a ball

Thank you for sharing that info Shednut!!!

I posted this after I sent you a pm thinking that there might be other wondering some info on it as well. I’m going to play around with it with my German Shorthair a little bit, and see if she takes to it or not. I know that she knows that birds fly and tennis balls are green It will be interesting to see if she takes to it at all. Thanks again for the info.

Thanks shednut for your insight! Very good read.