Welcome

According to my wife, my hobby, disease or "affliction" as she calls it is training bird dogs.

I enjoy training bird dogs. My own dogs simply are not enough to train. I keep 2-3 that I like to hunt over, and sell the rest.

Thus, I occasionally offer a finished dog or two for sale. Helps pay for dog and horse feed expenses. They will be advertised as they come available.

After buying puppies from others and training them to sell I have come to the conclusion that I am better off raising my own litters. I keep the whole litter and train them. That is next in 2026-2027.

I define a finished dog as. Steady to Wing, Shot and Fall and retrieve to hand and dog must honor another dogs point.

I prefer to encourage a natural retrieve, but will force break when needed. I wont breed a bird dog that does not show a natural inclination to fetch. A dog that wont fetch is about useless to hunt over.

A dog not trained to this level is not finished.

Quite often dogs lacking this level of training for whatever reason are referred to euphemistically as "started".

If you are looking for a "started" dog. There are a lot of folks out there that will eagerly fall all over themselves to sell you a "started" dog.

Please contact them and do ask them to specifically define exactly what "started" means. Let the buyer beware.

The tools I use are simple. Carded feral pigeons that I trap, and sweat equity check cording dogs "Around birds but not always ON birds".

No barrels, boards or fishing poles nor any other sort of gimmicks. I never ever say the word WHOA to a dog. Spooks the birds all that hollering whoa, whoa, whoa.

I finally bought two remote launchers and a remote backing dog. I am not a huge fan of launchers, I prefer carded birds. But launchers come in handy working on backing by myself.

I am not a salesman. So I take videos and post them in public on You Tube, Facebook and here. I have nothing to hide. I am certainly not any sort of movie star and my language can be a little rough. So, I take out sound except for the wind.

My videos are made to sell a dog. If any training ideas can be gleaned from them, great, but that is not the intended purpose.

I do have a Facebook page that I post training progress, updates, my training schedule and my and others thoughts on dog training occasionally.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61560822600806

I will always be grateful to Bill Gibbons, Bill West, Maurice Lindley and Mike Jones.

An old, but good video of Bill West shows the training concept I use. I call it Old School West/Gibbons. Grab a soda and sit down and watch it several times.

Bill West

I have modified those techniques a little over the years due to working dogs alone most of the time. You can train a dog with no help, takes longer, but it can be done. I tend to burn out training partners pretty quick...



Thank you for looking.
Idylwyld Bird Dogs
D. Chilson