00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation’s podcast. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about road trips in search of hunting adventure with our four legged counterparts. How to make them go smoothly because sometimes they don’t. Tis the season to load up the pups and point your truck somewhere wild and birdy. This month, all kinds of upland and waterfall seasons will open up, and a hell of a lot of us will head out somewhere for a little feathery adventure. Some of us won’t have a good time, though, and that might be because of just like little issues, or it might be because something goes catastrophically wrong, which is obviously no bueno. But a lot of what goes wrong could be preemptively avoided. You have to know how. That’s what I’m going to talk about right now. There are two things that I’ve done a lot for my writing career. Done a lot of traveling. I’ve done a lot of camping, often together, as you can imagine, since I wasn’t just chilling in my backyard in a tent. I don’t know how to frame this up any other way, but to highlight what a lot means to me. In the context of camping and traveling, I’ll say this, I average driving about twenty five thousand miles a year, and since I work from home, there is no work commute in the mix. It’s mostly miles for some kind of over the road trip on the camping front, which has thankfully slowed down a lot in recent years. I might spend anywhere from about ten to twenty twenty five days in a tent, but it used to be around forty to fifty for quite a few years. And let me tell you that the novelty of tent life wears off pretty quickly when you start hitting some big numbers there. Now, in case you’re wondering, none of that was glamping Kardashian style.
00:01:48
Speaker 2: All of that is.
00:01:49
Speaker 1: To say that I feel like I’m well equipped to talk about the pitfalls of travel in many forms, and quite a bit of my over the road time involves taking my dog somewhere, you know, which is track with an asterisk. You might be thinking about this very thing right now, considering that upland and waterfall seasons are opening up like crazy, and sometimes travel is not just a means to a unique experience, but a true coping mechanism to facilitate hunting that you can no longer get close to home for some reason.
00:02:16
Speaker 2: There are a lot of.
00:02:17
Speaker 1: Reasons to head out on the road. So let’s start with something that needs to be said. Do you need to travel with your dog to shoot some birds?
00:02:24
Speaker 2: Probably not. A lot of people have no desire. And that’s great.
00:02:28
Speaker 1: Some people, and I know this to be true because they reach out to me a lot love the idea of traveling somewhere to hunt some birds, but are hung up on actually making it happen. There is nothing to say to them, but either you know, get over it or don’t. But it’s best to get over it and just take the plunge. I think a good way to look at life, and you know, in this particular instance life with a dog is to think about if your dog could talk, and if it could and you said, hey, buddy, you want to head over to Kansas to try to shoot some roosters and quail. What do you think that dog would say? You think that dog would go? I don’t know what if the truck breaks down, or the weather sucks, or the birds just start as thick as we like them, you know, And we drive all the way for roosters, and we could just buy them at the game farm down the road.
00:03:12
Speaker 2: No, your dog’s not gonna say that.
00:03:14
Speaker 1: Your dog is going to say hell yes and then run straight through the wall like the kool aid Man. The biggest hang up that hunters usually have when they hit this contemplation stage is an obvious one. Where should I hunt? The thing about this is we always try to default to what should be easy, what should be you know, a sure thing for success? That lodge in South Dakota that promises pheasant limits without hardly burning a calorie, Or the quail hunt in the southeast somewhere where the covees all contain familiar birds, and the whole thing isn’t a foregone conclusion, but is so close you might not be able to tell the difference. Should you do those hunts? Honestly, I don’t care you do you boo? I just think that a lot of people don’t want to do those hunts for a variety of reasons. I’ll tell you a few of mine, since no one asked. I don’t want to hunt with strangers ever, not even a little bit. In fact, if you said you have to hunt pheasants with two strangers for an hour, or choose option B, which is a cattle prod to your junk pile for an hour while we shoot you with paintballs. I’d have to seriously consider it. There is also the cost factor, which can’t be ignored, and of course the reality that some people just want to forge their own path and spend time walking behind their dog and letting the whole thing play out without outside influence. Count me in that camp, and if you are too, you’re still going to be like, well, where the hell should I hunt now? I’m not going to break this down as granular as I could, but let me say this, there are a hell of a lot of birds out there on public land in the hell of a lot of different states. If you understand the basics about what birds should need as far as cover and food, and you have on X on your phone, you’re pretty close to where you need to be already, well sort of. I guess what a lot of people don’t get as this, especially you know if they’re used to hunting private land or have years of experience on properties that they know close to their house, is this is going to take some work to get on the birds on the road.
00:05:11
Speaker 2: It just will. But that’s okay. That’s the best part for a lot of.
00:05:14
Speaker 1: Folks, because when your dog does flush some sharpies or woodcock or whatever in an unfamiliar environment, that feeling is pretty damn sweet. But you have to get over the intimidation factor. How I did it was by being too stubborn and stupid to not believe what I would eventually find something. No matter where I traveled with my dogs, you know what, it almost always worked, even on trips. It took a while to get the old engine turned over, it eventually did, and some birds hit the ground and things turned positive after enough miles and enough head scratching. The main thing here is that you will hear a lot of people say that traveling to wherever isn’t worth it because there aren’t any birds left on public land here or there or whatever. Those people are probably woefully misinformed, even if they speak with a lot of confidence. I see this constantly with birds. I see it with deer in Western game and fishing opportunities and everything. Most people are either just lying to gatekeeping opportunity or they genuinely don’t know. I guess the main thing that puts me on birds in these situations. Besides, just going is not believing what I hear from people or what I read on forms or whatever. A lot of hunters aren’t all that into putting in real work to find birds, and a lot of those hunters think they know what’s going on, but they don’t, and if you listen to them, you’re gonna get a false read on the situation. You got to believe that the birds are out there for you, because they are, and if you can’t find them.
00:06:38
Speaker 2: You just got to switch things up.
00:06:40
Speaker 1: This is mostly a matter of doing what other hunters don’t or won’t, and that might mean hiking farther huntings, thicker cover, hunting during the week and not the weekends. There are many ways to skin the old cat here. Now there’s another aspect of e scouting that you should consider as well. Before you head into new ground. Pay attention to the property and whether it borders a busy road on the backside, which could be a potential danger, and look for homesteads around it where your dog might grab the attention of a farm dog that doesn’t take too kindly to a stranger coming into his territory. We get focused on identifying the most birdy looking spots, but it’s also a good idea to pay attention to the danger zones you can identify and then plan your routes accordingly. This is just a small warning, but the important part is to understand that you can find good hunting spots on your phone, and if you do, you’ll have a pattern to run wherever you are, which is a pre fricking suite. So okay, that hype song is played out. Now you might be thinking about what could go wrong on your trip, and.
00:07:48
Speaker 2: There is a lot.
00:07:50
Speaker 1: You could get a flat tire, which means you should have some fix a flat and a workable spare, and of course the knowledge on how to change a tire. I guess all simple easy preparation stuff there that sort of that’s the tone for this whole thing. But what about this? Your dog could get sick? This one is calmon. It’s almost always due to a couple of different things. Your dog could, for example, drink some water that doesn’t agree with it, which if you’ve ever gotten Manazuma’s revenge in Mexico, you understand I did once back in my drinking days. And let me tell you something. When it hits and you’re sleeping, You’re going to wake up real fast and you’ll be real happy that your hotel room has tile floors and that your wife is a heavy sleeper. Anyway, they might also you eat something on the road that makes your dog sick too, roadkill or three day old sandwich in the alley behind the hotel.
00:08:38
Speaker 2: You just never know.
00:08:39
Speaker 1: And if you’ve ever eaten anything that gave you food poisoning, like maybe at a Christmas party for your work in college, and then you know the next day you have a very embarrassing situation happen in a larger grocery store, you know what I mean. But the main reason for dogs getting sick on the road is just stress. Sometimes you can’t avoid the water or the road killed that it finds or whatever, but stress is a big one. Some dogs travel well, some don’t. The first key to this, to avoiding it anyway, is just to have a healthy dog going into the journey, one that is fit, well fed, well hydrated, and just generally doing pretty well health wise. That’s a good state to keep your dogs in anyway, but can really be an asset when you decide to put five hundred miles in the rearview mirror and hunt with them for four or five days. There is another aspect of taking dogs down the road that we don’t often think of, but we probably should. That ties into health sleep. I’d say my number one issue with my personal travel is that there are very few trips I take where I’ll sleep better on the road than I would at home. The motel life or the tent life or the lodge life is generally not conducive to totally restorative sleep for us. Now imagine it from your dog’s perspective. They don’t know where they’re going. They will usually be hyped to the max because that’s their default mode, but that comes at a cost. I kept my older lab in pretty good shaper whole life, but one thing I could never figure out was how to get her to relax when we took off on our trips. This only got worse. So she started to figure out that we might be going on a bird hunting trip. She’d watch me pack and then be anxious, panting, pacing all night long. Part of that was anticipation of a hunt, I think, but part of it was her watching me pack for a trip she might not get to go on, which happened a lot and stressed her out more than anything else, you know, the old separation anxiety. I ended up having to pack either the morning of the trip or figure out a way to keep it a secret from her. I’m sure there are trainers who will listen to that, who will slap their foreheads in disgust. But by the time I figured out what was going on, it felt like it was too late to untie that knot.
00:10:43
Speaker 2: So I did the best I could.
00:10:44
Speaker 1: I do know that if Luna had not a great night of sleep, you know she was all keyed up, or you know, on that drive hours and hours where she was just running a little bit hotter because she knew where we were going, that I would eventually see her energy level flo flag not too deep into the trip.
00:11:02
Speaker 2: You know.
00:11:03
Speaker 1: Add in motel rooms or the tent life that not only keeps us restless and awake, but keeps a dog restless and awake, and you have the recipe for a dog that gases out way too early on a trip. Now, this is where our beliefs about dogs often don’t jive with reality. They are athletes in a way that’s hard for us to understand, but they’re also living, breathing creatures that have similar biological needs like we do. One of the things I learned after starting to work out a lot is that a bad night of sleep for me won’t affect me much the day after, but two days later it definitely will. I don’t know if that’s standard or unique to me, but I know that I feel it at the gym or during a run. It’s palpable. Your dog might only get, you know, eighty percent or fifty percent of the sleep it’s used to getting at home, and that’s going to change things. Then it comes down to realistic energy management and trying to find ways to facilitate better sleep. Little things like a noise machine app on your phone to override the noise of other people in your hotel opening and closing doors and talking in the hallways. And if you’re in a place with a lot of hunters other dogs barking.
00:12:08
Speaker 2: That can help a lot.
00:12:09
Speaker 1: If you can feed them on the same schedule you feed them at home and let them out for a pee break at the same times, that can help. Structure is good for dogs, and sticking to the routine as much as possible, you know, as long as it’s reasonable on the road just helps, but it’s also just our responsibility to read our dogs too. If on day four you’re exhausted, think about them. Maybe you don’t need to go from start to finish that day, burning it up during every minute illegal shooting hours. Instead, maybe you should just sleep in and keep it relaxed and head out at noon or want. I’ve started doing this when my dogs are burned up, and it’s an absolute game changer for pheasant hunting. Instead of getting a couple hours of energy and then a lot of hours of a slow burn, I can get a smaller window of really good energy out of my dogs when I want it the most in the afternoon and not continually burn my dogs to the ground. Look, it’s not ideal because a lot of us don’t really want to waste time not hunting when we’re on a hunting trip. But it’s also not fair to ask too much of them because they generally will try to deliver and they’ll generally fail, as we all would if the roles were reversed.
00:13:17
Speaker 2: Well.
00:13:17
Speaker 1: Lastly, it pays to remember that your dog will feed off of your energy on these trips. This might sound like woo woo bullshit, but I don’t think it is, and they neither do a lot of people who have way more experience working with dogs. If you’re stressed, they know it. If you’re frantically trying to walk out the seventh slew of the day because you don’t have a limit yet, it’s going to affect your dogs. This is supposed to be a fun adventure, and it can be exactly that, or it can be a stress filled grind where you go into terminator mode on the fear that you’ll have to return to work on Monday and tell your co workers that you drove all the way out there to only kill a cup a quail or a praier of chickens or whatever. A relaxed, calm hunter is a hunter who will shoot more birds if for no other reason than the dogs will recognize that vibe and match it to the best of their ability. I’ve said this a lot, but if you spend enough time with dog trainers who really know their stuff, you rarely encounter an edgy, nervous, over the top energy vibe from them. Yeah, almost always get the opposite. They are generally pretty calm, pretty confident, and just even keel. This is an accident and it’s not an act now. I honestly don’t know if it’s because those types of people are drawn to the profession or the profession molds those types of people and weeds out the people who can’t get there. Doesn’t really matter either way, but it is something we can try to emulate when we are in a highly dynamic environment with our dogs and everything is humming at a little higher frequency. This is important to remember because it will literally flavor your entire trip and can make it awesome or a total suckfest, not only for you but for your dogs. So have some fun with it. Take your time, slow down, plan out your routes, and try to learn from what you know the land and the it’s going to show you. It’s also a good idea to keep an open mind, especially if you go someplace where you might be able to shoot more than one species of bird. For example, I don’t know how many times I’ve had woodcock save a tough grouse hunt, or how fun it has been to realize that our peasant plans might not pan out, but that prairie chickens are far more available than we planned. Options are good and twitching from one bird to the other might not seem appealing when you’re planning a trip, but in the moment it certainly can be. And I can promise you this. Your dog won’t care if you’re having fun. They are having fun, and there are a lot of ways to ensure that happens. So consider this stuff if you’re heading out for a road trip this fall, and definitely consider this if you’re not heading out on a road trip this fall, because it might be entirely possible to make one happen. And if you do, and you anticipate some of the bigger hurdles, you’ll have the kind of trip that makes you want to take more trips, and that’s good for you and your dogs. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation’s podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all of your support everyone here at meat Eater. We truly appreciate it. We are nothing without you, guys, so thank you for that. If you want some more hunting content, I’m talking Western, big game, white tails, whatever the meadeater dot com has you covered. We literally drop new content every single day. We have really cool stuff coming out as far as films, we have a whole podcast network that is huge. Maybe you’re sick of listening to Me talk or cal Talk. You can head on over to the Bear Grease podcast and listen to Clay teach you something about the history of the US as it relates to coon dogs or something. Or you can check out Brent Reeves This Country Life podcast, which is one of my fight favorites because I love Brent and I could listen to that dude’s tell stories all day. Maybe you just need a recipe, maybe you need an article on something I don’t know. I do know that there is a health of information over at the mediator dot com. Go check it out and thank you again.
00:17:08
Speaker 2: H m hm
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