Hot hunting dog on a cold and frosty day
WHAT is it about dogs and cold weather? My spaniel is not at all keen on rain and pokes her head reluctantly out of the back door to check how hard it is coming down before venturing out. A downpour is enough to keep her indoors, at least until persuaded out by the promise of a proper walk.
But open the door on a cold and frosty morning – especially if the sun is shining – and even if it is five below, she’s out and running around the lawn like a canine possessed. Maybe it is something about the sheer joy of being out in the sharp cold air; maybe its the crunch of the frosty grass under her feet – but she spins about like a mad thing.
As a gundog she’s a nose down sort of girl, but scenting conditions in a hard frost are notoriously poor. We regularly walk a piece of ground where the long grass and seed-bearing plants make great cover for everything from farmland birds to pheasants.
When the ground is hard and every plant carries a mantle of hard white frost she can almost stand on a pheasant before it breaks cover and searching for the training dummy is clearly much more testing for her scenting skills in a freeze-up.
Dogs rely on their noses much more than their eyes when hunting. Close to the ground she cannot see much more than a few feet in front and will cover a piece of ground back and forth for several minutes searching for her bright red training dummy when I – with an eye-line around six feet above – can clearly see it in the grass. I’m sure she would find a freshly shot game bird – something she was bred to do – much more quickly. In fact after a few throws and retrieves of the dummy her ability to get right to it improves; I guess she is putting her own scent and the scent of my hands on it and, as it warms up, it becomes easier to pick out in the thick cover.
Dog walking is good for a spaniel but taking something to throw, hide and generally keep the hound occupied is much better. A professional trainer once told me if you take your dog for a five-mile walk every day all you will have is a fit dog. Add in some games en-route and you get a much more biddable and mentally stimulated pup.
We’ve not had any snow to speak of hereabouts so far this winter, but when the Beast from the East struck a couple of years back, the dog was beside herself with glee powering through snowdrifts. The only downside is frozen snow tends to ‘ball-up’ in her paws and every few yards she had to sit down to try to pull it out with her teeth.
Nice to see something so enthusiastic about the cold, though.