Avoiding
Gunshyness

Avoiding Gunshyness written by Butch Goodwin        of                      Northern Flight Retrievers   The Retriever Journal Jun./July  2005     Don't forget to look at all of your training techniques. Some people are careful to expose their dog to load noises at distances, overlooking those times when it's fired off right over their heads.

Tug arrived at my kennel a few weeks back. He is a good-looking, well-built Labrador that loves to work; he retrieves well, loves to hunt birds in the field, always delivers to hand, and is extremely obedient. His owner explained to me that he used one of the more popular training books to train him, and from seeing how well the dog performs, he’s done a really good job with Tug’s fundamental training.

But Tug has a huge problem. He wasn’t sent here to work on marking or to learn to run blind retrieves and handle. Tug was sent here to try to cure an extreme case of gunshyness. At the mere sight of a cap pistol, Tug begins to shake and drool, and if he sees someone carrying a shotgun, he turns his head away and curls himself into a ball on the ground. And the worst problem is, it’s not Tug’s fault. His owner realizes that he created the problem.

Let me explain how this happened: Tug’s owner lives not too far from the Sacramento Valley area of California. For anyone not familiar with the waterfowl hunting in this area, the Sacramento Valley is a duck magnet. This area is pocked with members-only duck hunting clubs and farms that lease out hunting rights. In large measure, what attracts the waterfowl are the rice patties that dot the vicinity - ducks love them.

Between each of the shallow sections where rice grows are dikes or dams called "checks" for controlling the water levels. It is a common practice to sink concrete tubes and boxes into these rice checks for use as pit blinds. Since there is often little or no tall vegetation on the checks for a hunter to hide, these pits put the hunters below ground level, out of sight. When the ducks pitch in, the hunter slides away the covering, stands up, and shoots.

This is how Tug was made gunshy. his owner had him lying down on the dike next to the pit, and when he stood up to shoot, Tug sat up from his lying down position, and his owner fired, with the muzzle of the shotgun about a foot from the dog’s head. Tug made a beeline for the truck and hid. You see, Tug’s owner had ne’ver shot close to him before this incident. It never occurred to him to think that nearby gunfire would affect the dog; the book that he was using hadn’t suggested that a dog needed to be acclimated to close gunfire.

So, now I have Tug at my kennel - a really nice and well-trained dog hut totally worthless as a gun dog unless we can cure the problem. From Tug’s demeanor when he simply sees a gun, I don’t think this one is going to be easy.

Pups don’t come from the womb being gunshy, but neither do they come from the womb being acclimated to gunfire. In large measure, gunshyness is a man-made problem - just like in Tug’s case - that almost always can be avoided. With that said, I’ll concede that dogs from some breedings might he born with an inherited predisposition for apprehension or nervousness. Combine that with something scaring or startling them, usually early in their lives, and this can also cause gunshyness to develop. And, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a gun that scares them. Thunderstorms, fireworks, firecrackers, workers using a compressed-air nail gun, and too close to the shooting at a trap or rifle range are major catalysts, among a lengthy list, that can develop into gunshyness. Think of it this way: Guns will play a major role in the future training and life’s work of your hunting dog, so it is absolutely imperative that a pup be introduced to gunfire in a sensible manner. Introducing a pup to gunfire and taking steps to avoid gunshyness are far and away much easier than having to correct the problem after it has already developed, so let me pass along some ideas for introducing a dog to guns right from the very outset.

Maybe you aren’t a breeder, hut if you are - or if you ever have any aspirations of breeding a litter of hunting dog puppies - let me start with you. The best time to begin acclimation to the sound of a gun is when pups are in a group-type situation with their littermates; there is strength in numbers! And, it gives the breeder a chance to recognize any pups that might show an inherent "spookiness," which could develop into a potential problem. The best way to introduce a litter of pups to gunfire is to associate it with something positive - like eating or chasing a shackled pigeon.

Here is my suggestion: When the pups are weaned and outside, put their food down, or, if they have already been introduced to live birds, drop a clipped-wing pigeon into the pen; when they dive into the food or get engrossed with chasing the pigeon, walk off to a distance of about 20 yards or so and fire off several shots from a blank pistol. It is likely that because of their preoccupation with eating, or chasing the bird, you’ll see no reaction whatsoever.

By watching them closely, it gives the breeder the opportunity to see which pups show interest in the new noise and are willing to leave the food or bird to investigate. It also tells the breeder if any pups pull away from the food or the bird and tend to shy away from the sound of the shots. If a breeder will follow this same scenario every day, perhaps inching a bit closer each time, by the time the pups go to their new homes, they will have a legup toward being acclimated to gunfire.

If the breeder that you got your pup from didn’t have the foresight to begin to introduce his pups to gunshots, what do you do? The answer is: use common sense. Start your young dog in a similar manner to what I described above - associate the initial gunshots with something positive that they can get preoccupied with, such as birds or food or retrieving, and have someone walk off and shoot at a distance. It is best to gradually introduce your dog to gunfire, preferably using a gun that produces only a minimal sound level. Start with a cap gun at about 20 yards or so, and move closer and closer to elevate the sound level of the shots. Then graduate to a .22 blank pistol or a pistol firing shotgun primers, and move out to a distance of 40 yards; again, gradually decrease the distance as the dog shows that it doesn’t bother him.

Eventually, you want to he able to fire a 12-gauge shotgun at about 40 yards or so and move closer, in about 10 yard increments. But through all of this, you need to keep a very close eye on your dog’s attitude - if he shows any signs of looking away or cowering, move farther away and don’t begin moving closer until he appears comfortable with shots going off at the greater distance. If this is done right, your dog should begin to relate the sound of a gun going off to the excitement of something positive or the reward of retrieving.

Other things to consider when conditioning your dog to gunfire: Don’t forget that a gas-powered bumper launcher is a firearm that is often louder than a blank pistol. I once trained with a fellow whose dog cowered away and flattened himself on the ground each time he loaded his handheld bumper launcher. The young man had even gone so far as to tie the dog to his belt to get him to sit up and watch the flight of the bumper, but this just worsened the problem - the dog began ducking his head between his owner’s legs or behind him.

When he asked me for advice about how to cure his dog from lying down before he shot the bumper, I asked and was shocked to find out that he had never acclimated his dog to gunshots and had never even considered that his dog was being made gunshy to some degree by something as simple and as common as a bumper launcher.

Dogs must he conditioned to the report from one of these launchers in the same manner that they are conditioned to a shot from any other gun. Many trainers harbor the belief that if their dog is conditioned to a shotgun or blank pistol going off at a distance, then he should also he conditioned to the blast from one of these gas-powered launchers up close. So, often without thinking, they fire the launcher right next to the dog’s head and he flinches away. Then the next time they take the launcher out, he starts trying to hide before they ever get it loaded.

Over the years, several dogs have come to my kennel because they seemed to have developed a degree of gunshyness. As it turned out, some of these dogs weren’t really gunshy, in the usual sense. They seemed to be scared of the gun itself not the noise. The sight of someone holding a shotgun nearby would cause them to cower or want to flatten out on the ground. But once the gun was fired, they were up and looking around for something to retrieve. Is it that the dog perceives the nearby gun as some sort of a stick and they are afraid of getting hit? That is the best explanation that I can find, so I term this condition as being "stick shy" or "hand shy" rather than gunshy.

I don’t know why some dogs show this tendency, because it often seems that when someone other then the trainer was holding a shotgun and firing it, they show no adverse reaction whatsoever to the noise or the sight of the gun. And they also showed little or no reaction to the sight or the noise from a blank pistol shot by the trainer rather close by.

I have no choice but to surmise that perhaps their owner’s had been too heavy-handed with them at some point, and the next time they saw some thing resembling a stick in anyone’s hand, book, The Working Retrievers, Tom Quinn writes, "An old dog adage allows, "The first three whacks are for the benefit of the dog, any more than that is for the benefit of the man." Your threatening stance - with arm raised - can result in flinching and hand-shyness." Think about this the next time you feel your blood pressure going up - you could he creating a potentially larger problem that later may have to be corrected.

The jury is still out on Tug. He has only been here for a few weeks and, at this point, we have made only minimal progress at curing his gunshyness. We continue to work on the problem in a positive manner every day and have even tried one of those cassette tapes, which is purported to eliminate gunshyness. I would like to think that he is getting better, hut I have a feeling that this is going to be a long process. And I fear that when he goes home, if he associates hunting on the rice check with the shots that scared him to begin with, it may all come flooding back to haunt him. I guess time will tell.