Man, I need to step it up on these blog posts if I’m gonna introduce the entire cast of characters before my trip next week!

On that note, I’m looking forward to sharing pictures and tales of my experience in South Dakota. I’m packing up Ricky, Eleanor and Jack and heading cross-country to meet up with some relatives for 3 days of pheasant hunting near Burke, South Dakota! It should be a blast and I’m looking forward to spending some time with my relatives and watching some good dogs find birds!

One more thing; I apologize for the lack of pics. My home laptop crapped out on me, and loading them via my IPad is a bit of a pain. I’ll add more later when I get up and running again.

So, on to the first good dog that will be making this trip with me – Ricky Bobby!

He is from TomBoy’s second litter, and I wanted a boy. Even if it didn’t make sense from a breeder’s perspective – since breeders are the ones that own the female and decide who she gets bred to and when – I wanted a boy. Shooter was approaching 14 at that point, we already had 2 girls with TomBoy and Emma Jane, and 1 other boy with Patriot – so it was time for a boy.

The litter had a Harry Potter theme, and Ricky was originally the Ron Weasley of the litter. All of them were pretty nice across the board. Several good boys and girls – but there was something special about Ron. While they all loved to play and crawl all over you, Ron was the only one that would do that, but would also be just as comfortable laying on his back in your lap and either snoozing or just looking up at you. When he wasn’t cuddling, he was pretty boisterous, though! We set up a kiddie pool with a bunch of plastic balls in it – the pups had fun, and it was also a good experience for them, got them used to noises and sensations and stuff like that. None of the puppies had any issue with the ball pit, they all enjoyed it. They’d all walk up to it, step in, and then mess around and chase balls and all that good stuff.

Ricky approached it differently. 

He’d go up to the side of the pool, look at it, and dive HEADFIRST into it, balls flying everywhere. He was all-in on the ballpit!

He was a lovable little pup; well built, plenty of bird drive, extremely friendly. It was a tough choice between him and Harry. Jen and I waffled back and forth on this for a while, as Harry had a lot of good qualities as well … but there was just something about Harry.

I still remember the moment we picked him. We had been looking over them in the dog run in our garage and were walking back into the house discussing what we should do. I looked at Jen and said “I know Harry is a really nice dog, and we won’t go wrong keeping either of them, but I have a really hard time thinking what it would be like to see someone drive off with Ron”

Jen immediately teared up at that image. And we both knew – Ron was the one.

So unlike the book series, in this case, Ron came out ahead of Harry.

His official name was actually kind of a joke. We were throwing ideas back and forth, when I just threw out, “How about SoCo’s I Wanna Go Fast, and we’ll call him Ricky Bobby?” Jen actually agreed to it, much to my surprise. I made sure we got the paperwork filed before she changed her mind. 😊

He’s likely the only dog we never had to teach to swim. He was officially Ricky Bobby by this point, and we took him out on our property with our older dogs. We had a pond, and it would be his first time seeing a real body of water, and we were just hoping for a nice intro to it, no real expectations.

So we let the dogs out the back door, the big ones all just started running and exploring as usual. Ricky came down the steps, headed to the pond, jumped right in, and swam all the way across.

Well then. I guess learning how to swim is taken care of.

He has turned into a pretty nice gun dog, albeit he’s also softer than I expected, and presented a few challenges while I was breaking him. I’ll stop right here and say that, if anyone tries to tell you that there is one, single, correct way of training a bird dog, they are dead wrong. Every dog I have trained has been different, and has been as much a learning process for me as it was for them. In Ricky’s case, he desperately wanted to do things right, and seemed to genuinely feel bad about it any time he did something wrong. That meant I needed to apply a very soft touch when working with him. That meant no e-collar. Yes, I use an e-collar for most of my field training, and have found it to be very effective and not at all overbearing or harsh in most cases. Through his own fault or my own, Ricky didn’t like the e-collar, so I did everything from breaking him to force-fetching him with a check cord and treats and pretty much only verbal correction.

Anyway, I don’t want to get too much into the training aspects at this point. Ricky blossomed into a reliable, fun dog to run. He went from a mediocre retriever to a pretty darn good one. I’m really looking forward to seeing what he does on pheasant; he’s never had the chance to retrieve one, and quite honestly, I think he’ll have a blast doing it, once he gets used to having such a BIG bird in his mouth!

He’s my boy and I love him to death. He lives with Jen and TomBoy now, so I don’t see him now nearly as much as I would like. One of many parts of divorce that sucks. I miss my goofy boy and am happy to see the pictures that are shared, and ecstatic when he and TomBoy are able to come stay with me every once in a while. He loves everybody and I’m betting on him being the life of the party in South Dakota. Well – maybe second to Eleanor, who is pretty much larger than life and insistent on being everybody’s focal point.

But you’ll hear about her in a few days.

Until next time…