Moore Outdoors With Chester Moore 08/23/24-- Chester interviews a master duck dog trainer

Welcome to More out Doors on News Talk five sixty KLVI. This is Chester Moore. We're about to enter into the hunting season kicking off officially September first, with dove season early till following that. And it's that time of year if you're a waterfowler you need to start getting your dog prepared or maybe you're even like, hey, I need to maybe think about getting a dog. So we have Brian Johnson duckdog Trainer dot com and talk all about the best kind of dog to get that fits your

Hey, I'm glad to be here Chester.

Yeah, man so it's got to go back to the beginning. What got you into duck hunting.

So I grew up in a duck hunting family. My dad took me duck hunting for my first time whenever I was nine years old, and I'd been waiting for years even for that to happen, and he said, Hey, when you're nine, I'm gonna take you. He was very, very into duck hunting. He had one of the first Refuge legal air boats. I don't even think they had airboats allowed on the on the Refuge anymore, but back then I think he had like a ten horsepower Chaparral airboat.

Man, that's pretty awesome. I didn't. My dad duck hunted but quit during the point system of the seventies. After that he got him really frustrated, and so he would complain about that as we were deer hunting as a kid, and I never really duck hunted until I was about twenty one doing what I do now as a wildlife journalist, and you know, pretty much after that, it was just

So growing up we had a dog. My dad trained it. Her name was Miss marsh Wind and we called her Missy and man, she was just a great dog. And so I never knew duck hunting without a dog. And then I went to college and I no longer lived at home and the childhood dog had passed away. So one of the first purchases I made as a college student was I.

Bought a dog.

And I remember back then I didn't know much about the pedigrees or how to go about finding the right dog. And I at that time I lived in Houston, and I went into Houston Chronicle under labradors for sale, and I would call everybody, was like it was probably ten o'clock at night. Chester way too late to be calling somebody, and I would and I would call him and I say, hey, do you have any dogs left?

And maybe it was nine.

Okay, and anyway, they would all say yeah, and you can come look tomorrow.

And I said, can I come look tonight? And they were like no.

In this one old I mean, he was like a crusty old bachelor duck hunter.

He's like, yeah, you can come out tonight.

And so I show up at this guy, this random stranger, about ten o'clock at night and he's hardcore duck hunter and shows me his dog. And I'd heard that you needed to get different health guarantees and I said what about the health guarantees And he stuck out his hands and said I guarantee and I shook his hand and I bought my first duck dog and that was my dog midnight and she was amazing.

That is a pretty cool deal. Like he was so enthusiastic, showed up, had the handshake guarantee. And so you went from like training your own dog till like at some point saying, you know what, I might be able to make a little bit of money off this or help pay the bills.

Right, And so that was a necessity is the mother of invention. A friend had hunted with me and midnight, and he was friends of a guy who owned.

A local sporting goods store.

Fell by the name of Ronnie Wall and he told Ronnie all these great things about my dog. So Ronnie called me and said, hey, will you He had a dog that he wanted me to train, and he was going to buy another dog, and he said, will you trained my dog or you a dog trainer? And I remember I called the guy who had taught me how to train a friend of mine, Mike Cuttler. He was a professional trainer, and I cleaned his kennels and he

Yeah. I love that man. It's like, you know, you said that, you know you had to kind of do this to make it work. But one thing I know about you is that you have, you know, not just a dog trainer, but you like have a philosophy about dog training. So what is your philosophy of training a dog?

And so Chester, I think it's something that people need to understand. They everybody in a lot of areas in life, they want everything to fit into a certain box.

And if you do this, then you get that.

But but as we know, dogs kind of like people, they're not all the same and they don't all train the same way. So you've got to learn the dog and you've gotta you've got to establish a bond with a dog. Now, we we're not real heavy handed. Okay, we're gonna respect the dog and the dog is gonna respect us. But you know, Jestrick, nobody ever had to to force me to go get a hamburger. Okay, I've always just gone and gotten hamburgers because I like hamburgers.

Yeah, you know, I had a Chesapeake Bay Retriever and we'll talk more about retriever breathe in the next segment. And they're a little more hardcore than like maybe a lab is. And you know, there was a little bit of a heavy handed train on her that didn't translate well. But once she got to me back at home, she was like, I'm gonna do everything I was training. I just didn't like the person to train me very much.

Right. So I would always talk to my clients when they bring a dog in. I would I would ask them.

I'd say, you know, how how much hunting are you expecting to do?

And and you know there's.

Sixty to seventy days in a typical duck season, I think, and I don't. I don't know anybody that hunts all of them, okay, And so I would tell them, I say, look, if you hunt every day, let's say you hunted sixty five days straight, there's still three hundred other days that your dog has to be a pet. So at Duck Dog Trainer we wanted to make sure, like my goal, we weren't field trial trainers and we no longer do the hunt test. I wanted a dog that the other

Got to love that an obedient dog if you used that. A couple of dogs live in my house and we're talking with Brian Johnson. You can learn more about him at duckdog trainer dot com. You want to get a dog trained out there, he's out there in Winny and a definitely area for bird hunting. And when we come back on More Outdoors, we're going to talk about breeds of retrievers. There are different aspects and why they may

So I would tell you that that good labs are good labs.

It doesn't matter the color.

It's just like people. Good people are good people. It doesn't matter what they look like. You're you're more concerned with with their heart and with their attitudes. And that's the same with these dogs. So I have seen great

Me a dog, nine out of ten times.

The day you brought that dog, you could dump it out of your truck, open the car door, the dog jumps out, it's wagging its tail. We throw a dummy, and the dog runs out there and gets it and brings it back. Nine out of ten times, that's what happened thirty years ago. Today, it's probably fifty percent or less that they do that with no training.

So is that because they've been bred for pets or different things, or just color variants where people prefer the color.

They've been bred for color, they've kind of dumbed them down, if you would. You know, the lab has been the number one breed in America for almost thirty years, and different people want different things. I mean, how many people do we know that have a lab and how many of those duck hunt? I'm gonna say most don't duck hunt. There's not that many duck hunters compared to to just

No, that's that's really interesting because I've even seen like quote unquote silver labs. Is that where someone's throwing some wimern aro in there or something?

You know that that's a lot of debate on that, and uh, I'm I'm not the the determining factor on what really happened, if you would, I'm not the expert on that, but probably so now that being said, I've had guys that call me and say I've got a silver lab and I called these other and.

They won't train it. Will you train it? And I would tell them, yes, I would train it. But Chester, I'll train a monkey if you pay me.

This is business man, so so.

And I've trained. I have trained some that are fabulous. Okay, they were just really good. Now they are registered as chocolates, all silver dogs. When they register them, they register as a chocolate. But we know it's a it's a different it's a different color. Probably a wye reiner in there.

Who knows I smell wine marener, I'm telling you. Anyway, that's the investigatorjournalistsmouth to go crack the coat on this. But of course you have another very popular pet dog which is has its roots and retrieving, is of course a golden golden retriever. I call them like the Hollywood dog, Bush's baked bean dog, you know, uh airbud. But you know, golden retrievers can be really really good dogs.

See, I have had very limited success with golden retrievers. Now.

The ones that came to me that love to retrieve, they did great. But almost none of them come to me loving to retrieve. They they just didn't have the desire. Now, the ones as as maybe it's a coincidence, but the ones that that came to me that loved to retrieve, they had field trial backgrounds and they were they were good dogs. You know, there there are so many different breeds of dogs. You know, we'll we'll tell you that that labrador is king.

Okay, we've changed.

We've trained the Chesapeakes like like you had and had great luck with the Chesapeakes.

Uh.

You know, they kind of have the reputation for being the hardhead. But what's funny is people the quote common knowledge is you got to be rough on a Chesapeake. But it's just the opposite, absolutely the opposite.

Because the person who trained mine was rough and it got kicked out of retriever school like the last week and said it wasn't doing anything. It was biting, and she came home and did every single thing for me. She just didn't like the person train her because they were too heavy handed. You know.

So I trained one for a guy and her name was Delta, and it's pretty funny.

Every Delta I just loved her. She was a sweetheart.

There would be more Chesa Peaks here in the South, but they just don't handle the hot weather as good, and I think that's why they're probably not as popular here as they are up north.

But oh, Delta man, you like. I just loved her.

I would get that dog every time I got her out, and you're gonna laugh at this.

I would sing to her. I would say, hell, don what's that. I'd sing Delta docta.

And when the owner would come, I'd sing Delta docta and and she just wag her little tail and I'd go train her. And she did great. When he first got her back and he was having some trouble with her, I'm like, bro, you.

Gotta sing to her. Uh you you need to sing this song. And uh.

But but we we formed a bond and she loved it. And and that's why she did good, because she loved me. That's how chesapeakes are. Every breed is gonna be a little bit different.

You know.

There are the some of the pointing breeds that people like to hunt with. They want to hunt with the viislas with the German short hairs now, and I've had some mixed breeds. But but what I will tell you when you start getting into the other breeds. It's not just about training and desired it's it's how that dog is built and can't handle the conditions. Yeah, there's a lot a lot too asking a dog to go in thirty five degree water. You know, a lab has a

Yeah, well then that makes sense. You know, just because a dog likes to retrieve doesn't mean necessary it's going to be a duck dog. And on the other side of the equation, I mean, your labradors and even your chest Seas and these other dogs can be great dove retrievers.

Absolutely, and I would tell you that they'll retrieve. A dog that loves to retrieve, and once we've taught it to retrieve, it'll retrieve anything. I mean, you could literally you shoot a squirrel out of the top of the tree.

In college name it would go get the squirrel. You just have to introduce it to what you wanted to retrieve.

Yeah, that's pretty cool stuff. And lots of different breeds out there, and you know, like my chessie people. You know, a couple of guys were like, oh, you got one of those hard headed chessis, So I left her home on this one hunt. And one guy had a golden one guy had a lab. They were pretty young dogs, and these dogs got in a fight over the ducks. They send them both out, and I'm like, I should have totally brought my chessa to walk up and pulled it from their mouths and dare them to get it

Yeah, I knew that you were going to bring that up.

Of course, it's funny being the macho duck hunter that I've been with the exception of a Duck Dynasty episode where Uncle Cy had had a standard poodle hunting, you don't see or hear much about stand poodles in the hunting world, but that's what their background is. My wife loves standard poodles and she breaks she breeds those. My son Noah, who's our head trainer, has been like, Dad, please don't get us into the poodles.

Okay, please don't do the poodles. He didn't like that image anymore than I did.

However, we've caught one now that my wife she it's a about a.

Little less than a year old pup.

His name is George Straight and man, I'm telling you, George loves the water.

He loves to retrieve.

If somebody that we talked about that they want a great pet, hypo.

Allergenic, no shedding.

So man, you go to sweeping up all the hair and vacuum up the hair after a dog, after a lab, a poodle starts looking pretty good, and especially if you compare that to a.

Golden retriever's hair.

So anyway, these these poodles can be duck hunters and we're gonna be training. Uh George, I was thinking as I knew you were gonna bring this up. She's got a litter on the ground right now, and two of them were solid white.

Oh wow, And I thought, now on a goose spread, that's your dog.

That's awesome. I like it, man, And the goose won't see it coming that that can't be hunters down there. That's a poodle. So kind of cool. But you know another thing about besides the different breeds, you got duck tolling retrievers and flat coated retrievers and curly coded retrievers, all this different stuff. Even among like to just go labradors,

Yeah.

So when I first got into dog training, I was heavily influenced by the hunt test world, and I really enjoyed those hunt tests. And then one day I was at a at a hunt test, and and I had a dog that maybe it didn't do good. There was a great duck dog, but it didn't do good at that test that day. And and and my buddy told me, he said, hey, don't hunt your dog because we were

Okay that there's.

Some wisdom in that. And I was in just that ideology in the duck hunting world because when I had the privilege of going up to Phil Robertson's house way before duck Dunis, it was just the duck men back then, just duck commander. He said he got asked to go to this world famous duck calling contest. He said, he asked him if a duck could win it, and they said probably not, and said I'm not gonna go then.

Yes, so hey, so that that's pretty funny. You talked that that Phil Robertson's story. I'm I'm friends with Buck Gardner who was also he was a world champion duck caller and made the duck calls it and Buck told me the story.

Buck's a good duck hunter, and oh yeah, I.

Duck hutn't with him? Twice on him Porter Ramsa. It's a great guy.

So he calls ducks in well. And one day he told me, and he's also a he's a world champion caller and then he won the Champion of Champions and he said he showed up at this event and Phil had on this shirt that said Phil had a shirt that said there are people that call for contests and then there are people that call ducks.

And he.

That's the shirt that he had and he was kind of ribbing it buck, and Buck said, I went out that night and I went to one of them places. It would make you a shirt, and he said, I had me a shirt made that said there are people that win calling championships and there are people that call ducks.

I do both.

I do both. That's good.

I like it.

That's good.

But uh, anyway, so getting back to that, I had been influenced heavily.

And then I went to a conference that.

Robert Milner, he was a he's a professional trainer and he wrote the best book I've ever read on dog training. It was called Retriever Training for the Duck Hunter. And he told me, he said, Brian, I want you to take everything that you've known about training, and forget about it,

You know, in the in the field trials, you.

Don't want a dog to pop, for example, you want the dog to run a straight line and never turn around and look at you until you blow the whistle. Yeah, well, or it gets counted off. Well, if you're hunting in cover, in the trees and the timber, you got to blow the whistle when he's not standing behind the tree. And so a lot of time, by the time you blew the whistle, you couldn't see the dog. So I had this dog and I was really proud of him, and

Yeah.

And I had a client training with me, and I said, which one you thinks better? He said, Man, I like that dog that goes out there fifty yards and looks.

At me and I don't have to blow it whistles.

And I thought, Wow, different people wanted different things. And I had a dog, my first dog. We were hunting at Lake of the Pines, and there were there were a lot of different islands in the area that we were hunting with brush on them, and she would go and sit on a different island to get a better view. And when we shot the ducks, we never sent it. We just didn't pay attention to her. She went and got the ducks, picked them up, and brought them back

So what I would tell you.

If you've got a dog and that dog makes you happy, then be happy with it, be proud of it.

That's your dog. Teach your dog to do what you wanted to do.

And if there are some things that are important to you and you bring your dog to a trainer, discussed out with your trainer.

Now that makes sense, you know, like say, hey, look, this is the traits I really need in this dog. And these are the things I want. And maybe if that trainer is not willing to work on that, maybe find somebody else. You know, because you're putting in a pretty hefty investment not only of money, but you're putting investment of time away from your dog. And if you get someone to train the dog away, that's not gonna work for you. It's gonna be hard to reverse that.

Yes, and we I told many clients when they would bring their dog, we would have a discussion. I would say, look, I want to train you the dog of your dreams, not the dog of my dreams.

Well that's good, yeah, And that makes sense because there's so much different. I mean, a guy who's hunting thought tanks, you know, in the hill country on his deer lease is going to have probably some different needs. And a guy who's hunting divers out on some big reservoir, you know,

So my dog cold that just passed away.

We'd gone on a you almost won't believe this story, Chester, and everything had to set up perfect for this to ever happen. I could never even duplicate it again. Okay, we were on a goose hunt and it had been foggy all morning long, and the geese were building up and it was I guarantee you they were a half a mile away from us, Okay, but they were building up a concentration over there.

Well, when the fog lifted, there were.

All these geese in this concentration about a half a mile away.

Now it was a we'll talk more.

About incredible duck dogs, duck hunting and the Funnel waterfowl hunting pier with Brian Johnson. We come back on More Outdoors. Welcome back to More Outdoors on News Top five sixty klv I. This is Chester Moore talking with Brian Johnson.

The wind was blowing from us to the geese, which would allow the dog to hear any directions that I had given him m hm. Previous to this, I'd been I owned I think twenty something acres at the time, and on the far into the property, I'd set up a goose bread and I would, just for fun, send my dog from my house. I'd been putting bumpers in that goose bread. I'd get up and I send him, and that was probably four hundred yards and I just send him there. And we've been practicing that exact same thing.

Are building up.

And I told my buddy, I said, hey, let me send Cole into that goose bread, I mean into those geese, and I'm gonna scare those geese up.

Yeah.

And we ran this dog literally half a mile. He ran into the goose bread. I blew the whistle. The geese jumped up because he was in the middle of it. I blew the whistle for him. He could hear it.

We'd trained for that exact same thing.

You know, waterfowl hunting can be the most exciting hunt in the world, or it can be the worst hunt in the world, because you know, you can go and just have a bunch of action and they're a pretty easy spot to go to, or you can hike back a couple of miles and get killed by mosquito, sinking the mud up to your neck and see nothing. So for someone who wants to get started in waterfowl hunting, what would you recommend them doing in terms of maybe some of their first.

Hunts man, So it's going to depend on their their conditioning. Okay, because younger Brian was in better shape and Chester I talking to people that are in this area. I remember years ago we would hunt off of the off of the beach. We'd go to High Island, take a left, go down to whites Levy. I remember driving through the surf in the truck and we ruined a good Z seventy one truck with all the salt water that it would it wouldn't be water whenever we went out, but

And we would walk forever through.

The high grass to go to this pond, and we'd be following our phone looking at the GPS and and end up in a pond. And man, we had some incredible hunts, but there is no way fat older Brian would do that today. So if you're the young guy in shape, go pursue that hunt. Get you the the on ex some of those apps, look at the different deals, get on Google Earth, find you some public places and and venture out and go do that. Okay, if you are wanting to get into it and you're a little bit older and.

A little bit out of shape, the guide is the way to go.

Just pay the guide, go with him, enjoy the experience.

Duck Hunting can be a lot of work.

I mean, you know now, we we don't even take a side by side anymore to where we hunt. I drive my truck literally twenty feet from where we're gonna hunt, dump the decoys out, go hide the truck, walk back and throw the decoys out.

So duck hunting, it can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be.

Unfortunately, as I look back, it seems like the harder hunts I killed more ducks on.

Well, that's because you're getting in remote areas, you know. And that's the thing. It's like, the ducks aren't stupid, you know. You know. I'm looking back and just thinking about some my favorite duck hunts, and one of my favorite hunts was actually a really easy one. Some guys who had access to a private stretch of the Perdinality's River by Fredericksburg. We killed limits of mallards and gadwall in the Perdinale's River. When they hit they would hit

Two feet from me.

You know, that's not the always hunt it was. You know, usually have to work a lot harder for things like that. But just seeing the birds fly, you know, watching the dog work, all that's exciting and you know, it's it's a fun part of it. And I think unfortunately sometimes some of the attitude in the waterfowl world gets a little bit sideways, especially sometimes on public land stuff. People

And I'm gonna tell you duck hunting, if you will scout and you will find out where the ducks want to be. Some of the best duck hunts I had. You were talking about the river part Dallas River. We had a place in northeast Texas. We hunted a dairy and this dairy there were I don't know how many cows there were.

There are hundreds of.

Cows, and they would feed them and they fed on this concrete deal and they all lined up. And anyway, when they finished feeding them, they turned on these water deals and it just shot this water and it cleaned up all of their poop.

Okay, where every cow had pooped.

They just flushed it out and it went down this big pipe and it went to the very back of the property to this two acre pond.

Okay, the cowpoop pond.

But them cows had been eating grain, and I'm guessing that's what ended up in the pond. Chester There were so many ducks in that pond. We weren't doing anything illegal.

There were no no decoys. It was a two acre pond.

If you if the limit was six gadwall and you brought six people, you were gonna shoot thirty six.

Gadwall and and they just came in.

Now I remember friends saying, you know you don't have where's your duck call, where's your uh you know, where are your decoys? I'm like, do you see any other water around here? If a duck fly ows over where do you think he's going? Don't do anything to discourage you. Maybe more action, but not quite as scenic as the prodenal. I love it though, you never know.

Like one of my favorite fishing times I've ever done in my life, I've been there four times, is fishing the ditch across from a landfill in southern Florida for peacock bass. Now I'm stepping on broken glass and God knows what else. But we're out there doing our thing, enjoying it. And you know, you and I are laughing,

So they can go to our website at Duckdog Trainer dot com and that'll have my personal cell phone number on it and my email address. Or they can come to church. Shit first Baptist Winnie, and after I finished preaching at the end of the service, they say, hey, I heard you talking on More Outdoors and I wanted to learn about dog training.

That may be one of the best church pitches I've ever heard. Brian, I like that. That's really really good stuff. So I know you're excited. It's that time of year. We're about to have our duck season. Of course, you know, who knows what's gonna be going on with ducks flying drought this year. But that's another thing about it makes it interesting. You never know what the conditions are going