Ep. 514: Foundations - How to Train a Shed Antler Dog

shed dogs. I think a lot of them love the idea of a dog that can find shed antlers, but it probably won't greatly change the amount of sheds you find. It's still fun, and if you do have a shed dog, you'll become a better deer hunter, which might seem crazy, but I'll explain what I mean throughout this episode. Yeah, the first dog that I trained to be a shed antler dog was my Golden Retriever Lux. She wasn't okay

hunting dog, but simply loved to retrieve. In fact, I trained her to retrieve antlers, ducks, upland bird, squirrels and eventually rabbits. And now I know you're not supposed to take a pheasant dog and let it retrieve a rabbit, but I did it. Anyway, and it taught me a couple of things. The first is that not all rules apply to all situations, obviously, but also that a lot of the rabbits we shot at with shotguns would make

it into a brush pile and then die. The dog would slither in there and retrieve them, and it was an eye opener. This happened quite a bit with snowshoe hairs too. But anyway, back to shed dogs. Lux was a good shed dog and she found a few when she died. I trained my next pup to find sheds, and it was a glorious day when she brought me a little three point side for the first time while my wife and I were hiking through a local park

by the house. That dog, Luna, is still a shed hunter, but I've learned that the best retriever out there will only take you so far with sheds if your personal shed hunting situation kind of sucks, which mine does. Dogs do find antlers, we don't, or I should say dogs will find landlers, we won't, which is the whole point. But there are other benefits of training a shed dog, and I'll get into that at the end of this show. For now, I just want to go through a little

bit of the process. So for starters, any dog could theoretically be a shed dog. If you've got a dog that will retrieve something, you've got much of the problem licked. Of course, hunting breeds tend to be more popular for a couple of reasons. The first is that many of them are bred to retrieve, and we expect and in

herge that behavior out of them. The second is that if you buy a hunting dog for hunting, you're a hell of a lot more likely to care about deer antlers than a soccer mom in San Francisco with a French bulldog in her arms. The key to a shed dog is the desire to retrieve. If you have a dog that loves to bring you stuff, your task is gonna be pretty easy. If you have a dog that is lukewarm on retrieving antlers might be a bridge too far.

It's worth a shot though either way. Now, the thing was shed antlers is that they differ from everything else that we hunt with Our dogs are probably just about everything else, and that they don't really give off any scent. Give off a little, but a living breathing pheasant gives off a ton of scent, little quail too, ducks, grouse,

prairie chickens, whatever. If it's alive now or was very recently alive, and it has feathers, you can bet that it's giving off ent that his orders of magnitude greater than a chunk of bone that fell off a buck's head six weeks ago. Now, there is a waxy substance at the base of really freshly cast antlers that the dogs can undoubtedly smell. If you want to try to mimic this doc and Dog supply sells something called rack wax.

And here's a fun fact for you. The golden Retriever in the photo on the package of rack Wax is lux mild dog. The fingers in the photo belonged to my wife, who, on that day of that photo shoot, hit me square in the nuts with an antler that

she threw from thirty ft away. The five photos I shot of that antler flying my way in the air while squatting down like a catcher in a baseball game show her face going from surprise to shit eating grin as she realized she's about to tend ring my apple bag and drop me right to the ground, which is exactly what happened. You can use rack wax to teach your dog to key in on the smell of an antler,

much like would with a bumper or a dummy. The catch here is that the dog is far more likely the key in on the smell of your hands than anything, so if you want to do it right, the best way I found was to throw a couple of antlers and some gloves in a tote with an ozone unit. After that, try not to touch the antler with your bare hands while applying rack wax and tossing the antler into the grass. Trust me, this exercise is an eye

opener in dog scenting abilities. It's also an eye opener if you consider a deer to have similar old factory abilities, which I personally do. A dog that runs down wind of an antler you touched will smell it without trouble. Trust me, that same dog down wind of an antler that has been bathed in ozone will be a different story. They'll miss it every time if you do your job right and until you add some scent to it. That experience tells me that while most hunting situations with dogs

involved heavy nosework, that hunting isn't one of them. It's more of a visual task. I'm not saying they don't use their noses, but they use their eyes is a lot. This is something I didn't really understand fully when I trained my first dog. I couldn't figure out why she would run way out into the field to look at a styrofoam cup or some other light colored piece of garbage.

What she had learned was that antlers are light colored, and if she caught a glimpse of something similar in tone that didn't quite seem to belong in the woods or in the fields, she was going to go over there and investigate. Docin, who is one of the best dog trainers on the planet, is well aware of this, which is why he developed oversized antler silhouettes to train with.

These larger than life cardboard cutouts provide a visual clue to beginner shed dogs that there is an antler right here, or sometimes a bumper or some other reward gets them to to connect. The look of an antler ties the shape to some kind of reward mark that good behavior, kind of like a I don't know, a neon bar sign in downtown Memphis, or maybe the golden arches glowing along an interstate after a fifty mile stretch and nothing

but prairie. It gets your attention if you're so inclined to look for such things, and you're in the right mood when it comes to shed antlers, dogs just need to learn to look for them. They do this by first being introduced to antlers as a toy that can just be tossed and retrieved. For this intro work, a

little antler that is dull is the ticket. You don't want to take your five month old pop out and toss the twenty four pound moose antler, obviously, but you also don't want that little pupster to chase a nice white tail shed and get poked right in the eye when it goes to grab it. That is not good intro work, my friends. Negative associations that happen with intro

work like that can be devastating. If you don't believe that, ask someone who has had the unfortunate task of trying to train out gun shyness or water shyness and a dog. This usually lives in a world of damn close to impossible. When there is a positive association attached to something like an antler. You can start to work in varied environments

to make it a little more like a hunt. I like to start off in the grass of a soccer baseball field, which may or may not be covered in four ft of snow right now, depending on where you live. The key is to make it easy at first. However, you have to do that. Maybe that's in the house. The dogs should be able to see the antler from where you start him, and when he brings it back,

it's time to throw a little praise party. You want the dog to think that bringing you an antler is the next best thing to die in and go into doggie heaven. You also want to add a command into the mix so the dog knows when it's time to start looking for antlers or I don't know, to find the bone, which is the command I use. I don't want anything that will conflict with my bird hunting commands,

so this can be totally catered to your situation. If you use find the bird as a as a way to get your dog to get into the upland hunting mode, then find the bone might be too close. Whatever you choose, use it as a prompt in your early training drills where you ensure easy success, and this is important in a staple of all good dog training, but don't overdrive

your headlights. We often think, well, if the dog can find an antler in the living room or the backyard really easily, I need to make it difficult and really teach them how to hunt. But that's a bad idea. Dogs are great at learning through repetition and baby steps, which is how you should approach shed dog training. For example, if your dog absolutely makes the connection between your shed hunting command and running out to pick an antler up out of the yard, it's probably time to move into

a little thicker habitat. Instead of old grass, move to grass that is maybe six inches tall. Your goal is to ramp up the difficulty ever so slightly. When you know your dog has whatever level you're at just totally nailed, then you know it's time to move up into a situation where your dog just has to work a tiny bit harder for success, but there will always be success there.

Remember that eventually you can descent antlers and start planting them in more real world situations, like in a picked bean field or under a pine tree at a nearby park. What you want the dog to do is think this is a game where they get excited when you give them their shed hunting command. You want them to start actively searching and showing you through their body language that they are into it. This means you're closer to having a shed dog and can probably head out and start

actually shed hunting. But when you do, make sure you bring some antlers with you. You don't want your dog to be unsuccessful at any time, aim when you could change that outcome by simply tossing a fuel antlers throughout the day while your dog is looking the other way and side note this is a great move for little kids too. Eventually, with enough training, your dog will start to contribute to the yearly take. But this is a

moment where I need to be real honest. I am friends with some of the best shed dog trainers in the world, arguably probably the best, and they are adamant that the amount of antler is a good dog will contribute pales in comparison to a human shed hunter. Dogs do cover a lot of ground and they do find some sheds, but you're not at a net loss at any time with a good shed dog. They aren't antler vacuums crossing the countryside and finding tons of sheds that

you never find your on your own. However, that's just not how it works. Shed dogs and their antler production are also directly commensurate to the amount of sheds you'd likely find on a given year. So let's say you shed hunt kind of hard and your average six antlers per season. This is pretty common in the world of pressure deer. In that case, a good shed dog might find one or two antlers that you just wouldn't maybe three. I know that's not great, but it's not nothing either.

And the real best part of this, all the parts that I alluded to way back in the intro, is that having a shed dog gets you out there more. Training a dog to find antlers doesn't take away from their bird hunting abilities in any way. It just adds to their repertoire. And what that means is that while pheasant or grouse season might be over, you can still keep hunting quote unquote with your dog for a few

more months. That's good for you. It's good for your dog, but it's good for you specifically as a deer hunter, really good. I know for a fact that training my bird dogs to hunt antlers has gotten me out more throughout the winter months when there isn't a whole hell of a lot to do besides ice fish or binge netflix or whatever. There is a whole world of white tails out there, and some of them are losing their

head gear right now. Some of them live in parks, some of them live on private land, and some of them live on public land. Whatever the case may be near you and whatever land you have access to, spending time in the woods in the winter will make you a better hunter. If that takes a laborate or retriever with some shed antler training under his belt, so be it.

I know personally that I probably shed hunt I don't know twice as much as I would without a dog, because I like, I don't know spending time in the woods with my dogs. It's that's simple. They want to go always, which makes me want to go. Dogs are kind of like making a Jim buddy to lift with who is always enthusiastic about picking up heavy stuff and putting it down. You might not really need the motivation, or you might, but either way, it's nice when it

swoops into your life. With shed dogs, the desire to out there more is real. That means you'll cover more miles in search of antlers, but it might also take you to new spots. It might take you through the public land twenty minutes from your house that you don't really hunt because every morning of the season, as you drive past it to go to work, you see a couple of trucks parked in the parking lot. The dog doesn't know that, and the dog doesn't care. It just

wants to be out in the woods with you. That motivation can get you to understand a spot you've written off, and it can get you into areas of a spot like that to get your white tail gears turning. Following a dog for miles throughout the winter will take you to places you normally wouldn't go to shed hunt or winter scout, and that means you're seeing in person spots

that you wouldn't have otherwise. Now I don't know about you, but there have been a lot of times in my life where I found just one fence crossing or one big corner post rub or something out in the deer woods that changed my whole thinking on a stage eat or a specific parcel. And that's not nothing. My friends, and however, you have to go about putting yourself in a position to make those discoveries. So be it. Maybe you're already super motivated and you winter scout fifty days

a year, but maybe not. Maybe you don't winter scout much, kind of like shed hunting, and are mostly afflicted by cabin fever. And maybe I don't know. You've got a hunting dog or a sporting dog, or a working dog sitting there in your house, or just some random good dog that likes to retrieve sticks. If so, the ingredients are all there for you to change the course of your off season, which can also change the course of

your hunting season. And if it doesn't, well, you spend some time with your dog training, which is good, and then you spent some time in the woods with your four legged best friend, which is good too. Maybe you find an extra antler, few antlers, maybe not. Maybe you just find a bang in public land hotspot that you've always overlooked or maybe not, but it's worth trying if you have the dog and the means to do so

that's it for this week, my friends. My name is Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast. Next week, I'm kicking off a couple episodes on winter scouting, so be sure to tune in. And if you're not getting enough whitetail content in your daily diet, make sure to check out our wire to Hunt YouTube channel or visit the meat Eator dot com slash wired. I promise you those two resources will keep you busy consuming tons of white tailed goodness. And as always, thank

you so much for listening and for your support. We really appreciate it.