Most recent Issue
Prime Magazine Current Issue
subscribe button
Prime Magazine Back Issues
Shop the Prime Store
Be Featured In Prime
Facebook

Features


Thrill of the hunt

Image 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19



Published:

Story by Steve Lund

“I love bird hunting,” says Barry Lawler, “but watching the dogs work, that’s the fun of it.”

Lawler, 59, used to be a machinist, but now he spends most of his time training dogs. He’s known for helping people with problem dogs and calls his business Dogtordog.

He worked more than 30 years for Snap-on Inc. in Kenosha, but when the factory here closed, he decided not to go to Milwaukee or Bristol, Tenn., where Snap-on was still manufacturing

“I’d been doing this on the side,” he said. “I thought, why not give it a shot.”

Now he thinks he should have made dog training his full-time work a long time ago. “I should have done it in my 20s,” he said.

He was putting a pair of dogs, both German shorthaired pointers, through their paces on a hot summer morning.

“Mostly I do obedience training, dogs that have behavior issues, but this is my passion,” he said as he watched the dogs work an area.

The air was still and humid. The dogs couldn’t seem to pick up the scent of the birds Lawler had hidden.

“When it’s still, the dogs have to get a lot closer to them,” Lawler said. “When there’s a breeze, they can smell them 50 feet away. When there’s a breeze, it’s a lot easier for them.”

The dogs were working hard, running full-tilt, when one of them picked up a scent and went into a classic pointing pose. The other dog stopped as well, “honoring” the other dog’s point.

Pointers aren’t supposed to flush the birds. That’s part of the trainer’s job. But sometimes the dogs start to creep up on the birds after they’ve pointed them.

In a training session like this, if the dog starts to creep up, Lawler will pick the dog up and move it back to where it started.

“Once they’ve established a point, you don’t want them to walk up.”

On this morning, he’s working with three dogs. Forest is his dog. The other two, Butch and Addie, belong to clients. Lawler usually works with them one or two at a time, but if all three are out, he can have them all walking beside him, unleashed, with just a few commands. When they practice retrieves, each dog waits for its name to be called before bounding into the water or the tall grass.

If the dogs are going full speed, they’ll slow down if Lawler says, “easy” or “careful.”

These dogs are natural hunters, but it’s a long, expensive process to get them certified through the American Kennel Club. The dogs have to pass numerous tests along the way, 13 of them to become master hunters.

“The main thing is you’ve got to get the dogs to listen,” Lawler said. “If you can get the dog to listen, you can transfer that to the owner, unless he’s a totally wimpy guy.”

Lawler, who said he has been training dogs since he was 15, is mostly self-taught.

“There are certifications,” he said, “but I never did that. A lot of it is just figuring it out. I was always kind of good with dogs.

“The reason I’m successful at having a little business doing this is running these dogs in the tests, and people see the results I’m getting. Same thing with the obedience training.”

The Safe Harbor Humane Society sends him some clients.

“We give his card out all the time to people who have dogs with aggression issues,” said Sarah Luce, who works at the shelter in Kenosha.

Lawler does some of his training at his home in Somers where he has three acres and a pond, but a lot of it is done at Bong State Recreation Area in Brighton.

“Bong has a really excellent dog training area,” he said. “For bird dog trainers, it’s paradise.”

Bong is also the main local magnet for bird hunters, since pheasants are stocked there during the hunting season.

“Back in the day, there used to be a lot of pheasants around here. Now it’s mostly just Bong.”

Bong, which issues up to 300 pheasant hunting permits a day, can be a little crowded for Lawler’s taste. He likes to hunt at a private club near Princeton, and he sometimes makes hunting trips to South Dakota, where there are still a lot of wild birds.

Lawler said some hunting dogs take longer to train than others, and some seem more eager to hunt.

“Some things you can’t train,” he said. “You can’t train a nose, and you can’t train desire.

“My dog Forest, he loves to hunt. He goes after anything. He goes after dragonflies. Every once in a while he catches one. He spits it out, then he goes after another one.”