Top marks

Howard Kirby explains the importance of marking shot game and, crucially, how to develop this skill in your gundog right from the start

- Howard Kirby

An ability to accurately mark the fall of game is a real asset for any breed of gundog that is to be used as a retriever in the shooting field. For testing and trialling dogs, it will be essential if you aim to win awards.

This article is going to be steered towards those of us that shoot over dogs and then immediately send them for the retrieve. So although there will be exceptions, it’s primarily about spaniels and pointers.

As our start point, it’s probably best if we establish what we would like the dog to do when we shoot over him! Firstly, when instructed, we need a dog that hunts and locates the quarry we are looking for and, while doing so, ignores all other wildlife and livestock. Upon contact with game, the spaniel needs to instantly force game to ‘flush’, to take flight, stopping immediately when this is achieved, ‘sitting to the flush’. Assuming the shooting is successful the dog should mark its fall and, once instructed, go straight to the game and retrieve it quietly and efficiently. With the pointers, we add the addition of ‘the point’, before flushing on command.

This series of intricate behaviours that we require from the dog are often taught as individual elements during early training before being brought together in a top flight shooting dog.

As with many of the skills that our gundogs bring to the shooting field, these need to be learned. And of course the job that falls to us is to teach them to do it. This can be started right from the beginnings of training and will continue on into advanced field work.