Scent to try us: when dogs refuse woodcock

Most gundogs will happily pick these elusive waders, but there are some that find the task not to their liking.

- David Tomlinson

Have you ever stuffed your nose into the breast of a freshly killed woodcock? I doubt if you have, but if you did so you would almost certainly find the bird has a distinctive scent, quite unlike that of a pheasant or partridge. It’s a smell that many gundogs either dislike or find distasteful, with the result that some dogs, encountering a woodcock for the first time, refuse to pick it up. They may spend some time sniffing around it, even nudging it with their nose, but they flatly refuse to put it into their mouth.

Quite why is debatable, but it does seem to be because the dog doesn’t like the smell. You have to remember that a dog’s sense of smell is very different from our own. A dog has around 300million olfactory receptors in its nose, while we have a mere six million. In addition, that section of the dog’s brain that specialises in sorting out scents is, proportionately, many times greater than ours. It’s quite logical that some dogs refuse to pick-up a bird that they don’t like the smell of.

Rare retrieve

My very first sighting of a woodcock was one flushed by my cocker more than half a century ago and I have encountered hundreds since, many put up by my spaniels. All my dogs have hunted them with every bit as much enthusiasm as pheasants or partridges, but they have rarely been asked to retrieve them. I stopped shooting woodcock a long time ago, as I never enjoyed eating them. At the same time, the majority of shoots on which I have picked-up don’t shoot woodcock, so my dogs have rarely had the opportunity to retrieve one.