From our January/February 2025 issue
If you have a bird dog, it’s not a matter of if, but when.
Even a first-time dog owner knows that there is no shortage of ways a dog can get hurt in the field. Porcupines, blue algae, hot and cold weather, grass awns and a few dozen other menaces hold the potential to rapidly change your plans or create long-term headaches. The risk of many of these depends on where you live and hunt, but one sight gives hunters a case of the oh-nos regardless of locale.
Blood anywhere from nose to tail means something has made a hole in the package and you’re going to need answers in a hurry. How bad is it? How do I make it stop? Should I try to suture it or use a stapler? Do I need to go to a vet? Your responses to these and other relevant questions will be based entirely on how well you’ve prepared yourself to handle the situation. Assuming you’re like me and haven’t prepared by going to veterinary school or finding a hunting buddy who has, it’s up to you to find information that will help you deal properly with a dog that suffers a cut while hunting.
I’ve become a bit of a junkie for magazine columns, seminars, YouTube videos, Instagram posts and pretty much anything that can increase my knowledge of what to do when my dog comes up bloody in the field. The latest offering is “Field Emergencies and First Aid for Hunting Dogs,” an online course by Dr. Joe Spoo (aka Gun Dog Doc) that covers every injury or illness a dog is likely to encounter while hunting or training, including cuts and lacerations. The module of five videos on lacerations explains how to assess the severity of a cut by its size, location on the dog, depth and signs of any deep penetration into the tissue. The visuals are key, just as they are with the demonstrations of treating the wounds.
On smaller lacerations, pressure to stop any bleeding and a bandage is usually sufficient. Flushing the wound before bandaging is important to prevent infection. For larger cuts, Dr. Spoo prefers staples over sutures, because not only does the dog’s skin get half as many “pokes,” but also lidocaine, which burns before it numbs, is not necessary. In well-explained demonstrations, Dr. Spoo shows how to prepare a cut for stapling while minimizing the risk of infection and then walks the viewer through the proper stapling technique. He also shows signs to look for that would rule out stapling.
Having a skin stapler as part of your first-aid kit is a good idea, but only if you know how to use it—and how many people can truthfully say they’ve used one? Fortunately, staplers are inexpensive (about $10 on Amazon), so you can buy two and use one for practice. But not on your dog. Practice on a banana, which is a technique borrowed from some vet schools. Peel the banana, and then staple it back together.
My litmus test for any type of field-first-aid instruction is: How comfortable would I feel doing this myself? Knowledge is good, but the practical benefit comes only when you can put it to work when needed; and video is indispensable for crossing that threshold. Seeing a procedure demonstrated in a video answers questions you wouldn’t think of until you were wrist-deep in the situation with your own dog. A picture—a moving picture—is worth at least a thousand words.
Various veterinary offices and some non-veterinarians have videos on YouTube covering a variety of field-first-aid topics. None of these is a complete course, so you’ll have to search specifically for the injury or illness you’re interested in. Petemergencyacademy
.com sells a “Canine Wilderness Emergency First Aid” course, but access to the course expires 30 days from the date of purchase—which is only moderately helpful unless you have a photographic memory.
To date, Dr. Spoo’s course is the most comprehensive, practical and useful that I’ve come across. It covers basics such as the tailgate exam and simple eye, nose and foot care and moves through temperature extremes, lameness, hypoglycemia, toxins, animal encounters and major trauma. A useful feature is that these and other topics are broken down into 61 lessons lasting two to seven minutes, making it easy to find and rewatch a particular topic. Purchase of the course comes with lifetime access, making it an excellent reference tool and annual refresher.
The course covers prevention, as well, and devotes time to explaining how to recognize issues early, before they become bigger, more-expensive problems. It is not intended to turn you into a veterinarian; it is meant to give you the skills you need to stabilize your dog until you can get to a veterinarian. “I’m not trying to build trauma surgeons,” Dr. Spoo told me. His view is that you and your vet should be a partnership with the common goal of keeping your hunting dog in the field.
All of this know-how won’t do much good without a few tools. Anyone taking a dog afield should have a first-aid kit in the vehicle and ideally a few items in the vest in case trouble shows up. There is no shortage of articles and videos about what to pack in a first-aid kit and, yes, after 30-plus years I still look at each one I come across. The ones I consider useful are those that cause me to take something out of my kit or add something to it. Dr. Spoo offers a free mini course on his website about what to include, and after watching it I put a white T-shirt and some extra vet wrap in my vest to assist with the kind of laceration that falls into the major-trauma category. These lessons are included in the complete course, and added features to this and other modules are links at the end to sources of tools and other supplies.
In-person seminars are becoming more widely available. Shooting preserves, training clubs and nonprofit chapters are hosting these for the public—sometimes with a fee and sometimes without—and these are excellent if you live close enough to attend. The ability to ask questions and get answers immediately is a huge convenience, and the hands-on practice offered by some is irreplaceable. For the past couple of years Pheasants Forever’s national convention, Pheasant Fest, has offered a field-trauma course taught by military K-9 veterans that is heavy on the hands-on side.
Prices of these courses vary from free to somewhere in the $500 to $600 range. Before you flinch, realize that if you own a bird dog long enough, a course like this will pay for itself several times over.
As mentioned, few of us have the good fortune to hunt with a veterinarian on a regular basis. The rest of us are on our own when trouble strikes, and knowing what to do in a pinch could be the difference between life and death in the most extreme cases—and between an enormous vet bill and something more palatable in the rest.
For more information on Dr. Spoo’s course, visit gundogdoc.com.
Never miss an issue. Subscribe to Shooting Sportsman magazine.
Read our Newsletter
Stay connected to the best of wingshooting & fine guns with additional free content, special offers and promotions.