The Carolina Dog experiment
Meet Lucy. She’s not your typical bird dog, but she gets the job done all the same.
She’s a young dog who made all sorts of mistakes during her first hunting season, but she learned a ton. It’s been a blast working with her and getting to see the limits of this breed. Carolina Dogs are a pre-contact landrace breed, so they can be tough to work with. They are native to this continent up to 15,000 years ago. There’s no selective bird-dog breeding working in your favor — just cooperation and raw prey drive.
She’s sweet as pie in the house and hammers dove and quail in the field.
In some of these photos you’ll see what looks like a traditional point. Those are planted quail she found during training. On wild birds she’s developed more of an indication behavior than a classic point. She’ll slam on the brakes and look back at me to let me know there’s a covey around. Sometimes it’s a staunch point, sometimes it’s a full neck crane back at me — we’re still figuring it out together. She has learned the big lesson that wild birds will not accept pressure like planted quail, that was her big takeaway from her first quail season.
She’s become a nice little retriever in the dove field and is an overall joy to be around. I’m excited to see what her second and third hunting seasons look like and where the ceiling is with a dog like this.