Duck season opened Sept. 1 for Reed Carlson in Alaska. His dog’s first retrieve, a mallard, came straight to hand that morning, followed by 11 more ducks. Carlson’s retriever, Harley, performed like he’d been hunting waterfowl since the day he was born. It was, indeed, what the dog was born to do, though no one knew that at the shelter, where he’d been kept as a stray until a month prior.
“I’ve never trained a dog and I’m not much of a waterfowl hunter,” Carlson, the owner of Alaska Gun Company, tells Outdoor Life. “I’ve traveled for work full time for 10 years and I hung that up last spring. I started my own business and started looking for a dog.”
The retriever, originally named Ralph, had been at the shelter in Wasilla for around three weeks when Carlson first met him on Aug. 1. At just over a year old, the stray (which Carlson assumes is a Labrador retriever but doesn’t know for sure) was fixed and knew how to sit and stay, but he needed a lot of reigning in. Carlson, who is new to bird-dog training, tested to see how the dog handled loud noises.
“There was this ‘slippery when wet’ sign on the floor at the shelter. I dropped it on the tile. He didn’t flinch,” Carlson says. “I don’t know how true to sound it is, but I thought it would be like a gun test. If he was gun shy, I wouldn’t know what to do.”
Carlson adopted the dog for $149 and did two things right away. He changed Ralph’s name to Harlequin, after the sea duck. Then he took his new dog to the water. Harley only dipped one webbed toe in at first, but he was belly deep by week’s end. Carlson leaned on friends with pigeons (and other pen-raised birds after that) to introduce the dog to birds. Harley brought them all back. Once, he even brought back a shell Carlson had thrown to mark a downed bird.
So far this year, the two have tallied 10 days together hunting ducks. Harley also got a taste of upland birds during a recent moose hunting trip in the Yukon.
“I saw one spike bull on day one that I passed on. Never saw another, but a few minutes from camp we flushed a grouse, and then another. I said, ‘To hell with this,’ and walked back to the tent for my shotgun,” Carlson says. “Within 30 seconds, Harley tracked, flushed, and … brought [the bird] to me.”
Carlson knows he got lucky with Harley, who retrieved two ruffed grouse, five sharptails, and a dozen mallards during that trip in the Yukon. But finding a good hunting dog at the pound isn’t as rare as some might think. Unwanted pups can make great companions in the field for those willing to put in the training time. And while you’re unlikely to find many purebred vizslas or other niche hunting breeds, you have a decent chance at finding a Lab or some other retriever. Labradors are the third-most common breed found in shelters across the U.S., according to one analysis by a Texas-based law group.
Carlson was reminded of all this when he made a post about Harley in a Facebook group, Hunting Retrievers. Comments piled in from other people who’d had similar experiences after bringing a dog home from a shelter.
“We did the same thing,” wrote one user, Condry Pope. “Went to the pound and got one of the best retrievers we ever had.”
Is it a gamble to adopt a shelter dog, without any knowledge of its history? Sure, it is. But in Carlson’s case, it’s one that he says “re-worked his life” and opened up a whole new world of hunting opportunities.
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“We just finished that 14-day moose hunt in the Yukon,” Carlson says. “It turned into a 14-day duck and grouse hunt. [Harley] is supposed to sleep in his garage kennel, but he’s been sleeping in my bedroom ever since.”
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