Antler Shed Training

[Chris Atkinson]

At a recent vet appointment, I had one of the technicians ask me about how to go about training her dog for antler sheds. She claimed there are now antler shed trials or tests, which I was totally unaware of!

It is my opinion that any of these kinds of hobbies are good for us as trainers and good for the dogs to be stimulated and given a purpose.

Feel free to click a button in the poll please.

If you are actively training your dog for antler shed, feel free to post how/what instructional materials you've found useful.

Thanks, Chris

[John Lash]

They can be taught a lot of things as you already know. I used to be an avid bowhunter, that takes a lot of practice time. If you miss with an arrow at the target range it tends to slide under the grass and can be hard to find. My backstop was at the edge of the woods which made it worse. I taught my dog of long ago to find arrows by putting them in the undergrowth and encouraging her. If I lost one I'd get Katy and she'd make it look easy.

Seems like antlers would be pretty easy to train for.

[Rnd]

I couldn't figure out what all these posts about antler sheds were about..I had never heard of it until recently.

When Ken posted a link in a recent antler shed thread showing how much$$ these are worth it started to make cents.

[Mike Peters-labguy23]

Lee and Tiffany from the bow hunting show The Crush have a couple dogs trained for it. They run trials for she'd hunting also. They have Tom Dokken train their dogs. Seems Tom has found a new niche to sell on.

I trained one of my labs to do it but really don't have a great spot to find sheds unfortunately.

[Waterdogs]

All my dogs are trained to hunt sheds. I do not get the time to take them much because I am training for other things. It is very simple.

[twall]

An old dog of mine was a good shed hunter. I don't really hunt sheds anymore.

I did nothing more than praise him for bringing them to me.

Tom

[Paul "Happy" Gilmore]

I have a few friends who have trained theirs to hunt sheds. Not entirely difficult. Not putting any human scent on the shed is the key ingredient. He started with searching for sheds alone. Found a couple. Put on rubber gloves and handled them very carefully putting them into trash bags and sealing them up. Kept them in his wood shed. Must keep human scent off the sheds. Not training tracking dogs. Started playing with them and the pup. Only touched them with gloves and had friends/neighbors plant the sheds so pup wasn't tracking his scent. Continued to make "find the bones" a bigger and bigger game. Recently he's found some nice trophy elk sheds which he was able to sell to a furniture maker for some $$. Paid some fuel bills to get in the hills.

[rbr]

The dog featured on Lee and Tiffany's Crush is Tank, out of FC AFC Small Craft Advisory
Multi-tasking Field Trial breeding

Bert

[RockyDog]

Looks like Tom Dokken wrote the book on it (and the DVD) and hosts the World Shed Dog Championships ...http://www.sheddogtrainer.com/index.htm

[Shawn White]

I think I'll train my dog to go on point when she see's a nice rack.