Feeding dog before or after hunt?

Honestly I just use the injectable 50% dextrose given orally. I previously would premeasure syringes when upland hunting but now I just carry it in a FuelBelt or Nathan brand gel flask and eye ball it. I only do this when grouse hunting prairie birds and don't when pheasant hunting or waterfowl hunting. And a note, in case the question comes up about a glucose spike with supplementation and subsequent drop....yes that occurs in a non-working dog, but while a dog is active and working you don't see the subsequent crash, hence the reason this works.
 
Thanks for the clarification, Joe.


No, I don't feed my dog Power Bars but coincidentally, when he was a pup, mine was notorious for fishing long forgotten bars from the pockets of my jackets, vests and daypacks. He once stole a box from the counter and neatly unwrapped and devoured all six bars. I eat them out of necessity; I don't know what his excuse is.
 
I agree with "Joe"
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[font=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]Their exercise fuel burning is different than ours and so you can't extrapolate as to what you would do.[/font][/quote]
Dogs are genetically "designed" to hunt on an empty digestive system. The food from the previous "kill" is digested and subsequent energy is readily available for use by the muscles on the next hunt in the cycle.

Feeding a dog before hunting divides the blood supply. Part attempts to process undigested food and the remainder tries to supply energy to active muscles plus often deal with temperature factors.

"Don't feed the beast" before hunting. The digestion process takes several hours which means a dog hunting on a full digestive system is illogical. Doing so is simply anthropomorphism at its finest.
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It makes sense not to feed a dog if it'll be running out the door within an hour and chasing upland birds.

But much of our duck hunting is out of the boat, on large lakes, between November and January. Temps are usually somewhere between 15F and 35F. And some days we don't shoot many birds, so there's a lot of sitting around.

Our late season routine is like this:

4:15 wake up and feed dog


5:00 leave house

5:45 get to launch

6:30 boat’s anchored at the spot, decoys are set

7:00 shooting light


If it’s real cloudy or snowy we may not end up shooting anything until 7:30. That’s a good 3 hours after eating that the dogs been sitting around. What if it’s a slow day and we stick it out till the afternoon. Seems like a long time to be sitting in the weather on an empty stomach. What if she doesn’t even get to retrieve?

Molly will rarely eat while we’re hunting. But she’s always willing to eat breakfast, so I feed her then.






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That's pretty much my schedule. I would hate worrying that my dog didn't have enough fuel to keep him warm and powered up to hunt. He also gets part of my sandwich while we sit in the blind, it's just our thing. My dogs also train for field trials at least five days a week since they were six months old. I feed them two cups in the morning and two in the evening. They probably get three hours to digest before training or hunting. After reading the Vet post this may not be optimum, but I haven't ever noticed a problem over 25 years and six generations of Goldens.
 
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