I was digging around behind my shed last summer trying to clean up a little of the overgrown lilacs and found a bunch of my old hard core goose decoys from years ago. It's been 15 years ago that I flocked them and when we moved to our present location I really didn't have room in the shed to store them, so they went out into the elements behind the shed for the past 5 years. They were single coated with flocking, not double coated, but exposed to sun, rain, snow, freeing/thawing, heat and my expectation was not real high when I started pulling them out of the brush and leaves that had been piling for years on top of them. After all, they were old hardcores and the way I got the old flocking off of the original decoys was to just set them in the sun for a month and the flocking on the heads would literally peel off in sheets.
This decoy was one of 18 I had flocked and they all looked like this after so many years of neglect, out of sight, out of mind. I didn't wash them, just used my compressor to blow the debris off of them. While the remaining unfinished decoys had sluffed off nearly all their factory paint and flocking, these still looked pretty good.
Granted, I wasn't throwing these decoys in the back of a trailer, dragging them around the field, or let the dog tromp on them in the boat, but I don't treat my gear that way anyhow. I'm not sure where the expectation of being able to abuse decoys came from, but really my only concern is if you can get the paint to flake off like so many factory decoys do. Any paint will scratch, take a key to the side of your house or your car and it will scratch. I'm not particularly careful with my decoys, but I don't abuse my tools and I want my decoys to stay clean. I keep my shotgun clean too, otherwise it won't be reliable. I believe that lots of hunters kill birds in spite of their decoys, not because of them.
