The nice thing now days is DNA! Just because a Brit is a true All Age dog doesn't mean its been bread with an ES or EP.. At least not any more then the original breed which was created by crossing an ES. DNA makes it much, much harder to cheat... BTW.. Cheating has occured at every level of Field Trials. But that is a completely different subject that we could hash out for years!
Oldandnew. I agree with you 100% about trials and birds. Young birds are a piece of cake for pointers. Its the late season wild birds that give them fits. But remember, even when running dogs in the summers, there are a lot of those hold over older birds still out there, and they haven't forgot what its like to be shot at. IMO the perfect early season pheasant dog is any of the big running pointing breeds, and I prefer a dog who knows how to track and pin birds. I don't want a dog who ignores scent, and won't track even though they know a bird is not far away. It takes a lot of bumped birds for the dog to get to that point, but Ive seen first hand what a big running AA dog can do in the prairies when it comes to finding and pointing pheasants. Ill be in SD in 3 weeks to run my dog at the trainers off horse in the prairies, and then were going to spend a few days hunting sharptails off foot. When you go to a lot of trials, and then get to see what a pros string can do while running on wild pheasants and sharptail in the prairies, you really get to see the difference between what makes a dog good, and what makes a dog great. With that said, go to enough trials and its interesting to see how the different trainers dogs perform against eachother as well. Not all trainers are created equal, not by a long shot. Ill be honest though, If I had to pick the perfect late season pheasant dog, it wouldn't be one of the pointing breeds. During the late season with spooky birds, I think you will kill more birds over a close working lab or springer. Too many roosters just aren't going to hold for a point, if your not ontop of a pointing dog when it locks up, many of the late season birds are just going to walk out from under the point.. That won't happen with a flushing dog. A perfect example was last year when we spent a few days hunting public land in SD in December. My buddies Brittany (shes the direct daughter of Nolan's Last Bullet) locked up hard on a bird. My dad and he walked up for the flush, and you could see the bird run out from under the dog and go blowing through the grass. You couldn't actually see the bird, all you could see was the ripple through the grass as the bird ran into some heavier cover. We relocated the dogs but I think the bird flew off once it got behind the trees because the dogs lost the scent. If we would have been hunting over any of the flushing breeds, that bird would have been in the air and it would have been dead. On that trip we did get a lot of nice points, and killed a lot of nice birds over those points, but I think we would have killed more birds with flushing dogs.
), much like an EP or ES (believed to be the origin of Brits anyways). You can bet that people were breeding EP's and ES's into brits to get longer legged bigger running dogs. However, now that we have DNA evidence breeders can't exactly get away with that anymore. But, there are enough big running AA brits in the breed now to continue to get bigger and bigger running All Age dogs. Its really no different then breeding two labs who point to try and get pointing labs. Most folks don't realize that EP's and ES's used to point with their tails down. The 12 Oclock tail is something that has been breed into the two breeds.
