Gangrene bird retrieved.

L

leadthewayoakley

New member
Hello everyone, I'm new to the forum. I have a 1 year old chocolate lab, I have tried my best to get her out as much as possible this year. So far she has been on a dove hunt, a couple duck hunts and now approximately 9 pheasant hunts. Today after a couple hours of pheasant hunting with no luck, she finally got real birdie and locked on to a rooster. When she flushed the bird, it wouldn't fly. She ended up chasing it down in some thick grass an proudly carried it over to me still alive. I was super stoked and proud of her. When I got home, I began to clean the bird and sadly discovered that the bird had already been shot and the leg was gangrene. For my safety and the safety of my family I just threw the whole bird away. That being said, I am curious how likely it is that my dog could get sick from simply retrieving a rancid bird? Does anyone else have any experience with something like this? Did your dog get sick? Any input and advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
 
Dog will be fine. It happens, dogs are resilient to that type stuff.
 
My dogs eat cat crap out of the sandbox and drink from the shop toilet. Your dog will be fine.
 
Don't worry about your dog and almost anything that they run into on prey in the field. Predators have evolved over millions of years to be basically immune to almost all diseases of their prey. Remember, our dog's wolf ancestors usually take down the old and the sick in the herd for a meal. They would be in bad shape if they got a disease every time they ate an easy meal. My labs eat deer poop and my hunting buddie's Springer eats everything including week old road kill. It is true that our dog's digestive system has evolved to be more human-like since they have been eating our diet for quite awhile, but I have had no problems with my labs' dietary field habits. The only real problem we have in the field is poisoned varmint carcasses and, hopefully, there are none of those in our hunting areas.

As far as "gangrene" birds. I would have cut off the bad meat and frozen or cooked it. Both freezing and cooking kill bacteria and gangrene is really not infectious. It requires a deep wound to get started. In any case, the traditional method to handle game birds like pheasant was to hang them un-gutted by the feet until the head fell off.

Here is a quote: "For a wild bird, Shaw?s suggestion was seven days. This is often the recommendation used in Europe, especially the UK. Whether you talk to culinary expert Hank Shaw, or one of those cooking writers we both admire, like British writer Clarissa Dickson Wright, you can?t go wrong with aging your bird?whether two days, three days or until the head separates from the body.

Yes, in traditional British bird aging, pheasants used to hang until it became so rotten it fell to the ground."

This was also the suggested method for preparing pheasant in the 1972 Joy of Cooking Cookbook that I have in my kitchen. Check out <corksoutdoors.com/blog/pheasants-hang-em-high/> for the traditional method of preparing pheasant.
 
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Have you seen the birds they use at hunt tests for dogs to retrieve? Some of them are almost falling apart as they have been shot, retrieved, frozen, retrieved again and again... I am sure your dog will be just fine.
 
carptom1 said:
My dogs eat cat crap out of the sandbox and drink from the shop toilet. Your dog will be fine.
Click to expand...

TOO funny! But oh so true... doesn't matter what we do, these mutts consume some pretty nasty stuff.

Keep an eye... but I wouldn't be overly worried. My pooches have found their share of cripples back with the same.
 
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