Ill throw in my 2-cents even though its not worth nearly that much.
IMO, like others have said, it totally depends on the dog and the conditions. I have been lucky enough to sit on the both sides of the hunter vs field trialer fence. I grew up hunting pheasants in WA with close hunting brits that had very little training. Now, I have a Brit who has quailified for Nationals as a Horseback Gun Dog at only 21 months of age. She will hit 600+ yards in a heartbeat in the S.D. prairies off horseback (GPS'd distances, not guesses)... To me, its all about the training. IMO most "hunting" dogs aren't trained well enough to run big. They creep, aren't broke, bust birds, and just don't see enough wild birds in their lifetime to be able to really learn how to hunt wild pheasants. For that reason, they need to hunt within gun range in order to kill birds over them. Now, a well trained fully broke pointing dog who has lots of time in the Dakotas hunting and training with wild pheasants is a pure joy to watch. I don't care how big one of those dogs run, because they know how to handle their birds, and you will kill a bunch over them. They still need to be able to adjust their range to the cover, but with the invention of the Garmin Astro, they can point all day long when you cant see them and you will still know exactly where they are, no matter how far away they are...... It isn't easy for a dog to get to this point, they have to see hundreds of wild birds in many different conditions, and they have to be consistently ran on wild birds.. A perfect example is my pup. She spent 3 months last summer outside Winner S.D. with her trainer. By the end of summer she was pinning and pointing wild pheasants like it was a piece of cake. I hunted pheasants over her in the fall and she made it look like kids stuff, even though she was running 100-300 yards out in front of me. Fast forward 1 year. She got to camp in the beginning of July. She had been run on only liberated and planted quail for the previous 8 months. To say she went "bowling for birds" would be an understatement according to the trainer. He said it took her a while to get back into the swing of wild pheasants again, but now she is doing fine on them and pinning and pointing them like a seasoned pro. But, it took several weeks and probably 50-80 points for her to stop crowding and not to bump the birds (points, not birds. Some points produce 50+ birds flushing all around her). 50-80 points is more then many hunting dogs will get all season.
To the average joe hunter who hunts pheasants a couple times a year, 50 yards if probably as big as Id want my dog to run (this was me growing up). But to the guy who lives in S.D. or Kansas and hunts 30 or 40 times a year, with dogs who really know wild birds, and are trained properly, I would have no problem with my dog running as big as they wanted. 500+ yards doesn't bother me at all. BTW.. After running dogs on a Garmin, you realize that 500 yards really isn't that far. I feel like my dogs a boot licker when shes inside 100 now days.
