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Show Sports Midi By Ted Resting i)c Ioiik before you realize a fully trained bird dotf miht have been u burtfuin at $750. Training a pup yoursielf is an exhilarating challenge when everything in going nicely, but it can be a terribly frustrating experience if your pup turns out to bo a difficult pupil or if you lack the patience and the free time necessary to do a good job. On the other hand, if you can summon patience and enjoy teaching even when things are1 going badly, training a pup can be more rewarding than any performance you get out of a dog trained by someone else. Regardless of your requirements, require-ments, the dog that meets them may be expensive to buy, difficult dif-ficult to train and costly to keep, but if he pleases you, you'll never regret a penny of it, for he will have added an invaluable dimension to your life. Jerome 15. Kobinsun, Gun Dogs Editor of Sports Afield, tells us that he receives a great deal of mail from readers who are ready to buy a dog. They want to know how much they should pay and what ' they should expect to get lor their money. Are they best advised to buy a puppy and train it themselves them-selves or have it professionally trained, or should they buy a fully trained performer? Not surprisingly, most are looking for a bargain. A good dog that is the product prod-uct of a trainer's ability is worth a price that must include fair recompense for the time it took to train the dog as well as the cost of the dog's feed, medical attention and housing, plus its original value. Even at bulk-feed prices, it costs about $75 a year to feed a dog, and any pup from a good breeding background is worth at least $75 at eight weeks. Aedical attention will have cost at least $25. That means someone has at least a $250 investment in a two-year-old dog which has had no training train-ing at all. Add training time on top of that and then figure on paying a trainer a fair hourly hour-ly rate for an average number of hours, and you begin to see why trained hunting dogs bring the prices they do. A well-trained three-year-old bird dog of average ability has cost someone a minimum of $350 in actual cash outlay, plus training time. Even if the dog has had no more than 100 hours of nctual training in its lifetime (and that's not much) the trainer's time is a sizable investment. in-vestment. Call it four dollars an hour and a good trainer is worth more than that. At that rate, a well-trained three-year-old bird dog of only average ability could sell for $750 and still not pay any return on the trainer's investment in the kennel, ken-nel, training area, birds and general maintenance. Bird-day pups from desirable breedings usually sell for $100 to $150 at professional kennels when they are eight weeks old; often less through private owners. own-ers. Training rates vary widely, but it is not uncommon for pros to charge $75 to $100 a month for a real program of field hunting and bird work. It won'l |