#including solid little adventure dog and capacity to be offleash (with similar caveats to mav)

[abirddogmoment]

would you do bird hunting with Aurora given the opportunity? (I dont follow anyone who does hunting with their dogs and it would be interesting to see!)

I'm back and forth on it honestly. Ideally yeah, I'd love to give her the opportunity to hunt and be fulfilled that way. But there are a couple of things I'm struggling with:

I don't have access to training birds myself, nor the knowledge (or desire) to go at training her seriously alone.

Most gundog trainers (incl. my local brittany person who's been helping me out) expect you to go all in, birds should be your priority over all else (including general good dog manners).

Currently, pointing dog training in North America tends towards "make dogs bird obsessed -> introduce gunfire -> reign in the dogs so they're steady". The problems with this (for me) is that I don't want a bird obsessed dog at all and I don't want to use the pressure expected/required for "reigning it back in".

I had a really demoralizing experience trying to learn more about shotgun sizing and I'm not keen to try again.

So in conclusion, maybe but probably not to a serious extent.