‘Just part of the family’

Easy-riding pooch offers hunting skills, friendship

By Kevin Woster, Journal staff Sunday, March 09, 2008

HOT SPRINGS ---No kennel for Mr. Jiggs.He rides comfortably in the back seat of Hugh Welsh’s 2007 Chevy pickup, and alternates between snoozing and nuzzling the neck of a front-seat passenger.

“One of my buddies gets after me about that. He says I should put him in the kennel,” Welsh says as he steers the pickup south on Highway 79 toward an appointment with a ring-necked pheasant. “Jiggs is just part of the family. He likes to ride up here. And I hate to put him in the kennel.”

Indeed, Welsh hates to be separated from his 2-year-old English setter at all, even if only by the thin plastic walls of a portable kennel. Jiggs is family to Welsh, the 58-year-old athletic director at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, and his wife, Heidi.

When they went looking for a hunting dog a couple years back, they also went looking for a pal — and a handsome one at that.

“Oh, he’s from a good hunting line,” Hugh Welsh says. “But we really liked his disposition and his looks. We just think he’s such a good-looking dog.”

Handsome in any setting, Jiggs is especially appealing when he slides to a stop in a weed patch or sorghum field and locks up in rigid, half-turned point with his nose aimed directly at the source of scent. He did that 10 or 12 times during a recent two-hour hunt at the Dakota Hills hunting preserve near Oral.

Welsh buys an annual membership there and makes the one-hour drive to Dakota Hills about once a week beginning in the fall and running through the winter. The preserve season runs through March. And most days, Welsh and Jiggs have the place all to themselves.

Except, of course, for the pheasants.

Dakota Hills operator Tom Lauing releases well-bred, pen-raised birds with sneaky inclinations and flight skills that approximate their wild cousins. If the Dakota Hills birds tend to hold a bit better than many of the far-flushing, footloose roosters born and raised in the wild, it only makes the dog work more enjoyable for Welsh.

That’s the real reason he hunts, anyway.

“It’s fun to shoot. And we really like to eat the pheasants,” he says. “But the most fun is watching Jiggs. He just loves it out here.”

There was plenty for man and dog to love on a sunny, calm, late-February morning when the temperature was well on its way to 50 degrees. Four times the point by Jiggs was nearly perfect. Four times Welsh dropped a rooster with the powdery bark of his 20-gauge double.

And by a few minutes after noon, Jiggs was well-watered and back in his spot in the pickup, nuzzling the back of the newcomer’s neck.

He also had a bit of lunch, but it wasn’t a pile of dusty kibbles. Mr. Jiggs shared a sandwich with his boss.

He’s part of the family, after all.