Glen Scarborough is the story within the story of the 2012 International Grand Hunt Test held near Tulsa this week.
His story provides both a lesson and inspiration.
He lost his leg because of a hunting dog. Now he not only continues to hunt, but has made a serious hobby of dog training. His 27-month-old black Labrador retriever, Slyder, passed his first Grand hunt test this week, and in the spring he will be chairman of the 2013 Grand with his hometown retriever club in Texarkana, Texas.
“I kinda came up here to this one to learn, I didn’t really anticipate passing,” Scarborough said after he completed the upland series on a windy Wednesday afternoon.
Scarborough has a local tie in that he bought Slyder through the Retriever Academy at Miami. He’s done some training on the Retriever Academy grounds with Derek Randle. “They are just super nice guys,” he said.
Passing the Grand is a long-odds venture, but Scarborough is no stranger to beating the odds.
In December 2000 his own unruly hunting dog boat stepped on his friend’s 12-gauge shotgun and it discharged into his leg, severing his femur and main artery. “I was dead several times. They used 83 units of blood on me,” he said. “They said I had a one in 10 million chance of surviving.”
Scarborough now makes regular appearances to speak to community groups about the importance of donating blood and to Boy Scout groups and others about gun safety.
For years he had no interest dogs or hunting but a friend at church urged him back into the activity in 2007. “That was five years ago and now here we are passing a Grand,” he said.
Now when he hunts he has two dogs with him – but they always are under control. Hunters and their dogs work as a team in the field, and that means they both have to be safe as well. “That same mistake is not going to happen again,” Scarborough said.
The Hunting Retriever Club activity has replaced another aspect of his life that was missing after his accident. “I was always really into sports,” he said. “Here we compete against a standard but it’s challenging.”
While the retriever grounds are not exactly groomed Scarborough navigates them well in with his rubber-booted prosthetic leg. He also enjoys the sport with his family. His wife, Kelli, ran Slyder as a puppy in his first few tests.
Slyder’s experience this week at the Skelly Ranch grounds was complicated by a test all the handlers nicknamed Mudzilla. “That’s a bad dude,” Scarborough said of the muddy duck hunt scenario.
Slyder passed the water test in fine fashion, the problem was it took so long to run the test that schedules were disrupted. “They only got through 30 dogs the first day and I think they had something like 84 to get through,” he said.
Scarborough and Slyder ran their first land-based test, then waited two days to get to Mudzilla. “We sat for 60 hours,” he said.
The problem was when they finally ran Mudzilla they had to run a land series just hour later. Normally the dogs run just one test per day. “These dogs get amped up at these tests and that’s when he made his mistake,” Scarborough said.
But Mudzilla and the difficulties that it caused handlers and dogs is another story, the story on the Outdoors page in Sunday’s Tulsa World, actually.
Find that story and check out a video and photos from the 2012 Fall Grand
HERE
