Editing the Current Data for the Field Policy

'Field Policy' refers to the shooter's choice regarding the use of a retrieving dog, whether the shooting of wildfowl is over water or land, and the ranges at which shots are taken.

First, what is the benefit of a retrieving dog in terms of recovering downed birds? A dog will be able to recover birds which may still be able to fly or swim. At the Current Data panel, move down to the Retriever line and press the key to set the retriever to 'No' and press G (Graph) to see the effect. So, with the 36 grams of No.4 steel shot through a half choke, the results will typically be:

The hit rate should remain the same - any small difference here is due to the random effect of the computer simulation. However the reduction of Bagged/Hit rate from 75% to 69% is significant, reflecting the dog's value in retrieving swimming birds. To see the retrieving dog's contribution away from the over-water environment (i.e. over fields), edit the next line down in the Current Data so that 'Wildfowl over Water' is switched to 'no', then re-examine the effect of selecting/deselecting the retriever. Here, the essential difference between aquatic and terrestrial retrieving is that a one legged bird cannot run, but can swim!-

The 'ranging policy' should coincide with the region of the graphs which simultaneously combine a high bagged rate with a low unretrieved rate. It appears that a modest improvement can be achieved by reducing the maximum range by 5 metres. Having made sure that the 'Retriever' and 'Wildfowl over Water' are both 'Yes', move down to the 'Range Maximum' and use the & (sideways arrow) keys to reduce the value from 50m to 45m. Repeat this reduction by 5m for the 'Range upper plateau' too, giving:

Now press G to produce a graph similar to this:

Tabulating the change…

which shows that there is perhaps a beneficial improvement in the Bagged/Hit rate.

Other range policies' can be loaded from the datafiles: press I (Input) then P (Policy) and select from the list.