When Texas dog trainer Alex Huff brings down a bird, it’s not always a Lab she sends out to retrieve the kill. As often as not, a little streak of brown and white, barely over a foot high, dashes into the field: It’s Gator the duck dog, an Instagram famous eighteen-pound Jack Russell terrier with a full nine years of hunting experience.
How Gator came to be a duck dog started with his predecessor, Moose, another Jack Russell who loved to fetch so much that Huff told herself that she’d try formal training on her next one. When Moose passed away, Huff got a seven-week-old puppy, named him Gator, and began sussing out his abilities. “I started throwing toys for him in the hallway, then birds and bumpers, and he just loved it,” she says. “So I thought, Let’s see how far we can go.”
As it turns out, pretty far: Gator completed all of the training that Huff puts her other dogs through at her and her husband’s training business in Frankston, Texas, called One Shot Retrievers. Gator learned to walk to heel, deliver to hand, and even became versed in water retrieves (though Huff had to find a very small pond for swim-by training). He’s hunted geese, duck, and doves. Huff says he has a pretty soft mouth, though he sometimes can’t resist giving a bird a little shake.
Of course, he wasn’t exactly bred for this, and steady is not the word that comes to mind to describe Gator on a hunt. In training, he doesn’t break, but the field is a different story. “I have to tie him down,” Huff says, laughing. “Whenever we set up and shoot, he sometimes stands up on his back legs and tries to break free of the leash.” He’s also been known to get jealous of his hunting buddies, and once nipped a Lab who retrieved a bird he thought should be his (the Lab was unfazed).
When he’s not hunting, Gator enjoys sleeping for hours at a time in the closet, where his bed is, before emerging to indulge in zoomies around the house or yard. He also loves to play with the two Labs that live in the house as well, to attack and shake water bottles that Huff’s husband throws for him, and occasionally to sneak a bumper out of a basket and chew it up. But his real passion is hunting. Huff used to take him out as many as five times a week, but at nine years old, he’s slowing down a little. She doesn’t let him retrieve geese anymore, as they’re too big and hurt his back, but he’s still all-in for ducks and the occasional dove hunt.
Over the years, people have called and asked her to train their Jack Russells, too, but none panned out as well as Gator, and eventually, Huff stopped accepting them. “I just didn’t want to force it—if you want a gundog and you got a Jack Russell, you bought the wrong tool for the job,” she says. As she put it in an Instagram post featuring Gator dashing into the field after a duck: “He wasn’t born for this job, but he sure does love it!”
