Don’t get me wrong. We had dogs. Always.

But they didn’t live in the house, and they didn’t get treats.

They were working dogs. They lived in a pen at the back of the property, and they only got out to hunt.

I blame Garden & Gun magazine for gentrifying hunting dogs. And hunting. And most every other problem I have with aspirational bourgeoisie culture in the modern South.

I am convinced that quail hunting with expensive dogs and wearing expensive clothes while riding a mule-drawn wagon was never actually a part of our culture until people in Buckhead and Mountain Brook started reading Garden & Gun and buying into its nostalgia for a past that, if at all accurate, was rare.

Let’s be real.

Old money doesn’t spend money or put on airs.

If they were hunting with mule-drawn wagons, it’s because they thought ATVs were expensive and downright silly. And they damned sure didn’t have a faux-campaign-furniture style briefcase bar full of expensive whiskey with little collapsible cups.

They most likely had a Coca Cola and a pack of Tom’s peanut butter crackers in the game pouch of the vest they bought at TG&Y on clearance 40 years ago.

I grew up hunting coveys of wild quail with my father on massive tracts of paper mill property.

We started walking at daybreak and walked all day. We layered our clothing not for warmth but to turn briars. I got my first pair of “briar britches” for Christmas when I was 14 years old, and I felt like the luckiest, most privileged kid in the world.

Our dogs were good dogs, but they didn’t have pedigrees. They didn’t come from a renowned kennel, and they didn’t get trained before we got them.

They ranged farther than the dogs I hunt over now, and they’d hold a point until we caught up with them.

My father didn’t have a lanyard full of shock collar controls. If a puppy broke point while backing a mature dog, my father peppered it with a load of number 8 shot.

Inhumane? Maybe. But it worked.

And it didn’t seem to me that the puppy minded much. He just kept hunting and eventually quit breaking point before my father gave permission.

We didn’t have custom-fitted over-under shotguns imported from the King’s armorer in London.

We had Belgian Browing Auto-5s. No plug. Plugs were only required for migratory fowl like doves. So we loaded them “bird-bird-buck-bird-bird.” Because you always jumped the biggest deer when quail hunting. And you instinctively learned to pull the trigger three times as fast as you could when you jumped one.

My father started taking me everywhere he went as early as I can remember.

On a 10-hour quail hunt through thick briars, I’d walk until I was exhausted. When I got tired, he’d simply stomp out a clear spot in the sage, lay me down for a nap, tie a piece of flagging tape to a nearby branch, and hunt back to me a few hours later.

By the time I was 15, I had my own truck, my own dogs, my own shotgun, and a pocket full of permission slips from sweet widow ladies to hunt the pea patches behind their sheds.

My friend Bo and I went to school every day during quail season with a dog box full of dogs in the bed of our pickup trucks and a shotgun behind the seat. After school, we’d hunt over small family farms and raise three or four wild coveys before supper.

When I describe my adolescence to my “new friends” who didn’t grow up in that time and place, I always recount a specific story.

I was 16 or 17.

When I went to feed the bird dogs one morning before school, one of my dogs was missing. It was not unusual. My personal experience with bird dogs says they are escape artists par none.

We lived on a long dirt road, and our closest neighbor, about a quarter mile up the road, had a yard full of chickens, peacocks, and guinea fowl.

I didn’t care for him, and that dulled my concern when I saw my dog on his front porch shaking the life out of the last of his birds.

His yard was littered with carcasses, but my only concern was that my dog had tasted blood and therefore had become cursed with that most dreaded of maladies for hunting dogs—the hard mouth.

I scooped up my dog and threw him in the back of my truck. It wasn’t hunting season, so I didn’t have a dog box in the bed of my truck, but I knew the head football coach—with whom I often hunted—had one in the bed of his truck.

So when I got to school, I pulled in behind the gym, tossed my dog in his box, and walked into his office.

“Hey, Coach. My dog killed a bunch of chickens this morning, so I’m going to have to kill him. I didn’t have time to fool with it this morning, so I threw him in your truck. I’ll get him after school and take him home and shoot him.”

“OK.”

I didn’t want to kill the dog. I dreaded it. But that’s what you did to bird dogs with a hard mouth.

Salvation came (for the dog and me) when Coach knocked on the door of my second period chemistry class and asked that I join him in the hall. I walked out with the teacher’s permission and waited.

“You ain’t got to kill that dog. I sold it. Here’s your half.”

I guess I should have asked why I only deserved half of the sale price of my dog, but I was young and naïve and thinking of my fellow man.

“Hold on, Coach. That dog has a hard mouth. He’s tasted blood. He’s ruined. Did you tell them that?”

“He wanted a bird dog. There was a bird dog in my truck that you didn’t want, and didn’t want to kill. Everybody’s happy. Shut up and take the money.”

So I shut up and took the money.

That was more than 30 years ago.

I can’t tell you exactly when everything changed, but nobody hunts wild coveys any more.

Fifteen-year old kids don’t have their own trucks and guns and dogs.

I live in the city and don’t have a pen full of working dogs in the back of the property.

My last two dogs were Labrador retrievers with papers and bloodlines, and they slept in the bed with me every night.

My parents have a miniature schnauzer that is more pampered than Little Lord Fauntleroy.

I’ve taken my father on trips to hunt released birds on manicured plantations over expensive dogs and guides with lanyards full of shock collar controllers. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that every bird we killed over the limit cost me a small fortune. What’s the point?

He was a kid in a candy store, and it made me happy to see him happy.

Who am I to say what’s better or worse?

It was what it was and it is what it is.

But I know one thing for certain: I’m a dog person.

I have zero desire to hunt anything that doesn’t involve dogs. I want them to lay beside my chair while I watch the news and read a book. I want them to ride in the front seat of my truck and sleep in the bed with me. I want to give them treats and brag about them to my friends.

I don’t subscribe to Garden & Gun, and I think it’s blatant propaganda to encourage consumerism in new money pretenders. But hey . . . if it makes them happy to wear Martin Dingman ostrich boots on a mule-drawn wagon in South Georgia, who am I to judge?