Some of the prior comments are unrealistic...
80%+ of us live in urban areas. Most of us work 40 hours per week. There NO nearby wild birds -- one has to drive many miles to find any wild birds. If one wants to train and maintain a bird dog, pen-raised birds are the only choice.
Even those living on farms or in villages probably use pen raised birds for their dog training.
ALL field trials use pen-raised birds.
We live in 2013, not 1940. The Missouri quail population is down 90% from the 1960's. Most of the upland birds we shoot are pen-raised, except for doves. Get over it !!!
Jerry, agree with most of the above. However, there are field trials that do not use pen-raised birds. Ruffed grouse "cover trials", for example. And at least some of the horseback trials are on wild birds. But they've even "supplemented" the wild quail population down at Ames for the National (although I don't know if they've continued to do that or whether the bird numbers have recovered sufficiently from previous releases), so it's not as easy to find trials run strictly on wild birds as it used to be. And no question that wild bird numbers, in general, are down from what they used to be--very significantly so in your home state of Missouri, and my former home state of Iowa.
