Breeding Specialisation
Todays working dogs are the product of countless years of specialised breeding, which has resulted in dogs with an instinctual flair for hunting and retrieving. Their very fibre vibrates with the need to find their quarry. You can see their pleasure; it is palpable the pleasure they eschew when they are working. Even the occasional ones that are sometimes fractious with other dogs forget their animosity as soon as they start hunting in earnest.

And what strange mechanism allows our dogs to sense that this is the day, that we are going out beating, shooting, stalking or whatever type of hunting we do, because sense it they certainly do. I used to think it was the way I dressed, So I put on my shooting and beating gear on for a couple of weeks to test this theory, and they still sensed the days when I actually was going to work them.

I think we must give little clues with our body language, subtle nuances that we cannot detect, but their heightened awareness and ability allows them to read it as clear as if we had it stamped on our foreheads.

Ownership is a Privilege
That to me is the joy of owning these magnificent animals, to see them doing what nature intended gives me more pleasure than other pastime I can think off. Though I no longer train gundogs, my profession has taken me into the psychological aspects of why our pets behave the way they do. Irrespective of what I do now, for me the working dog still embodies the spirit of what dogs are all about.

These are the high performance sports cars of the canine world. Forget the pampered pooches recently seen at Crufts, though some undoubtedly do work, in the main our working strains are a very different animal to their show-ring counterpart. Just look at the Labradors and Springer