Written by James Allen
After spending my youth growing up around show spaniels, I knew that one day I would get my own dog. Fast forward to 2024 when I moved out of my family home and into my own place, I knew the time was right. A close friend of mine has two black labradors and I instantly fell in love with the breed, knowing that that is what I wanted. A bit of googling and you’d think the humble labrador was an easy going, easy to train and all round easy first dog that can come into anyone’s life. That’s where the internet isn’t the best place for research…
Many bruises, a few cuts, a broken bone and countless swear words and saying that I’ll phone up Dogs Trust after a bad training session later, we are in October 2025, and I can honestly say that it has been a journey of ups and downs, that a few people have gotten to witness first hand. The simple parts of Gundog training that you always hear about are something along the lines of:
Steadiness – well Monty wouldn’t sit still if his life depended on it…
Recall – that meant absolutely nothing…
Heelwork – no thank you!
Retrieving – well this part he understood from the word go…
Our journey over the last fourteen months has been slow, but we’re getting there. Turning up every weekend to lessons and spending countless evenings trying to get something to happen and inevitably feeling like giving up, we started to work together. Speaking to Carla and the Severncrest group has shown us that its not simply one plan fits all and it’s far exceeded past the A-Z list that many will be following. For us dog training has been an endless trying and failing, and getting back out there and trying again. We’ve recently been having great success by breaking down everything we do into stages. You would think that a labrador retriever would be able to go back, pick and come back, but even the simplest of task has had to be done in stages and repetitions, that anyone looking from across the field must think ‘what are they doing?’.
As said before, there is no one size fits all, every dog is different. A good friend at training once told me ‘we are sent the dogs that we need… not the dogs that we want’ and this is something that everyone should take into consideration when they feel like they’ve got a handful in front of them, and when it gets bad you hear of people giving up and moving the dog on. But if you give up on your dog, then who else is going to do the same.
When you overcome this stage in training, after months of lows, just to get to a single high point, it is honestly the most rewarding thing you can experience as someone training their dog, especially knowing that you have worked so hard to get there, and that is where we are at now. By changing our approach and attitude, and ensuring that we get the best out of the time we spend together has made such a positive impact on our training.
The breaking down into stages has worked wonders on our recall and retrieving – yes it’s not perfect by any means, but its better and week by week improves.
Steadiness – Monty will now sit for 8/10 dummies being thrown, with dogs running past, distractions and general day to day life. Again, this wasn’t easy, and as Carla says these things take time, and she is so right when she says its boring! But being as crucial as it is, we’ve sucked it up and we’ve gone and stood in B&Q for an hour on a Saturday afternoon when we really want to be in the pub having a drink with our friends, we’ve gone to the local café and sat there, and yes we’ve gone and stood in the middle of the woods where boar, deer and squirrels have been running around to try and get him not to sniff the ground.
For us, gundog training is about learning what each other need as it’s a partnership, always asking questions and learning from whoever you can, the more people you talk to the more experiences you get to hear and trying different things over and over again and persevering through the hard times until you get to that one good moment where something just clicks, and that is the moment you realise there’s more to dog training than sit and paw. The past fourteen months have been difficult but were ready for another fourteen and more, we’d even do it all again from scratch one day.