Since arriving in North America I am constantly asked, when attending competitions, what the difference is between British and American field trials…

The first time I ever saw the Virginia Sportsman it lay face down on a shiny mahogany table in a hotel lobby. What caught my eye was the advertisement on the back cover, and in fact it wasn’t until I turned it over, did I see the title of the publication.

An important element of obedience training for any retriever is what the English call ‘steadiness’, which quite simply means that if a bird drops out of the sky within inches of it’s nose and flaps around for several minutes, the dog does not move or make a sound.

To get a dog to this standard for the experienced trainer is relatively easy for a number of reasons.

If there is one aspect of shooting driven game that I don’t enjoy it is standing around on a peg waiting for the beaters and their dogs to flush the birds out of the cover. However, the positive side is that it is always an opportunity to talk to people that you haven’t met before-or indeed eaves drop on people that do know one another…