Handle with care

“Being able to read your dog’s body language is so important but unfortunately it is a skill that many handlers never achieve”

few years ago I was doing a photo commission on a driven day and the shoot captain had two rather smart-looking labradors. He was proudly telling everyone who would listen that he had paid a lot of money for these highly bred, fully-trained gundogs from a well-known professional trainer. To be fair, they sat nicely at his side but at the end of a drive he just turned them loose and by the end of the day they were running around like headless chickens. All the months of training were forgotten. It wasn’t the dogs’ fault,