Teaching very old tricks to new dogs: gundog trainer John Cook at 80

There is a Labrador in John Cook’s kennels at the moment that he describes, without hesitation, as one of the most difficult dogs he has ever taken in. It comes out each morning with its tail up, believing that it owns the place. By rights a man of 80 might hand such a dog back to its owners and tell them to find someone with younger knees. John does the opposite. “He’s the one that gets me up earlier in the morning,” he says. “I want to have another go. I won’t be beaten.”

That, more than any single trophy or championship placing, is the thing to understand about John Cook. He is not interested in the easy ones. The difficult dogs are precisely what keep him going – and, he is quite certain, what keep him young.

You would not guess his age, and he would rather you didn’t. “People can’t believe I’m 80 years old,” he says. He is still training every day – “over eight days a week” – with around half-a-dozen client dogs in at any one time. He has made up numerous field trial champions over the years, the most recent in the season before last. A few weeks before we spoke he had turned out at an England team qualifier, run against 15 dogs and progressed to the final eight before a single retrieve went against him.

“I’m a bit of a masochist, really,” he admits. “My head tells me to do things and my body says I should hang on. But I’m not going to stop.”

An impoverished Somerset childhood, reared on rabbits

He came up the hard way. One of five children in an impoverished Somerset family, John was, as he puts it, reared on rabbits – his father kept lurchers and Bedlington whippets and put food on the table with them. There was no money for anything new; everything was handed down from an older brother. His father was a lorry driver, his mother worked on the land. They were never out of work and were, by his account, wonderful parents.

His father also handed him a creed that John repeats now with a complicated mixture of pride and regret: work comes first, and never say no to any job. He left school at 15 and went straight to work training spaniels and running a small shoot for a Bristol businessman who loved to show his guests what a properly trained dog looked like.

Five years in, John knew he wanted his own kennels – but could not afford them. So he went self-employed into landscaping, won a Forestry Commission contract planting trees on new motorway banks and spent the best part of a decade at it until he had the money to buy the business he wanted all along. Flintwood Gundogs has been his life ever since.

John’s mentor was the late Richard Eversfield, of the Pinewarren affix, a name he says few people would remember now but one he returns to with real warmth. Richard was a brilliant trainer who always had a dog that could work the heaviest cover, and it is from him that John inherited the conviction that sits at the centre of everything he believes about a spaniel.

“A spaniel’s main job is hunting,” he says. “But you can’t shoot it until you find it, and you can’t retrieve it until you shoot it. So the most important thing is to find it first. Nothing happens until then.”

What John Cook looks for as a field trial judge

John was a founder member of Bristol & West Gundog Society and has been an A-panel judge for many years, with the privilege of judging the Russian, Swedish and English championships. A dog’s hunting ability is, he says, the thing he looks for above all else as a judge – and the thing he sees too little of. Too many dogs now simply run from side to side, busy and stylish and finding nothing, and too many of them win. A dog that bumps game by accident certainly gets no credit from John Cook. “I’m not crediting a handler with that, because the dog never found it.”

Every trainer who stays the course long enough, John believes, will be blessed once with the dog of a lifetime – the one of exceptional ability that all the rejects before it were leading towards. His was the English springer FTCh Robinsmoor Sam of Flintwood. Sam won his debut field trial, went on to a remarkable run of open-stake wins and was placed third, then second, at the Spaniel Championship in successive years, taking a Diploma of Merit the year after and qualifying four years running. He never lost a run-off.

The good gundogs are born, not made

John is careful, even now, not to take too much credit. The truly good ones, he says, are not made – they are born. “The good ones don’t fall out of trees. You’ve got to go through a lot of dogs to get a good one.” Going professional, he is honest, cost his own dogs dearly. Training other people’s animals for a living meant his own never got all the refinements he would have given them with the time. Sam, he suspects, was not even the most naturally gifted dog he ever owned – only the one who got the opportunities.

Ask John what makes a good trainer and the answer comes without any hesitation: “Being consistent, fair – and it’s not about punishment. It’s about understanding how they’re thinking.” He teaches in pictures that clients can carry home. Dog training, he tells them, is like driving a car: you are the one in total control of where the vehicle goes, and the steering wheel is where you make the decision. Train a dog and you are doing exactly the same – deciding, every moment, where you want it to go.

He explains the stop whistle the same way, and he regards it as the single most important command a dog can learn. Imagine driving towards a red light, he says, and pressing the brakes – but they don’t work. Cars are crossing your path with the right of way and you plough straight into them. Had the brakes worked, you would simply have stopped and stayed out of trouble. On a shoot, a strong runner heading for a busy road is no different. If the dog will not stop on the whistle – instantly, every time – you could one day have a dead dog. The whistle, he insists, must work 100% of the time.

His other advice is relentlessly practical. Keep the commands few and simple – most owners arrive with so many he runs out of paper writing them down. Let the dog mature. Sending a young dog into the big time, he says, is like sending bright 10-year-olds to university and expecting them to cope. And buy place boards – a minimum of two and four if you are serious about steadiness.

Then there is John’s infamous ice-breaking chair. New clients are sat at a table on a chair John has rigged to fall apart the moment they grab it the wrong way. It is psychology, he explains, delighted: a man who cannot remember how to lift a chair from one week to the next is unlikely to remember a week’s training instructions. The chair has levelled every one of his clients – from the titled sorts to the captains of business.

The London client who turned the tables

One London client did finally turn the tables, rebuilding the chair while John took a phone call and catching the master out with his own gag. “He caught me red-handed,” John says, still indignant and entirely charmed. “I said I’d never speak to him again.”

John worries about the future. With the political mood as it is, he is not sure that field trials will survive. The sport may drift towards tests, and everyone in it, he says, must be squeaky clean in everything they do.

His answer is to bring young people in. He is noted for drawing newcomers into the pastime and keeping it alive – and for a quiet generosity that runs alongside it. When a dog he has made up reaches about 8 years old, he likes to find it a good, less competitive home where its new owner can enjoy another four good seasons of shooting behind a dog that turns heads.

It all comes back to the difficult Labrador and the early mornings – and the refusal to be beaten. The dogs have taken this octogenarian a long way and opened a great many doors. And, by his own reckoning, everything he set out to do. But he is not stopping. There is a hard dog in the kennel that thinks the place is his, and John has six months to prove him wrong.