Ten minutes a day is enough, says trainer of 13 field trial champions

One of the most successful gundog trainers in the country has told owners that 10 minutes a day is all a dog needs, and that a working dog which has to live in the truck, the kennel and the house for the rest of the year should be bred for soundness before style.

Rory Major of Bryantscroft Gundogs has made up 13 Field Trial Champions from five hunt, point, retrieve (HPR) breeds over more than four decades, and in an interview with Ryan Kay published by Gundog Journal he set out how he does it. “I only train for 10 minutes a day,” he told the magazine. “People overtrain. I like short, sharp sessions. I want the dog going back in the kennel fresh, not exhausted.”

Why does a trialling man train for the shooting field?

Major’s reputation rests on trials, but he told Gundog Journal that he does not train for them. “I don’t see any difference between shooting and trialling, to me it’s the same dog. So I don’t train for trialling, I train for a good shooting dog that will hopefully become a good trial dog.” Nor does he vary his method by breed, despite having won with dogs from every one of the Royal Kennel Club’s four gundog sub-groups. “I don’t train to the breed,” he said. “All the breeds have their own way of working but there are different characters within each breed.” He trains each dog according to its character, not its type. “The ‘breed’ is a style of working and to me a gundog is a gundog.”

For the keeper with a young dog to bring on between now and the first day, and no spare hour in which to do it, the 10 minute rule is the practical point: a short session in the yard before the rounds does more than an exhausting one at the weekend, and the beating line and the picking-up team will finish the education once the season starts. That is how Major learnt himself. He told Gundog Journal that his first springer, an unregistered dog, was trained by nothing more than beating. “All I did was go beating with him. He knew the job inside out. People used to say he didn’t need me there, he’d just do it on his own.”

What should the kennel breed for?

Major breeds from his own dogs and was blunt about what a trial record does and does not prove. “A dog that you know has done well in trials, it has all the attributes. It has a good mouth, it’s going to be biddable and trainable, which your average shooting man needs – a trainable, biddable dog,” he said. “We breed quite a few dogs but my old mantra is there’s no point in breeding from the most exciting trial dogs in the country if you can’t live with the damn thing day to day, because most shooting dogs are pets that do 12 days shooting a year. What trialling does is it tells you that this dog is sound.”

He urged breeders to use the health tests now available and to accept the result. “It can be gutting when a dog you thought was going to be the one, fails on a health check. But we’re always looking to breed the next generation, so they have to be omitted from breeding if they fail.” For the shoot that keeps its own line of labradors or spaniels, that is the standard: test, and drop the failures, however promising.

How do you tell a trainer from a website?

Major would not take on a client’s dog until he had won a trial himself, and he told Gundog Journal that the number of people now offering their services made one test essential. “The advice I give to anyone looking for a gundog trainer is – ask to see the trainer with their own dogs and can they actually handle a dog. Don’t listen to any excuses, either they can train a dog or they can’t.” He added: “There are so many trainers out there, dishing out advice and you’ll have a nice day with them, but you won’t learn anything.”

His own education came from standing behind the best handlers at trials in the early 1980s and saying nothing. “We didn’t have shot-over days, we didn’t have trainers. I learnt by making mistakes,” he said. His first trial, with a German wirehaired pointer bitch called Velia, ended with the judge putting him out for several faults at once; that judge, Brian Botterman, became his mentor, and Velia went on to become the breed’s first Field Trial Champion in 1985. Asked which gundog breed he considered the most intelligent, he answered in two words: the cocker spaniel.

What happens next

Major has not trained one of his own dogs to trial standard for 11 years, because clients’ dogs have taken the time, and he told Gundog Journal he intends to bring one of his own out next season. It may not be an HPR: he has a springer he rates and two young labradors, and said he would love to make up a spaniel and a labrador before he finishes. His advice to anyone starting out was the same as the lesson of his first trial. “Open your ears and your eyes and shut your mouth. And when people are giving you advice, look at them and work out if they actually know what they’re talking about.”