“Our Mullenscote team of dogs and trainers are to be seen picking up on shoots throughout the south of England and once a week I take a small team to lovely shoot in Dorset.

Picking up is a brilliant job for anyone that enjoys gundogs. The picker’s up are the people that are entrusted with the job of finding and recovering shot game on a shooting day. Imagine a job description that reads like this: ‘Wanted: hardworking, reliable and trustworthy person (nothing new there), must have an interest in the countryside, enjoy meeting like minded people with similar interests, and be capable of working as part of a team.

You will need to be willing to work with gundogs in some of the most beautiful countryside in the world and be prepared to drive a 4x4 through copious amounts of mud. You will be required to stand around drinking coffee with your fellow workers whilst watching all the action followed by 30-minutes of industrious work when you will be required to work some of the world’s best gundogs.’ The UK should be very proud; we breed and train some of the best gundogs in the world.

Called me biased but I’ll be applying for the job in spite of the fact that the pay is rubbish.

As professional trainers we are regularly dealing with gundogs that are out of control when in the presence of game and our advice will always be that your dog must be introduced to game in a controlled and supervised manner. Far too many people rush this aspect of a young dogs training only to find that ‘being on the game’ induces a level of excitement in some young dogs that will as good as send them into orbit, creating some very undesirable behaviours.

All that said I chose to take a very well bred young Labrador out picking up with me this week in spite of his rather young age. Boss is a delightful little chap, just over a year old and slightly lacking in confidence. This lack of confidence is affecting his hunting and general drive so it is for this reason that I decided to take him. Boss has learned all of his basic obedience and is absolutely familiar with gunfire. He sat amongst the older dogs as the first drive started absolutely unaware of what was going on. As soon as we went to look for birds I cast him off and as expected he galloped off behind Otter still blissfully unaware of why Otter was so single minded.

We are lucky and get to see lots of dogs go through this first experience and it is wonderful to watch them turn the outing from a playful charge about in the woods into a systematic nose down hunting session scouring the covers for shot game, this transformation only takes two to three outings and I’m delighted to report that Boss had started to get the idea by the end of the first day.
He will do several more days as part of the picking up team and we will then bring him back into the more formal side of the dog work as his enthusiasm for hunting builds. I will need to monitor this carefully, as to much free hunting could make him too independent and reluctant to take direction.

Picking up: give it a try; you know you want to.”