Watch interview with Shawn Kinkelaar, Shooting Dog handler & trainer
Shawn Kinkelaar is one of the top bird-dog handlers & trainers in the U.S. He started field trialling in the 1980s, and today he’s one of just two people who have won 100+ Open Horseback Championships–the World Series + Superbowl + Stanley Cup of bird-dog competitions.
He has also won more National Dog of the Year Awards than any other trainer, as well as three English Setter National awards and three National Handler of the Year awards.
For the past 25 years, Shawn has spent his summers training in North Dakota. This year, a local news crew caught up with him and produced this video.
In the video below, you can get a taste for what it’s like training in ND in the summer: Horses, bird dogs, and the space to run both. I’m envious.
Sherry Ebert, one the nation’s top gundog trainers. From sherryebert.com
Back when I first bought Lexi, there was one trainer the breeder recommended to me over and over again: Sherry Ebert.
Sherry is one of the top trainers in the country, and she turns out great bird dogs. Unfortunately, she’s booked up solid. I’ll find wild grouse in Manhattan before I ever get a training slot with her.
You can read more about Sherry Ebert in this great tribute Tom Davis wrote about her in Sporting Classics. And be sure to check out the video below, too. In it, Sherry gives some good tips and advice on training bird dogs.
In 1963 a 17-year-old New Jersey girl named Sherry married a 21-year-old Pennsylvania man named Harold. Horses she knew, dogs she didn’t, but her husband, a wiry redhead with dreams of making it big in the bird-dog world, was fixing to change that. He took Sherry to Georgia, where since 1959 he’d worked for Fred Bevan, a professional trainer with a considerable reputation and a kennel operation to match.
Soon she was working for Bevan, too—and no employer, ever, got a better two-for-the-price-of-one deal than Fred Bevan did when he hired Harold and Sherry Ray. They worked long hours for short pay, their list of duties and responsibilities was endless, but they were the kind of people who couldn’t bear to leave a job unfinished and knew only one way to do it: the right way…
That achey, I-need-another-dog-now feeling. Check out the video to see a great looking Springer at a great price. If I wasn’t in between things right now, I’d think about buying him
