Nick Lambert: This podcasting is brilliant isn't it? You get to find experts who you want to ask questions and it gives you a perfect excuse just to call up the author of your favorite dog book and say hello.

Craig: Well, thank you very much. and

Nick Lambert: It's probably most well-thumbed book in my ⁓ house. And I've given it to a couple of guests on the, you know, there's a thank you for doing the podcast and it's always been well received.

Craig: Well, good. Well, that's great. There's nothing, there's no better compliment than to know that my book is dog-eared at your house. Only dog-eared pages, you know? And what I admit to anybody who asks is that I didn't really write the book for others. So when you say you can sit there and thumb through the book and find every night, like, cause I write usually in the morning and then I'll have a session at night before I go to bed. I'd be writing and sometimes my wife would knock on my office door and go, Craig, it's four in the morning. And I'm like, really?

Nick Lambert: and me.

Craig: it seemed like nine o'clock. I would get lost in that book because I'd be sometimes writing or researching, this is super fascinating. Like for me, the joy of writing it was that I learned about all this stuff and that's why I started.

Nick Lambert: What a treat just to travel the world researching what you're really interested in. mean, I can't think of anything better.

Craig: Yeah, I just sort of fell ass backwards into doing something that I would do for free and every day of the week anyway. And so, yeah, no, no, I'm just as fascinated in this stuff as any of the readers are. And that was what I wanted to convey in this whole thing is that I've never met a breed of dog that I didn't like. I never researched any of their histories that didn't fascinate me and draw me into the culture. and the history of the hunting culture and the gun dog culture and asking, well, why did it make sense to breed this dog here at that time? And really they do that over there and this is what they have. And the rabbit holes I've gone down and continue to go down are just incredible. Yeah.

Nick Lambert: I mean, there must be a couple that stand out for you though. Were they the surprises or were they just the best bit of dog work you'd seen? What sticks out in your travels?

Craig: OI Yeah, okay, so the ones that really stand out for me are, you know, obviously you go down, so I said, okay, I'm gonna study the German breeds. Well, the German Shorthaired Pointer's history is fascinating, and so is that of the Weimaraner. And it's relatively easy to research because they're popular around the world and there's lots been written. There's books on GSPs, there's books on Weimaraners. And so I had a lot of, and I went to the original German sources, which I had to sort of learn how to read old German script. because until about 1900, they still wrote in that old weird ass script, you know? So primary sources were a little bit difficult, but there was a ton of information about those.

Nick Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. The record keeping was probably pretty tip top with the Germans.

Craig: Very good. So for those breeds, it was interesting, it was fascinating. We went there, we saw some outstanding examples. We went to a Weimaraner test in Austria, which was mind blowing in its complexity and its history. And it was just, it was one of those things for three days, the hair on the back of my neck stood up just watching these dogs and watching the rituals. I went and hunted on an island off of the coast of Northern Germany with a bunch of long-haired Weimaraners. And again, Just being there was like, I was in a dream state most of the time just because it was so surreal to me. But the ones that stick out in my mind the most are Stichelhaar Yeah, me pronounce it right. ⁓

Nick Lambert: I speak a bit of German, that sounds good.

Craig: Yeah, I had a German person. did a podcast on them and they corrected me. Let me see. Stichelhaar. Stichelhaar. Anyway. Yeah. So ⁓ when I first started the double nose pointer, the Spanish double nose pointer and the Stichelhaar both of them in every source that I can consult. Now, remember, I started when the internet was quite young. In fact, I started before the internet really was a thing. But when I started researching, ⁓

Nick Lambert: Stichelhaar Would have made your life a lot easier to wait a few years wouldn't it?

Craig: You know, I'm a worm, a library, what do we call it? Suri de, I'm mouse in library, I'm a library mouse. I love crawling libraries, right? So that's where my first source of information was books, at libraries, and I would read about these breeds. Now, the ⁓ old double-nose pointer was never mentioned, the Stichelhaar was never mentioned, unless you got a little snippet from a Drahthaar history, they would mention it, but then no pictures, no information. Finally, the internet comes along, I start researching. And at first, everything I researched was these breeds were extinct. They didn't exist anymore. So the Stichelhaar I went to Germany in, when was 9-11? I think it was, that was when the 9-11, so 2001 I was in Germany, fully sort of believing that the Stichelhaar was an extinct breed, there was none around anymore, and I'm hunting in the north of Germany with a friend of mine. And I asked him about it. I said, hey Hans, you know, me about this Stickelhaar. You must have seen them as a kid. They must have been around when you were young. He was the older man at the time. He goes, yeah, I see them all the time. I'm like, what? goes, yeah, my neighbor has some down the road. This is the club. I'm like, what? Now, there were maybe 20 or 30 of them born every year in Germany. They were rare as hens teeth, but Hans just happened to live in the area where there was a breeder who had a couple. So within a day or so, I'm driving up this breeder's driveway. you know, thinking that this extinct breed is now back. And it was like, he opens his door and these dogs run out and it's like Jurassic Park seeing the dinosaurs. It's like, holy sh- these things, they're, ⁓ my God, they're still around. I could not believe it. I had never seen a picture of one. I had never even read much other than a few lines and few histories. So I spent some time with this breeder and subsequently visited him again and photographed the dogs and followed the development and the ups and downs of that breed, which- came close to being extinct so many times. And even to this day, in a good year, there'll be 50 Stichelhaar puppies born in all of Germany, you know, versus 3000 Drachthaars So it's still an unknown breed. The double nose pointer, the same thing. So many sources said they were extinct. They were extinct. They're extinct. Fast forward to about 2006, 2007, the internet's a little bit more developed. I'm going to get one more last shot. I punch in the Google thing and up comes a Spanish hunting magazine about hunting dogs. And there on the cover, a full on close up of a dog with a split nose. And I'm like, holy shit, these things exist. So I contacted, I looked, you know, I contacted the magazine, contacted the breeder. And a year later, we again, driving up this guy's driveway and he opens the door and his herd of, of, double nose pointers come out. And it was, now a Stichelhaar looks like a Drahthaar It looks like a German wire haired pointer more or less.

Nick Lambert: Amazing.

Craig: or like a griffin, you know, it looks it's a wire haired breed that's kind of brown and they're handsome dogs and they're very good working dogs, but it wasn't unusual to me. These double nose pointers, that nose, mean, well, at first you're kind of, I shouldn't say horrified, but you're shocked like, holy, look at that. ⁓ Wow, I've never seen that before. But they were the friendliest, cuddliest dogs. came up to us and they were all over us and they were enthusiastic. They wanted to hunt.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, nothing else like that.

Craig: And Lisa and I looked at each other and went, yeah, I'd take one if I wanted. Like, I could handle that. That's a pretty cool little dog. We went out into the hills and hunted quail with them, and they were 16th century dogs. They were basically hunted the way that they were described in 15th century manuscript.

Nick Lambert: What sort of terrain were you on?

Craig: So we were near, ⁓ in English it's called Pamplona, Pamplona, how do you say it? Pamplona, Pamplona. Yes, Pamplona. So we were near Pamplona, but we were north of there. So we were near the Pyrenees mountains, the mountains that separate France from Spain, where all pointing dogs come from. That is the, that is the, it's the Basque country. Yeah, that is the original sort of place.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, yeah. Where they have the running of the bulls. Yeah. ⁓ us country isn't it?

Craig: the homeland. Yes, that is the, yes, so ground zero is an excellent, exactly. That is, so on either side, on the French and Spanish side, and even towards the west onto the Portuguese area, but mainly in the Basque ⁓ area, well, on the sort of north and south side of that, that's where all pointing dogs trace back to. So all pointing dogs' origins are Spanish or French, Franco-Spanish. I mean,

Nick Lambert: ⁓ is it? That is ground zero or whatever the right expression.

Craig: It wasn't Spain, wasn't France at the time, you know what I mean? Like we've got, you know, it was Catalan territory for a while, it was ⁓ various, the, the, Oc area in Southern France. Anyway, we were there and we went into the mountains. So the train was, and I said to Lisa, my wife, said, imagine any cowboy movie filmed in the last 50 years. It looked like Southern California or the Arizona desert, basically, you know, there was. sort of hilly, rocky, cacti-y, very classic, you could almost hear the tumbleweeds coming, but you know what I mean? It was dry, arid, rocky, with thorny bushes. And these dogs hunted migratory, ⁓ you guys call them stubble quail or is that not straight? But the little quail, ⁓ you don't have them, or do you have them? You don't, ⁓ These are the ones that migrate from Northern Europe all the way down to Africa.

Nick Lambert: No, okay. We don't really have quail, no.

Craig: So anyway, they were hunting these little ⁓ well. hunt red-legged partridge. And so these dogs, way that they hunted ⁓ was perfectly adapted to their area and perfectly ⁓ in old manuscripts. You see, when pointing dogs first developed, the arm of choice was the crossbow. You know guns didn't exist at that time firearms did not exist at that time It was a crossbow or a bow with with with blunt bolts, you know to shoot game on the ground so you had two types of dogs you had dogs that would Circle the birds in other words, they would smell them and almost like a border collie herding You know, they would circle and then you would have others that would not circle but they would point them They would point out where the birds are so that the hunter could get close enough his bolt and crossbow and shoot them on the ground, whether it was a hare or whether it was a bird. Now, the double-nosed pointers that I hunted with, all of them pointed, but ran exactly how they described. They were within crossbow range ⁓ and they were in hot, ⁓ arid territories. They did not gallop. Why would you want to gallop over that stuff? It's rocky, it's harsh, it's dry. You're probably at it all day with a crossbow. You're not going out for a 30 minute sprint. You're going for the day. Okay, so these dogs trotted with a high head. They trotted at speed. I mean, they weren't slow, they weren't plodding they weren't boot lickers, they weren't here. They were out, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60 yards, even a little bit further, trotting and actively hunting the entire time. And when they pointed, boom, they were very solid on point. and hunters walk up, birds flush, boom, and they just retrieve them naturally. mean, again, if they had a crossbow, it would have worked perfectly for them as well, because, you know, obviously as an experienced hunter, they would know exactly where to look and what their game looks like, and they were probably good shots back in the day, but that's what it was like. And so the breeders of those breeds were adamant that that's how the breed was, and it must remain that way. They were adamant that it shouldn't be modernized in any way. They discouraged galloping from their dogs. If they ever saw a gallop, they would say, slow down, just, know, just trot. And they would, they would do that. And being there, seeing the terrain, seeing the game, understanding the conditions, you're like, that is totally, that totally makes sense. It makes just as much sense for that dog to hunt that way there as it does to see a pointer on the moors casting out hundreds of hundreds of yards at a full speed gallop. That's...

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: horses for courses and these ones were perfectly adapted. So that sticks out. Portuguese pointer, wonderful breed and seeing them in Portugal in a cork plantation hunting red-legged partridge. They are an absolutely beautiful dog and when Lisa and I travel, inevitably the breeders we meet, which are typically highly placed members of the board of the club were really well respected breeders. I do my best to find like the real experts in every breed, not just some guy who happens to have one. I want to get the guy who's won every award he could and he's been in the breed for 50 years, you know. We were with these fellows.

Nick Lambert: I heard you say your expertise was finding the experts.

Craig: finding experts. I've talked to people, yeah, that have spent their entire life, you know, doing this and these experts, you get to know them. And that's the other thing about traveling with dogs. The minute you and I have never met, but we're brothers in arms as it were, because we're dog guys. And that's what you do. And it doesn't even matter. We speak the same language, but even in countries where we don't speak the same language, we speak dog. And there's an instant bond and an instant connection with these people. So after time, after spending a day or three with these people, almost every single one of them would offer us a puppy. so and we're traveling, we're you know, we got little tiny suitcases and I got my camera gear and we've got two dogs at home we can't have any more and so we'd have to refuse. It was like if I had the money and the space I'd have one of every breed or more you know in my backyard today but The only time that Lisa and I came that close to accepting was with the Portuguese pointer. There was a litter of these pups and they're crawling all over us and you got the puppy breath and you got this and that and we both looked at each other and we're like, no, no, And as we're leaving, I told Lisa, open your purse. I need to check your, did you take a puppy? She's like, no, but we came that close to getting one. So there's things like that that stick out in my mind. And then also some of these rarer breeds,

Nick Lambert: Really?

Craig: Braque de L'Ariege Bourbonnais, some of these older Pont-Audemer Spaniel, which we had. Seeing them come here, I've invited them to come here to Manitoba to hunt with me. And that was mind blowing as well. And it's something I've always encouraged people to do, is to invite people from other hunting cultures to yours. Because what it's going to do, first thing you're going to do is just be chuffed at the expression on their face. The people who come from another culture will be amazed at your culture. The culture that you take for granted, the culture that is sort of almost banal at times. Well, this is the way it's done. This is the way I've always done it. I'm sort of used to it. And then you look over to your left and there's a guy and his eyes are pie plates and he's freaking out at the splendor and the wonder of what this is all about. All of a sudden you go, yeah, you know what? This is pretty cool. You get a brand new appreciation for what you have. and an understanding from somebody else's point of view. I never realized it was like that. I never realized the wonder or the beauty or the uniqueness of this particular thing here. so for me, yeah, it was inviting others with other breeds to come here and then watching those breeds hunting in a completely different terrain that they weren't even developed for. ⁓

Nick Lambert: presumably that must have been people in North America was it or did they actually travel? ⁓ really? ⁓ wow. Okay. Can you give me an example of someone that brought a dog from one of these countries and hunted with you?

Craig: No. ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, France, Germany, England, yeah. Yeah, so a breed of dog. It's a wonderful breed. I wish it was more well known and it's not, and it really does need a helping hand. So if anybody ⁓ listening to this podcast and is interested in a very cool breed of pointing dog from France, it's called a Pont-Audemer Spaniel. ⁓ comes from Pont-Audemer, which is in a town in Normandy. ⁓ is related to the Picardy Spaniel and the Blue Picardy Spaniel. ⁓ an HPR breed. ⁓ is the only HPR breed with a curly coat. It's got a top knot like an Irish water spaniel. It's a small ⁓ brown and white dog, slightly larger than a Brittany, but smaller than a setter ⁓ bigger than a Brittany in between. And ⁓ wonderful dogs. ⁓ They hunt almost like a spaniel. They're a very close working, but they're a pointing dog. So we were in France researching for my book.

Nick Lambert: Okay.

Craig: And one of the only breeders of these breeds just happened to be in a particular area we were in. We made an appointment to go see his dogs. Veterinarian and his sister and father bred these dogs. And we got along famously. We love their dogs and said, why don't you come and hunt with us to the fellow who was breeding them, the young veterinarian. And he said, you know, I've always dreamt of going to Canada to hunt. I said, well, come on over. So one year he came over with his, with two dogs. I hunted all over Manitoba and Saskatchewan with him. And that was the first time that anybody from Europe had come. And again, I got such a thrill out of just watching him because for my entire life, I hunted here thinking that everybody else in the world hunted like I did. I live in a province that is the size, it's twice the size of, England can fit twice into Manitoba.

Nick Lambert: incredible.

Craig: And we have a million residents here. There's only a million people who live here and most of them live in one city. So the rest of it is basically empty. And we're next door to Saskatchewan, which is even emptier. And for us to go hunting anywhere, there's a lot of what we call crown land. It's public property. You just go anywhere you want. Or if you want to hunt on private land, you basically knock at the door and ask. And 99 % of the time they'll go, oh yeah, I'll knock. Go for it. They don't really care. So he just was amazed at that.

Nick Lambert: Amazing. I mean that already sounds absolutely incredible from my crowded island that there's you could just go out and hunt crown land and even if you fancied hunting some other land the guy's probably going to say yes that that couldn't be more different here.

Craig: Yeah, we... Yes, most of the time, especially for upland game hunting. Now, for deer hunting or hunting geese in fields, it's a little bit, sometimes you'll see other hunters or hear shooting from somewhere else, but my wife and I will go an entire season and never see another hunter. And same thing in Saskatchewan, it's very rare. And not only that, let alone very few hunters, there's very few anything. To see a Frenchman look at an ocean of grass, Or Lake, I took him to Lake Winnipeg. We hunted off the edge of Lake Winnipeg. And it's a lake that is almost the size of the Great Lakes. In other words, you can't see the, he had never seen a lake where you can't see the other side. It didn't compute in his mind that this could be a lake. And he said, how big is it? And I said, it's, and I talked to him in hours. In other words, how many hours driving would it take to go to one end? I said, it's about eight hours. He, what do mean eight? ⁓ it's about 500 kilometers long. And it just, did not compute in this guy's head. then it was funny too because his dogs had never been in contact with that much game or had seen that much open space in their lives. And I remember one episode where we sat, like they'd never seen endless vistas. They'd never seen anything, they'd never seen more than.

Nick Lambert: That's not the bit that surprised me. I would have thought that you were going to say the game is very, very sparse in that sort of scenario. You've got the best of both worlds, have you?

Craig: So game, not, okay, let me try and explain that. We hunted a lot all day, every day in various areas. And when you do get into game, yeah, you can get into a lot of it. I always tell people there are a lot of birds in Manitoba, but there's a lot of Manitoba in Manitoba. You have to cover enormous amounts of ground. Some of it completely barren of game. But then when you do find it, you'll get into it. So the reason they got into so much game was because probably for the first time in their lives, They hunted from dawn till dusk. Basically we would hunt all day and we would go to this spot to hunt grouse and then, ⁓ I know a place where there's going to be ducks on the pond, we'll go there. And then, ⁓ there's another place where we might find some snipe or some woodcock. So it was this variety. And again, we didn't get into them every minute of every day, but we did have game contact on a regular basis, as well as these exotic to them vistas and places. And I remember sitting down for a break at lunch one day. And I sat down and I looked at his dogs and I said, ⁓ your dogs, got this, this glazed over look on their eyes. Like they're just mesmerized. And I looked over at him and he had the same look on his eyes. They were mirroring each other. They were just overwhelmed about, but I'll tell you what, if you would, and I have pictures, I should look at it. If you would look at my eyes at that test in Austria for those Weimarrarners, when they did the forest trailing tracking. If you'd looked at my eyes when we were on the moors in the north of England on the Scottish borders, I had the same look. It was a look of complete amazement of being overwhelmed by what you were seeing and not able to compute it all. Like you just needed, I needed a month or more after I came back from those events to digest them, to figure out what exactly I had just seen and what went on. And that was the look on my friend's face. And that was the look on his dog's face. It was just something.

Nick Lambert: I'm not surprised. To me, sounds like heaven, to be honest, because, I mean, the access and the scale of it just sounds incredible.

Craig: It is, But you know, here it's, the difficulty is the time you need to put in. So Lisa and I have been now hunting here ⁓ this particular area close to 30 years. And we have, and so when this fellow came over from France and all the people that I bring over from Europe, they're basically hopping ⁓ ⁓ project that has been in development for 30 years. So I know where to take them.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, there's a lot of learning.

Craig: I have access to these areas because I've known the people, I've seen some of their kids grow up over the years and now their kids are in charge of the farm or of the land. So really what they're seeing is almost, ⁓ if they had parachuted in alone by themselves with their dogs and a gun at the Winnipeg airport and then just sort of struck out on their own to find something, they would probably never come across a bird. They'd probably be eaten by wolves at some point in time. they really wouldn't sort of have the experience that they have. You really do need somebody to sort of show you around and show you how to get access. Because like I say, there's just a lot of land up here and there's a lot of places that you need to explore before you dial it out. I always say to Lisa, it's a spot within a spot within a spot that holds the birds and you need to be able to narrow that down. ⁓ So that's just the reality of hunting here. It can be wonderful, but it takes... a boatload of work, of, we call it windshield time, of just time spent. You know, because from one, I said, well, here's a spot we can go, we might find some grouse over here. And I know a spot that there's some ducks, let's go there. Well, that's a two hour drive, okay?

Nick Lambert: Okay, yeah.

Craig: But it is that, it's just the vast area that is difficult to understand for the first time somebody comes here. Even people from Quebec or Ontario that come here from other provinces that are much more populated. I remember some people coming from Quebec and I tried to explain to them this field. Our fields here are divided in square miles. So you'll go to, they're called a section, it's 640 acres, it's a mile by a mile. right? And we'll go to these blocks which are, you know, there'll be several of them in a row and I'll go, okay, you're going to work your dogs up to see that barbed wire fence. You know, it's a mile. You can barely see the fence. I go, go up to that fence, don't cross it, but then turn north and come, you know, we're going to make a loop of this one mile by one mile area. I had realized that none of these fellows, because they live in Quebec and hunt in Quebec, which is highly forested, which is hilly, none of them had ever seen in a straight line a kilometer before or a mile. didn't, it didn't compute because they had never been in an area, I guess maybe across the St. Lawrence Seaway or something, but they'd never been anywhere where we could see more than 300 yards.

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: So I tried to explain, so that's why I had to use the fence. said, okay, you're gonna come to a fence when you use, know, I said, go about a mile. How far is that? Well, it's a mile. Well, how far is that? You know, the Europeans who come here often get lost ⁓ because they have no sense of direction because there's always, as Lisa said, there's always a church steeple somewhere or a tower that you can orient yourself from. There's always some point that you go.

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: you know, that you can think about. Whereas here, no. You can get lost very, very easily, because it's all dense forest or even plains. Like you can even get lost on the prairies, because it's, basically in an ocean of grass where there is no point of, what would you call it, point of orientation. There's just another hill. And then you get to the top of that one, there's another one. And there's no trees in some areas. There's no, you know, towers or... church steeples or railroad tracks. It's just vast plains, you know.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, I can imagine you could get into trouble

Craig: yeah. I had a friend get lost in one of those sections. It was a mile by a mile by a mile and a dense fog came in. And he ended up walking the entire thing in a circle twice. ⁓

Nick Lambert: What? I mean, you're just north, I guess, all those sort of parts of the states that are famous, aren't you? sort of Wyoming, Idaho, that sort of thing. You're sort of northeast of that. Is that about right? Yeah.

Craig: We are northeast of, yeah, so basically we are about dead center. If you took a map of North America and threw a dart at the center bullseye, that's about where we are in terms of, you know, north to southeast to west. So.

Nick Lambert: which happens to be pretty strong for upland bird hunting.

Craig: It can be, it can be depending again in the area. So we are on a transition zone. So to the west of us is Saskatchewan, to the west of us is, you know, the prairies where the buffalo roamed and that. if I drive an hour west, that starts here. Sort of the open prairies, drier and drier and hillier and hillier as you go west into Saskatchewan. By the time you're in Saskatchewan, it's like there are areas that look like scenes out of Dances with Wolves. You know, it's rolling prairies in the south. And same thing if you cross the border into the States, which is North Dakota, Montana, and in that area, that's what you'll see in that area. If I go an hour east of where I live, it's basically the boreal forest, which is the same from an hour east of me all the way to Newfoundland. It's basically the rest of all of that Eastern Canada. We are on the meridian, basically. We're right on the meridian of North America. And so to the east, the hunting is... grouse and woodcock in dense forests, the same as it is in Quebec or Northern Ontario or Wisconsin and Minnesota. It's very much roughed grouse and woodcock country and moose and deer and that sort of a thing. For upland birds, it's grouse and woodcock. When we go west, we have a grouse called the sharp-tailed grouse and we have a few Hungarian partridges, but there are many more in Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan also has pheasants. wild ring-necked pheasants, but we're not allowed to hunt them, only Saskatchewan residents can. So we would go to the U.S. to hunt them. And there are good huntable populations in the U.S., which is maybe five, six, seven hours from where we are. So we would go there once a year to hunt there. But there it's a whole different ball game. There are way more hunters. It's much more developed hunting culture in the U.S. There are lots more hunters. They see it as a economic industry so every bar has a big welcome hunter sign there's ammo sold at every you hardware store and it's much more seen as ⁓ a ⁓ sport and an economic driver whereas where I live the tradition of hunting for sustenance is still plays a role in it. My grandparents were immigrants and were homesteaders were settlers on the prairies here.

Nick Lambert: ⁓ really?

Craig: ⁓ and ⁓ they hunted to feed their children.

Nick Lambert: locally to where you are now. Really.

Craig: Yeah, yeah. Like my mother, ⁓ once she left the farm, or my grandfather was a fisherman, he's from Iceland. My grandparents were Icelandic and my other grandparents were Ukrainian. And so the Ukrainians came after a war and the Icelanders came after a volcano, basically. They came to settle here and they settled near Lake Winnipeg and just eked out a living. ⁓ So both of my parents knew hunger, both of my parents knew poverty. They were the... son and daughter of settlers. And ⁓ my Icelandic grandfather in particular was a fisherman and he guided hunters. ⁓ ducks and geese and deer and game was what they ate daily. And my mother, ⁓ once she left the farm, never ate a duck again in her life because she ate it. Yeah, she couldn't stand game. She didn't want fish or very little fish, but ⁓ it was poor people food.

Nick Lambert: Ready? Yeah.

Craig: to her. She wanted store-bought cookies and jam from Safeway. That was a treat to her. Oranges and bananas and fruits that didn't grow in their backyard, you know. And my father was, you know, my grandparents never taught me which mushrooms I could pick or where to find the wild asparagus or, you horseradish because that was what poor people did. And they wanted us to live in the city and have the rich life.

Nick Lambert: .

Craig: So in Manitoba, again, that's my generation and the younger generation is somewhat different, but in Manitoba, is still the overall, or it still informs our hunting culture in that you hunt to put food in the freezer for winter. So the more of the game you can get, the better, the bigger that game is. So deer is great and elk is even better. A duck is good, a goose is fantastic. And why? My uncles would shake their head at me shooting snipe. What the hell are you wasting a shotgun shell on that little bird when you could use the same shell and the same gun to go shoot that big goose over there? We need the food. Whereas in the States, it's more, there's some of that, but it's more, it's a sport. It's an economic thing. It is a ⁓ sporting activity that generates a ton of money for the local economy. Whereas here, hunting isn't seen that way. Hunting is seen as a tradition of the family for food. And yeah, I mean, we have the big box stores that sell guns and ammo and we have all the camo stuff. It's more and more popular nowadays, sort of more Americanized that way. But growing up and even to a certain extent today, it's still that underlying ethos is still there. That it comes from a place of survival. It comes from a place of immigrants hunting for food. So bigger is better and... There are trophy hunters, people who want the big rack on the big deer, but I'm not one of them and most of the people I know, they just want meat. in the US, like just south of me, so an hour, well two hours south of me in the American border, hour and a half, and then maybe six, seven hours from me, you know, or major cities. And there are groups of pointing dog owners that have clubs and hold events and field trials. And, you know, if you go out to the fields there, the chances of you seeing at least another truck of hunters or coming. you know, buy them at the hotel or something is very high. Like you'll see other hunters and they're generous people and we've got lots of friends down there. We've hunted with them. It's a fantastic paradise that they have. have a really highly developed hunting culture down there. Here in Manitoba, again, you know, the number of people that actively hunt with pointing dogs for Upland Game, this is going to shock you, okay? I would say that go out more than, let's say, 10 times a year. That's a I'd say maybe even more than five times a year. I would estimate that to be maybe 20 people.

Nick Lambert: Really? Yeah.

Craig: Yeah, ⁓ now there might be a hundred people out there with a pointing dog that get out maybe once or twice a year, but then when you're talking four or five or six times a year, it dwindles down. And then when you're talking like people like Lisa and I, go out every day of the season, we'll go out 60 times or 70 times in a year. There are very few of us, right? Because it's just not, again, it comes from that upland game hunting is probably, with a pointing dog is probably the least efficient calorie in for calorie out. enterprise you could ever imagine. The amount of time and effort that you and your dogs and the food and the fuel and everything you get for the bird is nothing compared to three hours in a goose blind where you and your buddies can have 48-15 pound geese in an hour. Right? Or you sit in a deer stand and you've got a 200 pound deer or you know or an elk the size of a horse. I mean that's that's that's the big win you know.

Nick Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. some food.

Craig: Whereas in other places in Quebec, for instance, the Woodcock and the upland hunting environments in Quebec is, ⁓ yeah, it's old, it's very traditional, and there are lots and lots of people who do it and enjoy it. They have clubs, they have meetings and everything. So it's highly developed. We don't have anything like that here yet.

Nick Lambert: I would have thought with that access, it seems a shame with the crown lands and this kind of stuff.

Craig: Well yeah, and the Crownland, again, the access is people hunt bear or they'll hunt ⁓ geese or they'll hunt ducks or they'll hunt deer, really, and elk. Those are the big ones because people want the big payoff. They want the major haul of meat. And they're proud when they shoot their entire limit of geese in the morning. You'll see pictures on Facebook of guys, three buddies go out and the back of their pickup truck is loaded with geese. I mean, it's just overflowing with their limit of geese. Which by the way are overrunning the entire, we have millions of them. They are a bit of a problem here in terms of their numbers. There are so many of them. So it's sort of a conservation effort as well.

Nick Lambert: Well, if it's going into the food chain, that's great, isn't it?

Craig: Yeah, yeah, well that's what it's all about, you know, and that is the strongest sort of portion of it is that people do it like all of the butchers are very, very busy in the fall time, you know, making sausages and butchering the meat for all these people because that's where it goes. It goes into the freezer, it goes into your kids' lunches, it goes to sausages and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's just, again, that's a strong portion of what we, of what the hunting culture is based upon here, you know, and selling game is completely illegal. I say that we have the best of both worlds because, and I give game meat away to a lot of my friends and family and I tell them it's free, okay? It's free of chemicals, it's free range, it's free of hormones, and because it's illegal to sell it, it is literally free. You give it away. And it's a wonderful sort of communal thing that we engage in. I really enjoy that I have lots of friends who don't hunt but love game meat. They love it for their kids, they love it for their own health. benefits and so we do that. But it's been illegal for a hundred and odd years, 150 years it's been illegal to sell game in Canada and in North America it is. And it's the result of market hunting because back in the, like there's nothing that North Americans do better than to commercialize something and we commercialize the hell out of stuff, okay. We're experts at that. And so when market hunting was in practice,

Nick Lambert: as it is in the States, I think, isn't it?

Craig: the Canada goose, which, as I mentioned, is overrunning the province. There are school playgrounds where the kids cannot go out during the fall time because it's covered in goose shit. mean, there are lakes that you cannot swim in here because there are, like literally in the city of Winnipeg alone, there are over a hundred thousand geese living there during the fall time. I mean, it's incredible. But to know that in 1900, that species was on the endangered species list in North America, there were very few. My grandmother told me, she remembers it was maybe the late 40s or early 50s when my grandfather, who was a dyed in the wool duck hunter, he fed his kids on duck every day. He shot his first goose in about 1949, 1950. He had never seen one up till that point in his life. And it took him that long to come back from market hunting. Market hunting wiped out the passenger pigeon. Market hunting almost wiped out the North American bison. And it came very close to wiping out the Canada goose and the turkey and other species. So the law was enacted by hunters. Hunters lobbied for this law. They said, please ban market hunting and please tax us. Every hunting license we purchase in the U.S. and I believe it's the same with stamps in Canada, everything we purchase gets taxed and all that tax goes to conservation efforts. And so those efforts really paid off to the point where we have too many geese now, but... Yeah, that's the reality is that the geese were very close to being extinct and now they're just everywhere and more and more every year.

Nick Lambert: I had no idea of any of this, which of course must have been your experience in reverse when you were going all around the shop investigating in Portuguese pointers in cork plantations and ⁓ all that kind of

Craig: Hey man, I only knew corks came out of the end of a wine bottle. I had no idea they grew on trees. I was freaked out. I'm like, what do you mean? And like the way they harvest them and they number the trees with the year that it was done. Cause you can only do it every nine or 10 years or so. It was amazing, you know? And then when you talk about their dogs and how they use them and the way they even. you know, the, what happens when the dog is on point? What do we do? We do it differently than you guys do here and do your dogs fetch. had a guy come from France, Southern France, with a breed of dog that was developed in a very arid area. They've never been for a hundred years selected for anything to do with water, because the dog will only see water in its bowl at the end of the day. They never sees water. Well, we're not.

Nick Lambert: What was that? What was that?

Craig: is a Brac de L'Ariège. It's a French Brac, so it's a beautiful dog. It looks kind of like a ⁓ slimmed down version of a Braco Italiano. ⁓ They run like the wind, they point beautifully, they're a wonderful breed, very rare, maybe 40, 50 births a year, puppies a year in all of the world. It's called a Brac de L'Ariège, comes from the Ariège region of southern France. it... ⁓ again was developed in an area where their really water work wasn't on their list of duties. So the president of the club came here, he came here several times and hunted with his dogs, which were magnificent. And when we hunt, I say, listen, I'm going over here, I'm gonna walk for an hour, I'm gonna make a circle. I'll be back in an hour, you go this way and make a circle and we'll meet back at the car in an hour. That's how we do it. Okay, fine. I give them a walkie talkie and a compass. And it was pretty easy that area. was just big open fields with fences. And I said, okay. And then about 20 minutes in, I hear a shot and he goes, oh, okay. He says, there was a little pond in here and I shot a duck. I go, good for you. You know, bravo, way to go. We'll have a nice dinner tonight. And he goes, yeah, but it's in the water. And I said, well, where's your dog? He goes, he's right here beside me at the edge of the water. He goes, I don't know. He says, my boots aren't high enough. Do you think I should go? How am I gonna go get it? I said, well, hang on. I had a Weimaraner at that time, young female Weimaraner. And I said, just hang on, I'll walk over. So I walk over to him. And sure enough, there he is standing on the side of this pond with this dog and they're both going, geez, I don't know what to, what are we gonna do about this? And it's only 50 yards in the water, just floating belly up. And I go, well, do you want me to send my dog to go get it? He goes, will it? I said, yeah, it'll go in the water.

Nick Lambert: Thank

Craig: So I said fetch and it goes in the water and she fetched the bird to me. And so the conversation after that was I said Jean-Francois like what's the deal with your dog? He goes, well, I've never shot a bird in water. My dog's never seen water. It's just not something we've ever experienced. And I go, do you think with proper training he would go? And he says, I imagine so. He says, if as a pup, I said, and your breed as a pup, do you think they wouldn't go in water? And subsequently I have met people who have trained them to do it, but he goes, Well, I've never known anybody to do it, but we could always give it a try. So it's those sorts of things that you just don't realize. The other example, again, with Weimaraners, I had a friend from Germany come with her long-haired Weimaraners, a breeder, I've got a dog from her.

Nick Lambert: Amazing.

Craig: You know, German dogs always have this reputation of not questing very far, that their search is very close, you know, and it's true with upland birds, if you're out hunting pheasants or partridge with the average German Weimaraner, it's going to be a fairly close, slow working dog on upland game. But that doesn't mean they can't go far or fast. It just depends on where their brain is. So we get to this forest and we're hunting Woodcock and Snipe in this little area. And I said to Tanya, I said, okay, well, I've got my dog over here. You go over there and let your dog off the leash. She lets her dog off the leash and it disappears. It's gone. And I said to Tanya, go, wow, your dog is a really big running, you know, searching dog. goes, yeah, she's not looking for birds. I go, what do mean? She smelled deer. So Tanya uses her dogs every year. The average German hunter will shoot more foxes in a single season than pheasants in his entire life. Okay. Most of them hunt. big game. So Tanya's dogs were used to going, finding deer and herding them back towards her. Going out, finding boar and herding them back. So here's this dog in a brand new forest and her owner's got a gun and the owner says go hunt. Well where's this dog? 15 minutes later, about a mile away, I hear barking. Bark, bark, bark, bark and sure enough here comes a deer. And we don't hunt deer that way. We're not allowed to and it wasn't even deer season but the dog was programmed so Tanya was like, well, I don't know if she'll hunt birds. So I said, listen, put it on a-

Nick Lambert: But the dog is consciously herding the deer towards the gun. It's not a sort of random, start at one end of the wood and their dogs are at the other. It is like a collie or whatever. It's herding that deer. Amazing.

Craig: Dear. Yeah. No. No. Yeah, yeah, they're going out there, it's called a driven shoot. It's a very common and very traditional type of hunting in Germany where you would stand at the edge of the forest, me, you and 10 of our buddies were all standing 40 yards apart. We would each take our dogs and go find them. And all of our dogs would take off into the forest. And the minute they were on a hot trail or sight the deer, they would start barking and hopefully driving them towards us. You should speak with, ⁓

Nick Lambert: I know that. thought they're sort of beaters at one end of the wood and then you're lined out at the other and they're pushing them towards you. But they will go out and they'll find the deer and bring them back.

Craig: The dogs are the beaters. The dogs are the beaters. Yeah, they'll go out kilometers. They'll go out kilometers for like half an hour. They'll go out. There is a breed that is specifically bred and selected for that. It's called a Wachtelhund. It's the Deutsche Wachtelhund. It's a German spaniel, basically. It works like a spaniel, but it goes out kilometers. I used to speak to my friend Nadja in Germany. She breeds, get this, Cocker spaniels.

Nick Lambert: That's quite a thing.

Craig: English Cocker Spaniels, she breeds them for that. She has developed her own line of English Cocker Spaniels that go out hundreds of yards, a kilometer, and drive deer back to her loud, barking the entire time. Right? I interviewed her for my podcast and it blew my mind that I said, you did this? She says, ⁓ yes, my dogs are very good. They're better than some of the other dogs. Little Cocker's doing that. So that's what they do. So that's what my friend's dog did. He took off.

Nick Lambert: ⁓ really? ⁓ my god. incredible.

Craig: And then I said to Tanya, well listen, why don't you just put her on leash or keep her at heel. Let's work my dog. Hopefully we'll get a woodcock. Hopefully we'll get a bird. So maybe 20 minutes, half an hour later, sure enough, my dog goes on point, goes up and my friend made the shot, boom, woodcock down. I said, now I'll hold my, send your dog for the fetch. And so she did. Her dog went and picked up the bird. Again, this is Scolopax minore. This is the North American woodcock. It's half the size of your woodcock. So it's a bird this dog had never seen in her life before. She went and picked it up, brought it back. I have a beautiful picture of her. I should send it to you, because it's a beautiful picture of this dog with the woodcock in her mouth. And then Tonya, good girl, good girl, threw it out a couple more times. She fetched it up and she said, hunt. And then that dog from that point on, the light bulb moment, feather, 40, 50 yard casts pointing, backing my dog. It was brilliant to see this. And I thought that is one hell of a smart dog. And it was, I mean, she had passed all the

Nick Lambert: Switch to feather. ⁓ amazing. Yeah.

Craig: German tests and everything, highly bred dog, very good dog. But yeah, at first she figured, okay, just like the wind just gone. And then driving deer back towards us. And then after that she was in a different mode. And I was very impressed by that. I so impressed I got a dog from, I got two dogs from that woman after that. And they were both brilliant dogs,

Nick Lambert: ⁓ really? Did you ever in your travels ⁓ see any hunting in Scandinavia?

Craig: No, it's one of the places that I regret not going. We had, so when I was...

Nick Lambert: I guess they don't have any Scandinavian breeds, do they? The Danish pointer would be the...

Craig: Okay, yeah, if you include, yeah, I guess let's include Denmark in Scandinavia. Yeah, for sure. I went to Denmark and I photographed the old Danish pointer and loved them. They were cool dogs, man. Should be better known. I photographed old Danish pointers as well in South Dakota. I hunted pheasants over old Danish pointer. I met an old Danish fellow. He was born in North America, but last name is Nilsen, so of Danish heritage. And because of his heritage, he figured he wanted a pointing dog from Denmark. So he actually imported one. And then I photographed him one year with his dogs. And then the next year, the breeder of that dog came to visit him as well. And I hunted with those two over there, Danish pointers. And they're very nice dogs. I really, really liked them. They're like a very old fashioned German shorthaired pointer. In fact, if you go back, yes, yeah.

Nick Lambert: What does that mean a bit sort of heavier boned?

Craig: But basically it looks like an old fashioned GSP before it was really sort of modernized. So they're a little bit throatier, a little bit houndier throatier, not as what they say high on the pins. They're a little bit lower dog, powerful. Yeah, like I say, jowly, a little bit longer ears, same color, mainly white with brown, brown head, brown ticking, ⁓ but beautiful character. Like they were just, they were intense looking dogs. They ran hard, they pointed hard, but they were sweethearts, every one of them that I saw. So that's another breed that should be better known.

Nick Lambert: The Danish dogs have an amazing reputation over here. know, people say if you want a good German wire, look at the Danish lines. They're maybe a bit softer. If you want a good wirehead, Vizsla, look at the Danish lines. They seem to be some really good, there must be, I guess there's a hunting culture over there and they take it fairly seriously, they?

Craig: There is a strong hunting culture there. What I like about the Scandinavians, and I was going to say I never did get to Norway or Sweden, which were on the agenda. So was Italy. So was I was invited to a field trial at Balmoral. Every 10 years, there's a very famous field trial pitting pointer and setter owners from the three different countries from the UK. So there's an Irish team, a Scottish team and a British English team, and they compete at Balmoral. Lisa and I were invited to that event. ⁓ We had done the security stuff. We had our The hotel was booked, the cars were booked, everything was booked, airline tickets, then COVID hit. So we had to cancel everything. And on that trip, we had intended also to go to Scandinavia, to Norway and Sweden and check dogs out there. So what I ended up having to do for my second book was to rely on some very, know, gracious and talented people in those countries to send me photographs and to interview them at length ⁓ in all those countries about their dogs.

Nick Lambert: ⁓ no.

Craig: Specifically about pointers and setters, about their hunting culture. So I think I got a ⁓ fairly good I developed a fairly good understanding of what's going on there and I came to the conclusion that the famous Irish red setter breeder named John Nash was right He wrote in one of his writings because he went there and judged dogs in trials And was influential in those breeds in those countries in Scandinavia and he wrote that there is no such thing as a perfect breeding or field trial system. I'm ⁓ sort of quoting him, but inaccurately, but he said that, believe the Norwegians are closest. Yeah, in terms of the way they evaluate their dogs, they're evaluated as if they were on a hunt. They're evaluated in the same places they hunt, on the same game that they hunt, in the same way that they hunt. And judges are evaluating them that way. So I believe that this can't...

Nick Lambert: Interesting. Where do they fit in your sort of you make a distinction between East and West of the Rhine Den you the the the testing to a standard versus competition

Craig: Yeah, so I'm talking about, well, it's basically all of the Scandinavian field trial and even limited hunt tests that they have, they have very few. It's mainly a field trial place. It's based on the British stuff. It's basically British field trialing that they, they were the ones that brought it over there. There was a lot of exchange between the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danes, and to a certain extent the Finns, but mainly the Norwegians and Swedes. with England at that time lots. Like even Arkwright, the author of the famous Pointer book, yeah, he judged dogs ⁓ And some of his dogs are at the foundation of the dogs in that particular ⁓ But I think that Nash is correct in that the Norwegians, and I would broaden it, I would say that the Scandinavians on the whole are the closest. Their systems aren't perfect, ours aren't perfect but they're closer in that they have a much greater degree of transparency.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, punch and set.

Craig: And they don't realize it. I just gave a talk to the Norwegian Kennel Club or to a group within the Kennel Club that are supporting of the continental breeds. They are dominated there by the British breeds like pointers and setters are by far more popular than any of the continental breeds. Yeah, like Gordon setters are quite popular. English setters, pointers, they're very, very popular there and dominate the field trial and the hunting scene, basically. So there's a small group that are trying to promote the continental breeds. And I gave a talk to their ⁓ their group and I told them that they really don't don't appreciate exactly what they have in comparison to the other systems around the world. Their system isn't perfect but boy ⁓ boy it's light years ahead of ours in North America and I suspect of that of the UK in certain areas the transparency, the health tests, the research, the demands they put on their dogs that you cannot have a championship in one area like the field without having show qualifications and vice versa. And so I believe that they are closest in that here in North America, and it's the same now in England, ⁓ there are certain breeds that if you put a showbred example of that breed next to a fieldbred example of that breed, anybody with a set of eyes could tell the difference. Anybody with a set of eyes would even think they're different Everybody I spoke to in Scandinavia, I asked them, if you took the winner of the show championship that has maybe one minor field trial award, ⁓ and you said it next to the biggest field trial winner of the last decade, could I tell the difference between the two of them standing still? They said no. They said running, yeah. Pointing, yeah. But standing still, not really. And so they are closest to being able to... maintain that sort of at least the look and the style of their dogs. I believe their research into the health issues is top-notch, is leading. ⁓ And just their transparency, just the way that they go about things. Again, I don't want to put them on a pedestal, but I just found that they are more advanced than a lot of the countries and other systems. And so I wouldn't hesitate to... Personally if I was looking for you know specific breeds for instance a Gordon Setter or an English Setter They would be I would definitely check out the the Scandinavians in that regard and like you say German wire hair pointers and the Danish club for the day old Danish pointer quite an active club dedicated enthusiastic people breeding some pretty nice unknown dogs like completely unknown which And again here in North America. We have a bit of a not a problem, but we have a history that goes back to this inundation of German breeds. ⁓ So the most popular breeds in North America are the German wire haired pointer and the German short haired, German short haired by far. Pointers and setters are still popular in certain areas, but GSP's, Wiemararners Vizslas are quite popular as well. But all of those breeds, especially the German breeds, come from a culture that doesn't hunt like we do. ⁓ The average, as I mentioned, the average German hunter hunts boar. The average German hunter hunts fox. The average North American hunter hunts pheasant. The average North American upland hunter is after grouse and woodcock. Now, can a GSP imported from Germany or a wire deer imported from Germany hunt those birds? ⁓ yeah, I've seen it all the time. They're very, very good at that. I had German imported dogs that were very good bird hunters, but they also wanted to kill every fox and coyote and skunk and porcupine. in the country. They also had another agenda and I had to do all kinds of work with my dogs to make them focus on birds mainly. And so does every North American who brings them over here that wants to hunt mainly upland game. There's some work for you. You need to understand the tendencies of this dog and work almost against them in certain circumstances. Now some North American hunters love the fact that their dog wants to kill foxes. They hunt them. Same thing with coyotes. They want their dog, for instance, to be protective of the home. They want their dog to do blood tracking where it's legal. It's not legal here. I can't do it. So those dogs are good fits, but there are other dogs, like my current dogs, that are a French breed. They want nothing to do with fur at all. All they want is birds, and all I want is birds. And I'm good with that. And so the old Danish pointer, well, it's not a GSP. It's not bred. to kill foxes, it's bred to hunt birds. Every single one of the French HPR dogs is a upland bird specialist period. End of story.

Nick Lambert: I wanted to ask you exactly the question you just answered because in the UK we want bird dogs but the two most common are the GSP and the the wirehead pointer the short head point and the wirehead pointer and you think is that history is that because officers after the war brought them back would we not be better off with a Braque Français

Craig: Yes. Yes. Yes, believe the answer to that question is yes, in both regards. Yes, it's because after the war, was hundreds of thousands of allied servicemen and women stationed in Germany in a population that was starving and willing to sell their dogs for nothing, or just for the next meal. So thousands of dogs made their way over to the UK and to America to the point where there were clubs there that... that passed regulations within the club saying to their breeders, you cannot sell entire litters now. You can't sell more than half the litter to go out of the country. We have to keep some for ourselves. They did that. So yeah, the German breeds had a head start compared to the French breeds, because there were no, how many Englishmen were stationed in Paris after the war? Like none. Whereas how many were stationed, there were tens of thousands all over the country in Germany. So of course they saw those dogs. If the same thing had happened in France, if...

Nick Lambert: In fact, I'm talking to people about the history of the German wire pointer. They'll the first came over with major whatever and this one with another.

Craig: Major Herbert was in Germany, but for the Weimaraner as well. They know the exact guy who brought them over. Because they have the records. Same thing in the US. We know exactly when they came over. The French breeds just sat in their little corner of France and nobody paid much attention to them, including many French. The most popular breed in France is the English Setter. Pointers are very, very popular. Now, Brittany's came over to North America. Brittany's are very popular in France.

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: But all of the other French breeds and the Portuguese and the Spanish and the Italian breeds, which are in essence an upland bird hunting specialist, what makes them different from pointers and setters is that they're expected to retrieve. That's it. That's the only difference. Those dogs are HPR dogs. Hunt, point, retrieve. Tracking a Frenchman would be aghast at you suggesting that his dog go and bay a boar over in the back corner. You know, or, hey, let's go push a bunch of deer out of that bush. Let's go take our braques and Epagneul They're like, what? We have running hounds for that. ⁓ let's go blood track this. No, no, I've got a blood tracking dog over here. Like they have breeds for that. They have all kinds of breeds to do that. They never, ever intended for their dogs to be those sorts of dogs. And so North American hunters, when they take a German dog, they have to kind of take the German part out of those dogs unless they plan to use it for that. If they don't, if they do deer stalking or if they do blood tracking, fine, get one of those dogs. But if you don't, look at a dog that comes from a tradition that is developed for hunting like you do. And that is why to this day, Lisa and I now have two French dogs. have a Espagneul ⁓ 100%.

Nick Lambert: So you've been on that journey effectively. You started with the German dog that could kill everything in sight, including the neighbour's cat.

Craig: Yeah, I had German dogs. had German and American. I had American bred and German bred Wiemararners short haired Wiemararners and long haired Wiemararners. I had both of them and they were, I loved every one of them. every one of them turned out to be wonderful hunting dogs, but there was always something, especially with the German dogs in them. It was like, ⁓ know, half of the toolbox I didn't use. The dog wanted to use those tools, but I kept telling them, shut that drawer. That's, that's not what we do here. And so I was always working a little bit against a certain portion of that dog's. So then we had one and he was an unbelievably good dog and he died early from lymphoma. And that just broke our hearts. ⁓ and so of course we got people telling us, know, we'll give, you know, Weimararner people, my God, here's a puppy. Well, you know, come on, get one. And we just couldn't even look at pictures of Weimararners without ⁓ bursting tears because it was just so heartbreaking for us. We had two older dogs at that time. We thought, okay, let's hunt with them.

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: for one more year and let's decide on another breed. Why always drink the same bottle of wine? Why always go with the same style? Let's change it up. What are we gonna do? So we started thinking about it. And by that time, we had seen every single one of the pointing breeds. And so we had contacts in all of them. By that point, I knew what I was talking about. I knew every one of them and I knew their qualities, their strengths, their weaknesses. ⁓

Nick Lambert: So you are the expert at this point.

Craig: And we kept coming back to a couple of breeds, including one that was the one we have now, which was developed in the area of Northern France called Picardy. Now, funnily enough, we had some very strong ⁓ connections with Picardy. The first was that it looks like Manitoba, kinda. And the hunters, when we went there, hunt like we do. They'll go out in the morning and maybe shoot a duck and maybe they'll go for woodcock a little bit later. And ⁓ I know a place where there's some partridges. And so their dogs were very strong in water because they're waterfowl hunters there. We do a lot of waterfowling here. Their dogs were very good upland hunting dogs and none of their dogs wanted anything to do with a boar or a fox. And we're like, hey, this sounds kind of like us. Like these guys have developed a breed over the last 150, 200 years to hunt kind of like we already hunt. And then we also realized traveling through Picardy that Lisa's grandfather was in the first world war. And we actually found the village where all of his mates were buried near it because he was one of the sole survivors of a battle of 600 that went out over the top and 40 came back and he was one of them. It was a little, yeah, was a town called Cours-Sédette and it was a battle, a famous battle where the Quebecois 22 or the 22nd regiment of Quebec fought in that battle. So there was this personal connection to that particular area as well. So we started thinking about this and that, thought, ⁓ know, a Picardy would be nice, but they're not very common. There'll be maybe 100 pups a year born in France and all of them in France. And then one day I'm scrolling through Facebook and I'm, you know, for some reason I'm on the Picardy Club or something group in Facebook and there's this little photo. First litter of Picardy Spaniels ever born in the UK. And it was in the UK.

Nick Lambert: in the UK. ⁓

Craig: So a fellow in the UK went to France, imported a bitch and then got a male from France and got them together and whelped a litter in the UK. And he had these pictures and it was puppy pictures and I looked at these pictures and I thought, ⁓ jeez, I need to back away slowly from this because I'm about to press the buy button on this. I took the picture over to Lisa, I said, Lisa, look at these dogs, what do you think? Maybe this should be our next beach. He looked at it she said, I'll go get my purse, let's go to England. didn't end up going there, but we ended up getting a dog from the breeder in England. That was our first dog, ⁓ ⁓ out of the box, probably the most amazing dog that I've ever owned. ⁓ ⁓ because he ⁓ exactly what we needed at that time, a change, because we couldn't even look at Weimararners or think about them. ⁓ ⁓ he wanted to do was run like his ass was on fire and point and fetch birds. That's it. ⁓ only that,

Nick Lambert: Really? ⁓ yeah. What a dream.

Craig: And the minute he got home, we waited until he was six months of age to import him because when he was a pup, it was February and that would be torture to bring a dog to Manitoba in February because it's minus 30. So we waited until June to get him. So he was six months old at the time. And again, amazing dog in the field, just on fire, but at home, a complete old man. was like, he just slept. all day long. was the mellowest, calmest dog that we had ever had. Our wiemararners always slept with one eye open. They were always ready for something. They weren't hyper.

Nick Lambert: Looking for intruders to kill, probably.

Craig: I don't know, they were always on. There was never a fully, they were like your computer, like when your computer's asleep, all you have to do is just brush one thing and it's up, you it's on. Whereas with Leo, boom, he's down. And another example would be when we're closing into, so here in Canada, in Manitoba especially, we have a lot of gravel roads. In other words, we have pavement, which you call it, like a bitumen, you know, like a paved road, but then,

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: A lot of the side roads that will go for miles, sometimes hundreds of miles, are gravel, basically. And so when we're going to our hunting grounds, you're often on the highway and then you turn onto gravel. And with our rhyme runners, the minute we turned onto gravel, they knew that we were getting somewhat closer. All hell would break loose in the back of that. They knew we were getting close. With Leo, so we were used to that. With Leo, you get onto gravel. All right, no noise. We'd finally get to our hunting spot. By that time our whims would be foaming at the mouth and clawing at their cage, they gotta get out there and hunt. You'd open the back and it's almost as if he's sitting there smoking a cigarette going, hey, what's up? He was just like, completely zen. Like as if nothing was going on, you'd get him out of the truck, he'd take a little bit of water and then he'd look at you, ⁓ you want me to hunt? Boom, just gone and just on fire the entire time until you tell him, very hard hunting, yeah.

Nick Lambert: Really, so hard hunting.

Craig: They're setterized. mean, they hunt sort of like a setter, basically. Closer, somewhat less speeds, you know, not quite as fast, a little bit closer. But Leo is a two, 300 yard dog, you know? Yeah, we have another one, Rooster. He's a 75 to 150 yard dog out in the open. But with a completely different person.

Nick Lambert: Really fabulous.

Craig: That was the mistake. We got Leo, we thought they were all like that. well, all Pacardys are going to be exactly like Leo. ⁓ got the exact opposite when we got the next one. He's sort of little bouncing off walls a little bit that way. But, know, to conclude, that's exactly we did. We went from the German dogs, which were superb gun dogs and superb bird dogs that had an entire tool chest of tools that I never used. And in fact, had to dissuade. Whereas these Picardies they only want to use the same tools as I do. And they only want to use them in the same way that I do. And that is the pitch I always make to anybody considering any breed. Consider where it comes from and the culture in which it was developed and for what type of game it was developed. If it matches you and the way that you hunt, bingo. If it doesn't, there are other breeds out there. And for a lot of upland hunters, these

Nick Lambert: Yeah, brilliant.

Craig: unknown French breeds, these Braques and these Epagneul tick all the boxes that you want without ticking all these other boxes that you don't want or don't need. ⁓ Their difficulty is they're ⁓ easy to find sometimes, there are not many of them around. ⁓ French dog club politics is like French politics ⁓ general. ⁓ They've raised, you know, political ⁓ to an art form. ⁓ French, the national sport is arguing. ⁓

Nick Lambert: I did like some aspects of the French. I think there was a degree more transparency than there is in the UK. I like the fact that after the trials they have the books they fill in with the good and the bad. I like the fact that certainly with the Visla all the health data and everything's online and you can check stuff out. It did seem a pretty good system.

Craig: And remember, there's an even higher level of transparency in French dog culture that comes after the wine. If you want to unlock that extra level, I'm serious, man, two, three glasses of wine, all the secrets come out. It does. And because the French, in my mind, the French in terms of pointing dogs ⁓ breeding are...

Nick Lambert: It all comes out.

Craig: and creation, they've created more pointing dog breeds than anybody else. There are more French pointing breeds than there are German breeds. And so they've created more and they've lost more than everybody else. They are the, I say that French dog breeders are like French cooks. The results are absolutely superb, but you do not want to look in the kitchen, okay? You don't want to know what's in that sausage. because what's in it is,

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: is their fantastic ability to cross pointers and setters and other breeds into their breeds and not have it really obvious. Every single French breed is highly anglicized. They all talk with an English accent, but they're remarkable in terms of how they can manage it. And they've done it for the good of the breeds, in my opinion, ⁓ and they've done it in a way that is ⁓ effective. ⁓ And now...

Nick Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

Craig: with DNA testing and with the heightened regulations and rules within the French kennel system, I think it's gonna get a little bit more difficult. So the books are never actually, you can open the books. There are mechanisms. The French are one of the few systems and kennel clubs. The Germans still have this as well where there is an actual plan B. My main, although I shouldn't say it's completely, you know, limited in the Kennel Club of England or in the US, it's just,

Nick Lambert: Yeah, those books might be getting closed a bit.

Craig: much more difficult but there are mechanisms within the French system whereby if a breed gets into trouble, in other words if plan A isn't working, there is a plan B and that plan B is follow these steps. Declare this, do that, fill out this form, get a judge, do this, that and the other thing and you can introduce and you can crossbreed into a breed and have that after a while established as part of the mainstream of the breed. There is a mechanism. It's not easy to follow, but it has been done officially. But because it's not easy to follow, it's been done unofficially a lot. Like a lot. I've been involved in two of them. I've been personally involved and helped people manage a infusion of outside blood into their very rare on the brink of extinction breeds in two different breeds. And it was done so...

Nick Lambert: sure it needed to be done.

Craig: It was done semi-officially, let's just say. It was done semi-officially. Some of the proper steps were followed, others were sort of skirted. But that's France. That's just the way it is. That's just French culture. ⁓

Nick Lambert: Did you ever, when you were in France, go to the hunting museum in Paris?

Craig: That's number one. It's the Charles de Gaulle Airport Hotel Hunting Museum. ⁓ yeah, I've been there. man.

Nick Lambert: I stumbled across that when I think my daughters and wife were shopping. And there's that picture with, is it Diane and Blondie? two, there's like a, it looks like a short head pointer and a setter, that sort of thing. Yeah.

Craig: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that's Audrey and Desportes the two famous ⁓ painters for the king. Yeah, he painted the kings. Yeah, and he named them all underneath that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nick Lambert: Yeah. I mean I was just walking along and I went in there and then suddenly I'm like this is the most amazing place.

Craig: Those paintings predate the development of the pointer and the setter. And everybody goes, well, the setters come from Spaniels which came from Spain. No, no, take a look at those paintings. that is English, basically that is the grandfather of all English and Irish and Gordon Setters, basically right there. And the same thing with the pointers. Yeah, yeah. They came from France, basically. And those paintings are there. Those are the originals. I know, it's like a pilgrimage for me. Every time we go to France, we go to that museum. It's unbelievable.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, it is cool.

Craig: And it's been recently renovated too, so it's probably even more splendid since the last time I've been there.

Nick Lambert: I was there a couple of years ago, think, something two, three years ago. And I took a picture on my iPhone of this, of that picture. I was like, that's a pointer and that's a setter.

Craig: ⁓ you... yeah, well if you look those fellows up, if you look up ⁓ Jean-Baptiste ⁓ and Desportes, if you look them up, they were painters to the king and king had kennels full of pointing dogs, of setting dogs at that time, like Chien Couchin. ⁓ they're famous, famous paintings. And the originals are there and they just blow my mind every time I see them. ⁓

Nick Lambert: Fabulous, fabulous. Now, we've talked about the logic of maybe you don't need all the tools in the German dog toolkit to do the upland bird hunting, but as an Englishman, what about an English setter as an HPR? mean, there's nothing that stops them retrieving, is there? Maybe there's a less inclination, but I mean, people have them and they do retrieve.

Craig: So one of the most shocking things you could tell any Italian, for instance, or even an American, is that the English produce, in a good year, maybe 300, 350 English setter puppies. Why is an Italian shocked? Because they produce 15,000 a year. The Americans will breed 5,000, or the French will 5,000, the Americans maybe 3,000. It is shocking.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, I've banged on about this before.

Craig: to anybody in the setter world that the homeland of the English setter has more or less forgotten their breed, one of the most magnificent breeds to ever be created in the history of pointing breeds. And it's been lost and forgotten in its homeland and put on a list of vulnerable breeds. It's just mind boggling how that happened. I I understand it and I explain about it in my book, why and where and when it happened because it's not a new thing. This happened 100 years ago, 150 years ago. The rise of driven shoots, the rise of the big guns and the big shoots really was the days when the setter and the pointer started their steep decline. But in terms of getting an English setter or an English pointer or a Gordon or an Irish setter as an HPR, ⁓ my God, yeah. Have you seen some of the dogs? There are dogs, I have in my book. pictures of Irish setters retrieving foxes in Germany.

Nick Lambert: I haven't seen that and I've got the book right here. I shall have to have a good look.

Craig: Yeah, take a look, take a look. Volume two, I can't give you the page number, but there is an Irish setter, you know, a very well-built, beautiful Irish setter of German lines bred in Germany for generations, and he's retrieving a fox. are English setters ⁓ here in North America that have what's called a versatile hunting dog championship title that have passed the highest levels of HPR testing here. Same thing with pointers. My friend Judy, who is a brilliant breeder of wiemararners, I had some of her dogs. She also has English pointers and those pointers she puts in the exact same tests that all of her WIME runners have passed and she has put the highest level awards on those pointers, generation after generation now. And so they are perfectly capable of doing everything that you would want an HPR to do. It's just that the English ⁓ tradition, especially in field trials, is for non-retrieving of those dogs. And that sort of limits them as well.

Nick Lambert: I mean, even today, some people will say, this is a field trial of a setter. We won't let them retrieve for the first couple of seasons or something like that.

Craig: Which doesn't, yeah. And I talked to some of the field trailers there and they tell me that in all honesty, when they're hunting, their dogs will retrieve and they have no problem with it. It's a field trial regulation that has somehow seeped into the sort of overall culture of those breeds that sort of preclude them. When we were in North of England, we were in Darlington waiting. We were at a hotel or pub and we were gonna go the next day to the trials up on the moors. And a fellow heard our accent and knew that we weren't from around there and he said, ⁓ what are you doing here in town? I said, well, we're at a field trial. What's a field trial? Well, we're going to go attend this where dogs are competing. ⁓ he says, ⁓ lurchers. I go, no, it's not a coursing trial or something like that. He goes, because I have lurchers. And we talked about lurchers for a bit, fascinating dogs. And he said, well, what kind of dogs are they? I said, they're English setters and pointers. He goes, well, what are those? And I say, well, an English setter, it's a dog that points birds and grouse. goes, ⁓ I think I might've read about them once, but this is a native guy in Darlington. He's maybe 50 miles from one of the most famous moors in the world where they've been running trials for a hundred years. Never heard of them. Now it goes way back, as I mentioned, the decline goes way back because the decline started as soon as driven shooting started, but it goes even further than that. There's something curious about the English character and it's similar in America. And, ⁓ There's a famous quote, I should look it up right now, but there's a famous quote in one of the very first books written on John Johann Caius wrote this book about dogs. It's called the Encyclopedia Britannicus of Dogs. It's just basically a dog encyclopedia written in the 1600s, actually in the 1500s and then translated by Fleming after that. But there's one of his famous quotes. And he talks about dogs coming in. This is one of the first mentions of setters in Spaniels. He talks about, is a new dog coming in from France, which is blue speckled and crawls on its belly like a worm when in presence of game. I'm paraphrasing here. And he goes, it is now popular in our country because our countrymen are always more curious about things that are foreign than things that are homegrown. And so I quote it in my book, ⁓ Ark Wright quoted it in his,

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: There is just something that is appealing because it comes from somewhere else. There's just something appealing about it being exotic from being outside. We can't produce anything good here. It must be better because it comes from somewhere else. And so that's in large part why the English have turned their back on their native breeds, which I can't emphasize this enough. Pointers and setters represent in so many ways the pinnacle. of development of the pointing dog. They are the cream of, they're the top. That's the Mount Everest of pointing dogs. And they're unknown and ignored. And same thing with the.

Nick Lambert: Yeah. I think, I mean, they're intrinsically in this country linked to the Moors and they're linked to walked up on the Moors, which is as I kind of alluded to, something that's difficult to get and pretty rare because if their numbers are there, they like to drive them because it's, I guess, commercially much more sensible thing to do.

Craig: Yes.

Nick Lambert: But then you look at videos of someone hunting Woodcock or in Italy and you see they can work close. You don't need to have, you know, a horizon miles away for these dogs. And I'm intrigued by it. And I have mentioned it on almost every single podcast. People are going to think I'm mad, but I think the English HPR, the English Setter is something that really piques my curiosity.

Craig: Well yeah, and- So David Hancock, who is now passed on, but if you look him up, David Hancock, I think he was made an MBE or something like that. anyway, he's got a, his blog, yeah, his books and his blog is still online. His archives are still online. His archives, because he wrote for many of the sporting magazines in the UK for decades. ⁓ And he wrote for, I think the Kennel Club or whatever. He was involved in all of those, but his books are absolutely brilliant. And in one of his books and

Nick Lambert: I I got some of his books.

Craig: in several of his blog posts, he actually proposed that idea of the development of an English HPR dog. And this, it almost happened in a way. If you go back into the old literature, you will find references and I have a chapter on them in my volume two on the Russian setter. right. So there's a section in my book that talks about, it never came from Russia. It did sort, it existed in a way. All right. So.

Nick Lambert: Yep, never existed, is that right?

Craig: people would sometimes come across a rough-coated dog out on the moors. it hunted kind of like a setter and a pointer, but maybe not as far. was ⁓ of an HPR. The way it was described, it sort of sounds like it was like a ⁓ korthalls griffin. It sort of was that way. And ⁓ knew where they came from, but because they were sort of fuzzy and hairy and had a beard, they simply associated with people out east. They simply thought it was Russian, because that's what they thought Russians looked like. That's why it was called a Russian Setter, which never existed in Russia. In other places on the continent, similar dogs were called Polish Setters, or Polish Water Dogs, or Bohemian this, or hessian and that, because that was a stereotypical image. If you come from Eastern Europe, you're hairy and wooly and fuzzy. you got a hairy, wooly, fuzzy dog. That's what it must be. It must come from there. But in reality, what it probably was, So what are the odds that somewhere, at some point, some place in England, a short-haired dog, a pointer, got it on with a curly-coated dog, and those puppies were wire-haired, and they pointed, and they ran? It must have happened dozens or hundreds of times over the years, just by sheer chance, and somebody probably kept the line, thought they were pretty good, and hunted with them, and slowly but surely, other people started mentioning them, and they had to give them a name, so they called them Russian Setters. But eventually they were overshadowed by pointers and setters and they were overshadowed by, again, driven shooting and spaniels came on. So all those breeds, you know, there was a Welsh setter for a while. There were other types of setters that sort of went the way of the dodo because all of them were in decline. So the idea of an English HPR is a very interesting and valid idea. It could totally be done with what you have on hand. Again, you have in England some of the best dogs in the world and the best breeds ever created by mankind were there. Now, do you want to?

Nick Lambert: Would it necessarily be very different from an English setter for example or an Irish setter? What would what are you missing? What would you be looking to to change?

Craig: I would say that there are Irish setters that come close and same thing with Gordon setters. That would be the start because you're not going to get... And in fact, the average Irish hunter expects his dog to retrieve, you know, and there are a lot of hunters. There are a lot more upland game hunters in Ireland than there are in England, you know, like walking up shooting. There's just more of them, I believe. I have to look at statistics, but there are lots of hunters in Ireland.

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: And when they do use, and their Irish setters are used as walk up shooting dogs, you know, whereas in England it's not the same thing. But how would you go about it? Well, ⁓ first of all, you would to yourself, OK, look, is a wire haired coat ⁓ desirable? ⁓ And if so, you've got the ingredients right there. You've got brilliant short haired pointers and all you'd need to do is cross them to, I don't know, Irish water spaniel. Start there. You would have wire haired dogs and they would be, you know, based on that. ⁓ You could start with a line of setters that is selected for, for instance, ⁓ ⁓ a love of water. You know what, you'd start with a bunch of setters that just naturally take to water and they're out there. Some do, some don't. You'd select from those that do. You'd look for a line of setters that, yeah, might not be, ⁓ you know, the biggest all-age field trial running dogs ⁓ that maybe have a softer temperament or that have a really, really strong desire to retrieve. ⁓ You know, the traits that you would seek You would make a list of the traits that you would want in an English HPR and you would go, okay, I'm going to seek out dogs that have oodles of those traits in them and then select from those dogs. You would start with coat. What do you want? Short coat, long coat, wire haired coat. know, start there. And then, you know, if you want a short coat, well, why don't you start with droppers? Now it's a difficult thing to fix with droppers. So what you would do is start breeding setters and pointers together. You know, and then there, because inevitably you're going to get mainly short haired coats that have a long haired recessive gene in them that you would have to sort of work away. ⁓ But yeah, you would, or you could do it the other way around. You know, you could then breed just for the long coat or introduce the curly coat. So you would start with coat. You would take a look at size. Do you want smaller dogs or do you want bigger dogs? Do you want more powerful dogs? you want, but those are the things that you would say. You would say, look, we could, you know, build a, a, ⁓ a particular breed and go from there or a line within a breed. You could breed a very versatile HPR line of setters that you would never breed a dog that didn't retrieve out of the box, that didn't jump in the first puddle of water he saw ⁓ and didn't go too far and just selectively breed. But I mean, we're talking decades and dollars.

Nick Lambert: Yeah. And helpful in, yeah, in times gone by, you could have a massive kennel with hundreds of dogs in. That's probably not so realistic these days.

Craig: Yes, the other factor, and I point this out ⁓ to people living in the modern world in which we live, is that nowadays ⁓ all of our dogs are the results of a system that is foreign to us and it's hard for us to get our heads around. It's difficult for us to understand how they did things back in the day. So,

Nick Lambert: I think you're gonna go down a ruthless culling road here, are you?

Craig: Well, let's face it. ⁓ The main tool and the most powerful tool that all breeders had in their toolbox was culling. It's just a fact. ⁓ To this day, there are people in Europe and North America that still practice extremely severe culling. I've talked to breeders who say, you're not a breeder unless you have a boneyard out back. They basically have places where their dogs go. They call it taking the dog up the creek or over the hill. ⁓ I talked to a fellow who said that His father or grandfather was a kennel boy for a famous kennel up north in England. And he started when he was eight years old. And his first job was to shovel shit out of the kennel, clean up the kennel boxes. And then his second job when he was 10 or 11 or something like that, he was given a pistol and he was told which dogs to take over the hill, basically. And that was his job. And it was a monthly occurrence. You had two, 300 dogs. Well, these 10, listen. They didn't have vaccines. You couldn't cure 90 % of the illnesses we cure nowadays. Dogs got old, dogs got sick. What do you do with them? Not only that, dogs met the same fate as horses, and cows. It was just a reality. And people in Britain sort of, I guess, have forgotten this, but I stumbled upon this during my research and ⁓ they forget the great culling of the Second World War. ⁓ So you may be unaware of this, but many of your listeners aren't, but during the Second World War when there was a blockade and times were tough and food was short, the British government issued an order for people to euthanize all of their pets, cats, dogs, parakeets, it doesn't matter. They were, and there were ads in magazines and the government would actually issue these, it was a type of a pistol and it had a that basically just knocked your dog on the head. A captive bolt. That's exactly what it was, a captive bolt pistol. And one of the famous breeders, the most famous breeders who had one of the world's largest kennels of pointers and setters, Sharp, Isaac Sharp up in the north, is said to have had to euthanize several hundred dogs in a day, in a single day, simply because there was no food to feed them. And so nowadays,

Nick Lambert: Yeah captive bolt I think is what we... yeah.

Craig: We're much gentler with our dogs in every aspect. We feed them better, we treat them better, their lives are better, their medicines are better, everything is better. And when we have excess dogs, we spay and neuter them and place them in pet homes. We place them in homes. That's what we do. That's just what we do. But it's not that way everywhere in the world. France ⁓ and Italy, instance, neutering a male is considered worse than death.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, we're in a different place, yeah.

Craig: They generally don't want to do it. They would generally rather euthanize the dog. And so it's a cultural thing. It's a historical thing. anybody who... And so that's why I've always written that the golden age of pointing dog and HPR development is gone. The golden age was from 1850 to 1950, basically.

Nick Lambert: It's all right.

Craig: where everything happened and it happened in an era where certain tools were at the disposal that are no longer at our disposal and where the culture was a little bit different and we are the beneficiaries of that sort of thing even though learning about it and understanding it is horrific in many ways but that's just the way it was and the way it is today that's just where we are. So I've had a lot of people ask about that developing a line or a strain or even a new breed I've talked to people who have started their own breed. None of them have really caught on yet, but I've talked to them that have tried it. And unless you're Bill Gates, you know, or Elon Musk, it's, those days are kind of gone It doesn't mean that you can't, as a single person, have a kennel full dogs of whatever breed you want that work exactly in the way that you want them to work. It just takes time and talent. and ⁓ effort. Like I say, my friend Judy takes pointers from the highest level field trial, high octane blood in America. These are all age field trial dogs. She takes them and she trains them and she runs them in HPR tests and just cleans the floor with the other breeds. And those are pointers. But it's because she's uber talented. She knows which dogs to select from which lines and goes about it and does her own thing. So she's got her own Kennel full of HPR pointers basically so it can be done, you know

Nick Lambert: Yeah. Fascinating. the grouse keepers, I think it's reasonably common to put a wire head pointer, German wire to a Labrador. And they call that a sort Perthshire pointer. But it's always a first cross as far as I'm aware. Cause I think things are awry for a bit once you cross those, don't they?

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. They do. The F1 generation always give you, let's say, droppers, right? So there are brilliant droppers. Every pointer man, every setter man I've ever spoken to in the States, almost every one of them have told me that. Sometimes during their life, they've come across a dropper and it was an unbelievable dog. None of them say, ⁓ I've seen the droppers and they suck. They all say they're fantastic, but they don't throw good pups the F1 is always great. The F2, F3, not so much, but that again, that's why I say that's where the culling comes in, right? So in your F2 generation, you're gonna have one outstanding pup and nine that are so-so. Well, what do you do with those nine? know, like it's always a question of numbers. So yeah, I mean, I've always thought I would take a dropper sometimes. So I saw a dog on the moors that was unbelievably beautiful. It was a solid black setter. Now I had read about jet black setters. What's his name? ⁓ In a number of different books, Laverack talks about them, wrote about jet blacks. were ⁓ of jet black setters that had been developed. And there's this, I'd seen this one, so I took pictures. It's in my book actually. It's in my book under ⁓ Welsh Setter. Take a look in there. And it's a jet black, beautiful dog. And I asked, is it in the trial? And the owner said, no, it can't because it's not registered. Its father was a Gordon, its mother was an Irish. So it was a cross between the two. But I tell you what, I would have taken that dog in a heartbeat. I mean, it was magnificent and it ran well at point, like it was a beautiful dog. so for me, I mean, listen, I'm a typically Canadian person. I'm half Icelandic and half Ukrainian. So for me, anything mixed is fine, you know? And that would be another way to go about it because one of the restrictions you have is the fact that you're operating or we all operating in a kennel club system with registries and pedigrees. Well, if you don't, if all of sudden you don't give a shit about any of that stuff, well, the world's your oyster and you could do whatever the heck you want to develop. If you, if you're saying there are game keepers that are crossing wire hairs and labs, fine. If it suits their purpose, fine. Of course, the people in the K-9 establishment will get their britches in a knot thinking about such things. It's, you know, it's almost heresy to do such a thing. But in reality, If you're not part of that agreement, if you've never signed a contract as a member of that club and sworn that you will never do that, what ethical breach are you actually committing here? Like, it's just you doing you. You do you, man. You know, as long as you're doing it, you know, as long as you're not claiming it's something else, that's the problem is the lies, is the hypocrisy. But as long as you're saying, this is what I'm doing, here's the results, well, then who are you hurting?

Nick Lambert: Yeah, absolutely. Do you have any recommendations for books on genetics that are sort of accessible to a lay person?

Craig: Not so much genetics as I follow a woman online named Carol Bruchette and ⁓ she has the Canine Institute, no, the Institute of Canine Biology. And she is a canine geneticist or biologist and she really digs deep into the weeds of all things canine genetics, especially coefficient of inbreeding, especially hip dysplasia, all that sort of stuff. She really goes deep into that stuff and links to you know, fascinating articles and modern new research and that sort of stuff. So it is a, it's a developing field. It's something that I find fascinating. It's something I find a little bit frustrating as well because of the marketing of a lot of these DNA ⁓ testing ⁓ organizations where a lot of people have their mixed breed dog and they want to know what breeds are in it. And none of them come back. The funny thing for me is that none of them come back that it's a hundred percent mixed breed all the way down. which in a lot of cases it is. They always come back that there's pure breeds in the background. Well, that can't be true for all dogs. mean, what if it's just turtles all the way down? You know what I mean? It's like, so is it a little suspicious to me? And I know that here in Canada, there's been some investigative journalism. Somebody have submitted their own human DNA and come back half Labrador and yeah, you know, like.

Nick Lambert: Really?

Craig: Like again, I think the science behind a lot of that is very solid in terms of their DNA testing, but I think that sometimes their sample pools are a little shallow and they don't have enough data to really hone in. They're getting better all the time, but ⁓ no, mean, it's something fast. I've worked with some geneticists that have tried to isolate, for instance, the pointing gene, are trying to isolate certain genetic traits to certain.

Nick Lambert: Please.

Craig: to, you know, halotypes on certain, you know, certain strands of DNA. And that's really interesting work as well. But again, I'm not, I'm not a dog trainer. I'm not a biologist. I'm not, you know, that well educated in that area, but I do know where to find some of that stuff. And it's, it's really fascinating to me.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, I'd like to learn a bit more about it. Not least because I think I've told you about my curly tailed Vizsla that I've produced. I'd like to understand how heritable that trait is, whether if I put her to a dog with a low set tail, what will happen then? That just kind of stuff. And my wife's a vet, but she doesn't have much of an opinion on that sort of thing. I didn't know whether there was any reference.

Craig: Well, again, well, this comes back to the same discussion from five minutes ago. mean, ⁓ there are modern ways to find that out. You would do a genetic study. You would do a survey of this. You'd take samples of hundreds of dogs and then back in the day, they would just breed it and find out. You would have a litter tomorrow and then you'd have another one a year from now. You'd have 10 litters and figure it out. There's a famous story. I don't know if it's true, but I think it is. I think he wrote about it himself. One of the most famous breeders of pointers in North America was a guy named Bob Wehle And he developed a line of, that's his name backwards. Elhew is Wehle backwards. ⁓ it's the Elhew pointer, which most people in the world have heard about. ⁓ Well, bred a lot of dogs because he realized that in order to breed and select and to develop the type of dog he wanted, ⁓ quantity a quality of its own. He needed quantity. So he would breed hundreds.

Nick Lambert: Is that LHU? Yeah, right, okay. Yeah, yeah.

Craig: and hundreds of dogs every year, he would cull severely and he would sell a lot because he had the marketing wherewithal and the money to really market his dogs. So there was a huge demand. He developed a huge demand for his dogs. So he was well positioned to create his own line and did, and it is one of the most influential lines of pointers in the world. At one point, he said that he got tired of walking into his kennel and having to put earmuffs on because of all of the barking. He hated all the barking. So he decided one day to get rid of the barking in his line. And I think it took him several generations, but eventually he walked into the barn of silence and there was no barking. He just eliminated barking as a trait from his dogs without any DNA test, without any, you know, he just selected, you know, you bark your God, you know, or I don't breed you. He just bred quieter and quieter. I mean, he was...

Nick Lambert: Wow.

Craig: at a point where every one of his dogs was a superb athlete and a superb performer. So he had the ability to choose from among them. yeah, so those traits. ⁓

Nick Lambert: And right now we're kind of diametrically opposed to that, we? Because certainly in the UK, the way that dogs get bred is, I have a dog and I think it's amazing because I love that dog and therefore I breed from that dog and I'm blind to its faults. And I, yeah.

Craig: Yes. Yes. Yeah. the French say everybody has the best dog in the world and everybody's right because their dog is the best dog in the world. They're all correct when you say that. And I understand that because I love my dogs to death as well. But a true breeder, and Wehle wrote this as well, he said there are very, very few breeders. He said there are a lot of producers of puppies. There are a lot of people who produce dogs like livestock. He said there are very few breeders.

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: A breeder is someone who has a 10 year plan. A breeder is someone who knows exactly what they want and can see clearly the faults in all of his dogs. He knows exactly what's wrong with every one of his dogs and he knows and he has a plan to fix it. He has a plan to correct that. And he talks openly in his books. He talks about, know, I had this issue with the dogs. The tail was this way or the mouth was this way or I had but bite or or I had cancer in this one line and this is what I did to get it out. And he did what it. took to take it out. now, yeah, I mean, we, and the other thing too is like, even, even pups that are, you know, really like runts of litters and things like that, that are really struggling at birth, we take extreme measures to make sure that those dogs survive and good on them. You know what I mean? And they go to a pet home. But then what happens when that dog gets bred? Because we have very lax legislation. We can have every rule in the book with the Kennel Club, but it doesn't stop anybody from doing anything with their dogs, you know, especially here in North America. People breed indiscriminately and there's puppy mills all over the place. you can have every contract you want, a non-breeding contract. Well, who's enforcing that? When was the last time you saw the police break down a door for somebody breaking the non-breeding contract on their poodle? You know, just, it doesn't happen. So that's the situation we end up with. And so it comes down to education, which is my main thing. That's one of the main reasons I wrote these books is to make sure that people have the straight story. and the right information about these breeds and not some of the crap. I I still go online to this day and just cringe even at some of the Wikipedia entries on these dogs, how inaccurate they are ⁓ and just how much of a sales job they're doing on people without really giving them the true story or the reality of these breeds and what they require and what's necessary for them. Even people that are supportive of certain breeds, question health. You you're talking about the health of breeds. Well, we talk about hips. We talk about DNA swabs for this potential eye problem or heart problem or elbow problems. And we'll have very, you know, honest and hardworking and dedicated breeders who never work their working dog. Okay? So these are people who show their dogs. They love their dogs, they have beautiful dogs, they have great dogs with great temperaments, but they have no clue about their working ability. And in some of those cases, when the working ability is tested, we find there is none. We find that this person has bred successfully over 25 generations, a breed of pointing dog that doesn't point, ⁓ or a strain of Labradors that doesn't retrieve. In my mind, those dogs can have all of the health tests in the world, A plus on every health test, but they fail the mental health test for a gun dog. If a gun dog is unwilling to work as a gun dog, that is in my mind, an unhealthy, mentally unhealthy dog. A border collie that doesn't want a herd is a mentally unstable border collie. I'm sorry. A Labrador that doesn't want to pick something up and bring it to you is a mentally unstable Labrador. And if that trait, is in a line for generations. If you can test an entire litter of pointing dogs' puppies and not one of them point, and you're telling me you've got healthy dogs, I call bullshit on that, I'm sorry. I've seen entire lines of pointing dogs that will not hunt. They don't search. You put them on the ground in a game-rich environment and they'll sniffle around the round and maybe piss on a bush, but it's like, you...

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: I don't care how good its heart and hips are. That's not a healthy dog to me.

Nick Lambert: No. That's the most depressing thing, isn't it, a pointing dog or a hunting dog that won't hunt?

Craig: It is depressing, but it goes unnoticed to people who don't hunt because it's never tested. Of course my dog's hips are good. Have you tested? No. Well if you never test, you'll never find. And so they're testing for hips, they're testing for heart, they're testing for elbows, but they're not testing for point, ever. And for 15 generations, none of the dogs ever bred in 15 generations were ever tested for run or point or retrieve or swim. Well how do you know? And that's the problem. simply assume, they don't assume hips, they don't assume hearts. We have to test that. But they assume that the hunting instincts will always be there. I've had breeders tell me about shoulder layback and how you can lose it in a single generation. It's so important, the shoulder layback, the construction of this, they'll talk endlessly about the physical part of their dog and how if you don't breed to the right dog and the right line, you'll lose it. Meanwhile, you ask them about the run and the point and the fetch in their breed, ⁓ it's always there. ⁓ it's there. Of course it's there. Well no, if the shoulder lay back can be ruined in a single generation, imagine what can happen to point or fetch or swim or all of those abilities. They're just as variable, just as variable as anything physically that we can judge with our eyes.

Nick Lambert: Well, you imagine that these beads have been developed over a fairly short time period. So they could lose those traits over an equally short time period, they?

Craig: Yes. Our breeds have been developed to have, so a pointing breed is a breed that has a high degree of OCD in regards to the pause Labradors have a high degree of OCD, it is, it's this sort of mental illness in this dog that is obsessed with picking things up and bringing it to us. Everything we see in our dogs exist in wolves. Wolves pick up things and bring them back to the den. Wolves run. Wolves gallop, wolves point, very briefly. We take a look at our dogs and they're basically wolves that have been selected to have one or two of those things in incredibly non-evolutionary levels. It doesn't make sense for a dog to point indefinitely. It has no evolutionary value. Mother nature does not want dogs to point endlessly. Mother nature does not want a dog to go out and run at a full sprint for an hour in a field. That's crazy to Mother Nature. So the minute we stop selecting for that extreme, bizarre behavior, Mother Nature goes, okay, let's pull it back a bit. Let's pull it back. You take every one of our pointing breeds or herding breeds or whatever they are, you put them on an island and come back a thousand years later, you got coyotes, you got wolves that don't do anything that we expect our dogs to do in the measure that we expect them to do. I've seen English setter puppies, 10 weeks old. You put the whole litter on the ground. They all run, they have no idea why they're running, but they all gallop. They gallop everywhere. Wolf puppies don't do that. Fox puppies don't do that. Coyote puppies don't do that. We've selected for that. by selecting...

Nick Lambert: And those setter puppies will point and back as well, won't they? Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy.

Craig: and point each other. Yeah, right? And they have no clue why, it's just that it's hardwired in them. Now that instinct has, Mother Nature does not want that. There's no use for that instinct in the wild world, none. So if left without our selection pressure on them, you're rowing against the current, you stop rowing, you're not staying still. You're going backwards. You're being pushed way back to where you were. So here's this one person worrying about the shoulder layback in one generation. Well, I'll tell you what, especially search. Search is the one that goes first. Pointing will go second. Retrieving is the last one to go. Tracking is the last one to go. Those are the deepest, most survival-based things. You must retrieve and bring food back to the den. You have to, okay? You have to track to follow, yeah.

Nick Lambert: that what retrieving is, it's bringing food back to the den.

Craig: Yeah, retrieving is sharing. retrieving is basically, you know, we theorize that that's what it that's where it comes from. And that's why the Labrador retriever has it in spades. The Labrador retriever has its own fascinating history in that it was developed to live on ships, you know, copacetically with a bunch of men for months on end, and then jump overboard once in a while and fetch their net or a fish. So it is right from the get go one of the most cooperative breeds.

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: ever developed or types of dogs ever developed. And what is one of the most cooperative things you could do? Share. Share the bounty. And so that's really where it comes from. mean, pause or point is a pause before you leap. And everybody does it. We do when we swat a mosquito, you look at the, you know, there's a fly on the table, you go, and then you get it, right? That's people point. In fact, I tell people this next time you're at the pub with friends, I can prove to you that people back. They're naturally, right? Pretend there's a fly on you and go like this and look at what your mates are doing. all, they're all, they're all gonna back you and then you get it. And then, yeah, you got it, right? So it's there, but again, it's not as survival oriented, whereas, ⁓ or as deeply ingrained. ⁓ They don't have to pause every time, but every time you wanna feed the pups, you gotta bring the food back.

Nick Lambert: Heh.

Craig: You know what I mean? Like that's survival. And same thing with tracking. You need to find your way home and you need to be able to track the wounded game and that sort of a thing. And running again, the search, because that's one of the most artificial things. Think about a wolf in its entire life. In a year round, a wolf is living for an entire year. During that year, it might actually go into a full on sprint 10 times for 100 yards. That's it. The rest of the time it's walking or trotting. That's it.

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: 90 % of time it walks. Every so often it'll trot. It might sprint if that deer is gonna get away and it needs to be in the pack, but it's a very brief sort of thing that they do on great occasions, right? What do we want from a pointer or setter? From the minute it's on the ground in a field trial, that's it. 100%, sprint the entire time. The minute it slows down, you're out, right?

Nick Lambert: Yeah, we wanted to run hard.

Craig: So that's a completely artificial thing that we've taken from this one little portion of the wolf's job description. We take this one little portion and exaggerate it so that, I've had dogs. You put that dog in a parking lot at a shopping center on a Sunday when there's no cars. It's just like an empty parking lot. It will run its head off looking for birds. Like ⁓ put them in a gymnasium. It'll run like crazy looking for birds. Like that's just how, how we've gone. And so again,

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: You stop, you take your foot off that gas pedal of selection, it's going back. So that's what I've seen in showbred dogs. They might still point a bit. Most of them will still fetch if you, know, some of them will swim. Almost all of them after several generations lose. The first thing they lose in my experience, the first thing they lose is search. They simply, they simply do not get out there. They simply do not have the drive or desire to seek game.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, that makes total sense.

Craig: And that's the most fragile part. But if a showbreeder or someone who doesn't hunt never puts their dog in a situation where it should be running and hunting, how do they know if that instinct is gone? How do they know if it's still there? They don't. And yet a hunter calls them up and says, listen, I'd like to buy one of your dogs. I saw your ad in the paper. It's from a hunting dog breed.

Nick Lambert: Absolutely.

Craig: You know, I'm a hunter. want to hunt with you. ⁓ yeah, of course it hunts. It's an HPR. It hunts, it points, it retrieves. It's an HPR breed, so it must hunt and point and retrieve. Do you have any evidence to back that up, that claim up? Well no, I don't need any evidence. I'll show you the hip scores. I'll show you the heart tests. I'll show you all sorts of awards I've won at a show. Okay, can you show me it hunting and pointing and retrieving? Well no, it's an HPR. It's part of its thing. Of course it's going to do that.

Nick Lambert: Yeah. And certainly within the UK, there are very few of us that field trial HPRs. It's a depressingly small number. And a lot of the HPRs, their work is effectively retrieving on driven shoots, which is not a test of hunting at all. It's a test of seeing a pheasant fall down over there and going and collecting it. ⁓ So yeah.

Craig: Yes. Yes. Yes. Again, if you're not testing it, if you're not testing for it, if you're not proving it with every single generation, if you're not out there making sure that the hunt and the point and the retrieve is still there, you're being pushed backwards. You're going backwards. You're not staying still. You could have got the best HPR from the best breeder, know, proven line in the world. But the minute you stop proving is the minute you personally, your breed, your line starts going backwards. Over time, it will end up to a point where it is so different from where you started. It's incredible. It's just, I've seen dogs that will literally never go 10 feet from their handler.

Nick Lambert: And I think within the UK and the Kennel Club specifically, I'm not an expert on this, there does seem to be a movement away from the sort of real testing. They seem to be less inclined to do the real testing at the field trials. Maybe you could describe that as a sort of move towards ⁓ working with dummies rather than shooting game. And from what you're saying, if you don't do it. your working dogs will no longer be working dogs in pretty short order.

Craig: What happens is it becomes randomized. ⁓ know, you'll have, like I have seen dogs from 25 generations of show dogs that none of them could hunt a lick at all. But once in a while, one will come out and it's actually pretty decent. It becomes like, it never goes away 100%, but it becomes a total crap shoot after a couple of generations. And then at the end of 10 or 15 generations, it's like winning the lottery that, ⁓ my God, I have one that actually points or I have one that actually retrieves, yay. Therefore my line is proven. No, no, no. What you want is consistency. There are breeds out there and there are lines within every breed you could pick a puppy from any litter. Just reach into that box, pick out a pup and that thing is going to hunt and it's going to point, it's going to retrieve. There are breeds like that. Like ⁓ would have to look long and hard in North America to find, for example, a poodle pointer that doesn't hunt. Now you might find an ugly one. You might find one with a not so great coat or great temperament, but they will all hunt, all of them. They haven't been ruined yet, as it were.

Nick Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

Craig: Whereas with other breeds like the Weimaraner, if you just randomly pick any litter and pick a pup out of any litter and get one that really hunts hard and is competitive in trials, you've won the lottery. It's like lightning in a bottle. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't good lines. There are lines where I would tell you, you can go and find a pup from so-and-so and they'll all hunt. But in general, the population of 10,000 Weimaraner puppies born every year here, I'd say maybe 200 are good dogs, are good hunting dogs, and the rest are just, are lovely pets, is what I would say.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, well, that's quite sobering. But you're obviously at the forefront of educating people, so thank you. Thank you for that.

Craig: Well, so, so, and let me just finish on this then, or that part on this. I've seen it. I've seen hunters' souls be crushed by getting a shit dog, okay? I've seen it happen. I have seen well-intentioned people who are breeding dogs with no knowledge of their abilities. They don't know if they hunt, point, and retrieve. They know they're wonderful with kids. They know they look great. They know they're of the breed standard because they have all sorts of titles on them. But they don't know if they hunt or point or retrieve and did not admit that to the hunter who asked them for a dog. So I'm not saying that they committed fraud or they lied to the person, but they simply it was a lie by omission. I want a dog to hunt with. my dogs are ⁓ X breed, Weimararners whatever, Vizslas Of course they hunt, take one. And then I've seen that same hunter. It might be his first dog. It might be her first dog. She gets this dog. Of course, after a year, you've raised the puppy, you love it. The kids love it. The family loves it. And then you take it to the field and you realize, especially when you see other dogs doing what they're supposed to do, when it is chalk and cheese difference between you, your dog, and these other dogs, and you realize, ⁓ my God, I got a shit dog. It crushes.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, crushing I might say.

Craig: their soul because they're gonna keep that dog forever most of the time because they love the dog. The kids love the dog, everything is there. But now, it's almost, their whole attitude towards it is poisoned by that one thing that could have been avoided. If the breeder had simply been honest, I have a friend who breeds a type of working dog that if somebody wants to work with it and calls her up and says, do they work? She will say, I don't know. She'll be honest. She'll go, maybe, maybe not. But if you really want one, Go see so and so. She actually recommends them going to other people. She will guarantee their temperament. She will guarantee their health. She will guarantee their beauty. But she will never ever say that they will hunt because she has no evidence to that effect. So that's the one thing I would say to anybody listening to it. On either side, if you're looking for a dog to do HPR work, make sure that it's HPR work has been tested for and proven and that that. Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Lambert: which is difficult to do. It's difficult to do in the UK, I would suggest.

Craig: And then on the other side, if you are breeding probably beautiful, lovely dogs that are winning all sorts of things in shows and are wonderful pets, but you have no clue because you've never actually seen them run or hunt or point or retrieve, please do everybody a favor and tell that hunter, that keen hunter who's probably at the beginning of his journey, that really wants a good dog, be honest and say, you know what, you might be better going to so-and-so. who's got this long list of trial awards, who has this long history of really good dogs, you're probably best served going there. And then I think everybody would be in a better place.

Nick Lambert: I think so. Craig, thank you very much. That was amazing. And ⁓ been responsible for producing much fantastic I've recommended the podcast as well to people, Hunting Dog Confidential. I've listened to every single one of those, drive a lot to field trials and they're ⁓ paying playing that. And Project Upland, I don't know quite what your is, but they've...

Craig: Yes, thank you very much.

Nick Lambert: I've listened to all those books that they've recently very kindly put onto audiobooks.

Craig: Yeah, Project Upland is a US-based, I'm in Canada, they're in the US, they're good friends of mine and they are dedicated to spreading the word of Upland hunting and of dogs and of Upland hunting cuisine and all that sort of good stuff. They're great people and because in Canada, obviously the smaller population and smaller market, I do sell and distribute some of my books in Canada but they are the main distributor for the US, which is the main... ⁓ main market for all that I do for the podcast, articles, magazines. They produce a really lovely printed, actual printed magazine ⁓ called ⁓ Project Upland.

Nick Lambert: which is so expensive to get in the UK that I have never seen it

Craig: unfortunately, ⁓ the is the real issue, especially since COVID. It's incredible. ⁓ So of my books, okay, you could, yeah.

Nick Lambert: Maybe I could speak to them actually and they send a box over or something and make it a bit more cost effective like we do with your books, which incidently I need another box of. interested, I don't know quite how it would work, ⁓ you know, am, I'm all in on this stuff. And even for me, ⁓ by the that I paid for postage, it was just like crazy. ⁓ So I know whether there's some way we could do it, because there'll be a small gang of people over here that I'm sure would love to, love to read. The people that actually hunt over pointing dogs is very few and far between.

Craig: Very few. Yeah. And the people who trial them and campaign them, I said to my friends, now they're my friends, I spent time with them up in the North at the field trials, I said to them that after spending time with you guys for a week or 10 days following you around, you're like a caravan of gypsies sort of following your dogs from trials to trials, but they all know each other for years and years. They've all been in the same sort of activity or the same sport for most of their lives.

Nick Lambert: Yeah.

Craig: So they're like a family. And I said, but they're completely unknown in England. Like nobody knew who they were or what they were doing or why they were there. They were sort of anonymous. And I said, I have the feeling it almost feels like I discovered a lost tribe in the Amazon somewhere that hadn't had contact with the outside world for a hundred years because they live in the past really. Or their activity is so such a throwback to what it was. And the modern world has just gone past them. And it's fascinating.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, absolutely. They're a lovely bunch though, the pointer and setter people. I've bumped into them on numerous occasions and yeah, you couldn't meet a nicer bunch really.

Craig: ⁓ my God, the best. They're the best, you know, and I didn't really know what to expect when I went there, but now, and I tell people this, think that of all the travels I've done, all over Europe and all over North America, to see dogs and photograph dogs and to watch them in trials and hunt over them and do all that sort of stuff, I think the best time or the, I think that the one that marked me the most deeply, was the English trials, was that group of people seeing those dogs in those conditions with those people. To me, of marked the most significant of them all. They all were great experiences, but that one was the most moving in a lot of ways, and the most sort of, and I'm glad I did it at the end, that was the last one of all the pointing dogs, because it really put the crown on it all, it really.

Nick Lambert: ⁓ really?

Craig: It was just like the grand finale of it all. It was just the best.

Nick Lambert: Yeah. And on a grouse moor, we have HPR trials on grouse moors as well. And I love it because it is the kind of distillation of everything. There's nowhere to hide. To a certain extent, all the dogs get a similar opportunity because it's not like one's in the wood, one's in a field, one's in, you know, it's just, everyone can see what's going on. It is the most magical thing. I love it. I absolutely love it.

Craig: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it was. Yeah. I would say that's a great way to describe it to me too. It was the most magical. was the most memorable, really. Like, you know, I think of all of the trials that we've done and all of the breeds and I have fond memories of them all, but the one I think that will stick with me the longest and be the deepest memory that I is that, is the English trials with the English folks and the Irish folks that were there. Yeah, that whole thing was just so memorable. ⁓ It'll never leave It was, it was the best of the, of them all, I think.

Nick Lambert: Well, if you're ever over here, give me a call because you're more than welcome to come out here. It's going to be a very different experience, unfortunately, that, the Moreland experience. I'll be like, don't shoot that way. There's a footpath, but you can shoot in that direction.

Craig: ⁓ I will. Yeah, yeah, I've been in situations like that in Holland and places like that. Yeah, you're at the you're behind a high school shooting pigeons or something and there's somebody's house next to you. Is it kind of strange? But hey, you do what you do.

Nick Lambert: Yeah, it's ⁓ I'm very jealous of your wide open planes, I must say, with public access.

Craig: Well, listen, the doors are open and my dogs are friendly, so come on over any time, you're welcome. Our shooting season starts September 1st and goes till the snow flies in December. But prime time is October, basically, just any time in October is kind of the peak of the season.

Nick Lambert: one day I would love to. Thank you. And do you have any plans to come over here and presume with your net with your retrieving book that you'll have to involve her?

Craig: Yeah, so this, my first plan is this fall I want to go to Newfoundland and Labrador because I'm ⁓ to photograph not only sort of the environs and where the Labrador sprung from. was, it's a British breed. It was developed and created mainly in Britain, but the root stock of the St. John's water dog and the Newfoundland dog were from that area. So I'm going there as well as to Nova Scotia to photograph and to see where the Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever comes from. So. That's my first trip. But then after that, yeah, I really do. I need to get to the UK. want to see, interview some ⁓ lab breeders as well as I want to see a retriever trial. I photographed the Canadian national retrieving trials here near my home last year. And that was fascinating, but I need to see British trials because they're completely different than the retriever trials here in North America.

Nick Lambert: Well if I can help in any way, let me know. To educate myself, last season I shot at a Retriever Open trial and a couple of Spaniel trials and it was a good education.

Craig: I will. Nice nice

Nick Lambert: Craig, that's been absolutely brilliant. Thank you very much for all your time. You've been very generous. ⁓

Craig: Okay, my pleasure. Anytime, Nick. Hope to see you sometime soon. We'll go shooting together here.