THE HIRED GUN-DOG 



" WHERE can I hire a really well-broken and reliable 

 retriever or spaniel ? I can spare but a couple of weeks 

 in September away from business, and have arranged 

 to spend my brief holiday among the partridges. If the 

 dog suited me I might purchase it." A somewhat 

 difficult question to reply to is this. Glance through the 

 advertisement columns of the sporting journals, and you 

 will see any number of gun-dogs advertised for sale, and 

 in many cases a trial is offered prior to the purchase being 

 completed. There are also several professional dog 

 breakers and owners in the kingdom, especially in the 

 North, who advertise well-trained dogs for hire during the 

 shooting season. In some cases, without doubt, these 

 people do own and hire out to their clients reliable dogs, 

 or teams of dogs, which perform all that is required of 

 them, more especially when in charge of an experienced 

 man whom the dogs know, and who understands how to 

 work them. On the other hand, hundreds of so-called 

 steady and well-broken sporting dogs advertised for sale 

 and hire are absolutely useless and worthy of nothing 

 better than a dose of shot ; wild, hard-mouthed brutes, 

 which will chase anything wearing fur or feathers, mouth 

 the entrails out of everything they retrieve, run in and 

 flush game far out of range in short, play the very deuce 

 generally, to the utter detriment of sport and temper 

 alike. 



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