This is the photo from the cover of James Lamb Free’s Training Your Retriever. The book is a classic treatise on training retrievers for North American waterfowl trials with some discussion training them to hunt pheasants.
It does not show you how to use a golden retriever to hunt ruffed grouse. I considered it false advertising!
Lovely lovely lovely!
A beautiful photograph. love the look of quiet assurance the Golden has.
Free’s book was first published in 1949, (before any use of the electronic collar.) It is indeed a classic text for the basics of retriever training for the owner-trainer. My copy’s dust jacket has a b/w photo of Mr. Free with a black Labrador. The Freehaven Labradors were well- known in retriever trials “back then”.
The story of how retriever trials (and training for them) have changed over the last six decades or so, would take an entire book itself.
Half of Richard Wolters’s book on the Labrador is about the changing of trials and cultural differences in trials too.
“Trainiing Your Retriever” has been revised several times, some by Free himself, and then by others after Mr Free died in the mid-’60s. My latest copy is 1978, so I’m not sure what’s in the recent editions. Maybe I should find one. . . Though my library is already threatening to take over the house!
A lovely expression, one of depth and kindness. This is also before the impetus to want drive and more drive.