Shooting Times & Country Magazine
CENTRE FOR EXCELLENCE
The Kennel Club’s new estate is good for gundogs
arlier this month the Kennel Club held the official opening of the Emblehope and Burngrange estate (News, 13 September), which it aims to develop “as a centre of excellence to support a wide range of working dog and shooting activities”. You won’t be surprised to know that neither I nor Shooting Times were invited to the event but the Club has an uneasy relationship with any journalist who dares question or criticise it, something of which I’m afraid I have been guilty.
However, I wish the Club every success with this bold and exciting venture. The 7,550-acre estate cost several million pounds and not everyone on the Club’s ruling council was in favour. Whatever the critics may have said, there was no
Ethese dogs are hardly any smaller than the large version, but they are typically brown-and-white roan. Despite attempts to establish them here, they have never caught on and just one was registered here last year.
Peter Hartley is a reader and longtime large Munsterlander enthusiast, so I asked him why he thought the breed had never become established as a serious shooting dog in the UK, let alone a rival to the GSP or German wirehaired pointer. One of the reasons, he believes, is that they are relatively slow to mature and that training one satisfactorily takes “a lot more patience than the average gundog owner/ trainer is prepared to spend. I always started fundamental house training and basic obedience at 10 to 12 weeks, with ‘fun’ retrieves at six months.
Extremely intelligent
“Like all intelligent animals — and the large Munsterlander is very intelligent — their junior growth period is quite long, and so serious gundog training is best delayed until 12 months.”
Peter added: “Between nine and 16 months, these dogs tend to go through a ‘teenage’ rebellion phase, so be prepared. Not until the large Munsterlander is two years old should question that the Club could afford the estate, as funds for the purchase came from a multi-million-pound deal with property developer British Land.
In 2014 British Land acquired the Club’s hugely valuable freeholding at Clarges Street, Mayfair. The Club’s HQ is still in Clarges Street, as part of the deal with British Land was for the latter to provide it with new modern headquarters in a fresh location adjacent to the old site. The move from No. 1-5 Clarges Street to No. 10 was made in October 2015.
The purchase of Emblehope and Burngrange was completed in March 2016, with the Club working closely with estate agent Knight Frank, which advised and helped with the deal. Most of the estate is open heather moorland, so ideal for training, testing or trialling pointers, setters and HPRS. It also offers pheasant and partridge shooting — it has 395 acres of woodlands — so there is the potential for spaniel and retriever trials, too. There is also the prospect of bloodhound trails being held on the ground. it be taken out on a shoot, and then with caution. However, at three years old, the large Munsterlander is fit for proper work and it gets better every year, until selective hearing occurs at eight to nine years old.”
Peter did emphasise that large Munsterlanders are people dogs, far happier living in the house than kennels. This does cause one problem: they are great shedders of hair. He now has a hospital-standard German
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Working gundog clubs — presumably only those affiliated to the Kennel Club — are invited to book the estate for field trials or training days. I’ve been unable to find out the costs but the Club rarely gives anything away for nothing. For more details, visit the estate’s website at po.st/emblehope or email any enquiry to the administrator at emblehope@ thekennelclub.org.uk. Emblehope and Burngrange is close to Kielder Forest, about 300 miles north of Clarges Street. vacuum cleaner that has helped reduce the fur in the Hartley household.
Though I’ve seen large Munsterlanders running in tests and trials, I’ve only twice been in the shooting field with them. On both occasions the dogs I saw performed admirably. Guy Wallace, in The Specialist Gundog, describes the large Munsterlander as a “muchunderestimated gundog having a lot of natural ability and natural sense... They hunt with great style and will point and retrieve naturally, are good stalking dogs and can be worked under longwings [falcons] or shortwings [hawks].”
If you want to learn more about this good-looking German breed, the Club’s website (www. largemunsterlanderclub.co.uk), covers every aspect of the breed from showing to working. It even includes a list of large Munsterlander field trial award winners, dating back to October 2008. The Club, mindful of the breed’s origins, holds two natural aptitude tests a year: “Ideally every large Munsterlander would do at least one natural aptitude test during its lifetime as it helps to preserve the working origins of the breed”. This is a great idea and one to be encouraged.