Howard Kirby is the proprietor of Lains Shooting School and Mullenscote Gundogs, where he specialises in training a variety of dogs (and handlers!) from companions to specialist gundogs. In his weekly blog, Howard shares his experience of the dogs and people that pass through his school and his top tips to train your dog.

“Along with our wonderful team of dogs, Annie and I visited one of our local junior schools this week. We delivered four demos - one to each year group consisting of approximately one hundred children. Portway Junior School really does appear to giving their pupils a fantastic education. The pupils were polite, intelligent, attentive, great fun and a real pleasure to spend some time with. It’s so easy to work with children when you have dogs as a teaching resource.

The dogs were just brilliant; they needed to be, we took a couple of our Dummy Launchers with us (as I set them up one young man commented ‘Wow, they’ve got some rocket launchers!’. No problems keeping this guy focussed, boys like that stuff) and unexpectedly when I fired one of the launchers it rocketed a dummy clear over the sports field. At this point, as it flew towards the neighbouring housing estate leaving a vapour trail I was thinking, ‘Whoops when this lands in someone’s greenhouse there will be litigation.’ Phew! It landed five yards short of the houses in some rough ground.

Next problem: how on earth are we going to get a dog out to that? Up steps Annie and Dan, the pair pulled off a retrieve that would win the Retriever Championships, the children who had no experience of gundogs recognised this monumental feat of gundog work and erupted into loud cheering and clapping.

What a day, the children learned lots about gundogs, shooting and dog training and we went home with our pride intact. Imagine the walk of shame if I had needed to walk across to collect the retrieve, well done Mrs. Buckley.

Hats off to the staff at Portway Junior School, Andover, thank you for being brave enough to allow your pupils to experience the countryside and make informed choices for themselves. I have always believed that common sense will prevail and that the UK will once again learn to live in the real world.

Another busy weekend ahead, the Shooting School is booked to be busy on Saturday morning, then we throw ourselves into the lorry to do some demos at the Grand Opening of A Scats Superstore in the afternoon then straight to the Broadlands Country Fair for two days of demos. There’s no peace for the wicked, so I must have been really bad somewhere along the way.”