Who's a naughty boy, then?

We all like to think our gundogs are impeccably behaved, but, as Rupert Uloth observes, theyre capable of letting us down in the most embarrassing ways in the field.

When I saw the unusually tall land agent of a large Yorkshire estate arrive at a shoot with a wire-haired dachshund, I presumed his diminutive friend was just for company. however, when the hirsute little canine then followed his master to the peg, I could see the other guns, a dead-eyed duke among them, watching curiously. Presumably, this feisty furball was going to show everyone else how it was done. Or not.

As the duke brought down a stratospheric hen bird with a resounding thump, the dachshund saw this as the equivalent of the red lights going out at the start of a Grand Prix. he hared across the turf towards the inert quarry and settled down to tear great chunks out of the pheasant’s breast. The land agent was in two minds what to do, but, as the feathers drifted thickly in front of us like smoke on a battlefield, he threw down his gun and ran to admonish his wayward charge.

‘Running-in’—the act of leaving the peg unbidden before the end of the drive—is an expression that was brought to the notice of the wider public by Lord Cranborne in the 1990s. he described his actions over the secret deal with the government to retain some hereditary peers in the house of Lords as the behaviour of an ‘ill-trained spaniel’. It resulted in his being sacked. I suspect the dachshund experienced a similar fate.

CLA Vice President Mark Tufnell, who’s successfully reintroducing wild grey partridge to his Gloucestershire farm, remembers taking his favourite spaniel on his father’s shoot with a new gamekeeper in charge. ‘I lost him on the first drive and he charged to the end of the wood, where the pheasants had concentrated, and proceeded to push them uncontrollably in great flurries over the guns to the extreme annoyance of the keeper, who was aiming to spread the birds evenly over a much longer period of time.’