Novice Cocker Woes

This article was written for the Gundog Journal who didn’t publish it … perhaps it is too political. We have reproduced it here as we feel very strongly about it.

“Winning is all that matters ... Second place is the first loser ... I only came here to win…”. If I had a pound for each time I heard people say things like this at field trials, I would be considerably better off than I am now. I have often found these phrases slightly amusing as 15 of the people there were plainly not going to win. Whilst a trial is a competitive meeting I would venture to suggest that it is attitudes such as this that are the major cause of some of the problems field trials face at the moment, especially it’s growing disconnection with most shooting people.

A few sports are run almost exclusively by volunteers who form the committees of the local clubs so the members can participate. However, in trials, as well as allowing members to run their dogs should they come out of the draw, the system also benefits a small but increasingly influential number of people who make considerable amounts of money out of it. Some of these people stand on club committees and therefore can influence how things are run leading to some accusations that whilst they have lots of contacts for grounds things tend to be run for their benefit and it can be hard for a beginner to get a fair start. The irony is the “elite of the sport” need a constant thoughput of newcomers to fill the minimum number of dogs required to run a trial (14 for an Open and 12 for a Novice). 

Spaniel trialling is now so based around the yearly Championships that nothing else appears to matter. Every time a good standard Novice trial is run on very good even ground you automatically hear “we should have an open on here”. In this current unprecedented period I have seen lots of comments of the type “let’s bin all the Novice trials and just hold Opens so we can have a Championship.” Really? Cobble together a season just so you can hold a second rate Championships with half the numbers of dogs? 

Many field trial clubs now do not hold Novice cocker stakes but hold Opens, some blaming the standard of novice dogs, others saying they are short of ground. Others argue that they don’t get enough entries to fill the trials. A lot of this is because there is not a thriving base of novice entrants, partly due to some Clubs policies over the years. Even the Kennel Club itself could not be bothered to organise it’s own Novice cocker trials over the last two seasons even though they own their own shooting Estate. Surely this is completely wrong on many fronts. Participation in most Kennel Club dog activities, including trials, is falling, the only one increasing is agility, yet little is done to change this. I cannot remember a season like last season when so many trials were cancelled due to lack of entries.

Field triallers must have the highest individual carbon footprint of any fieldsports enthusiast, travelling huge distances for both training and to competitions. The lack of Novice cocker trials makes this even worse as anyone wanting to run has to be prepared to travel long distances. There will come a time when this becomes less and less acceptable and affordable and an easy solution in the Kennel Club’s hands is to make Clubs run Novice cocker trials if they want to hold an Open trial. In the last 2019 to 2020 season culminating in the 2020 Championships, 51 Clubs were licensed by the Kennel Club to hold Open qualifying trials for cockers. Not all of these went ahead as a couple were cancelled. In contrast there were only around 26 or so putting on Novice cocker trials. Several of these were cancelled for varying reasons such as Clubs not informing the membership, lack of entries or lack of ground. That would be around normal for most years with about 20 or more clubs that hold Open cocker trials not putting on a Novice. If a club has to cut a trial it is nearly always the Novice cocker that goes first. Many of these Clubs have not run a Novice stake for years. Last season there were only five Novice cocker trials in the area between Newark in Nottinghamshire and Aboyne in Aberdeenshire, the distance between those two places is 401 miles. Some club secretaries and participants argue that you can just run a Novice cocker in an Any Variety trial but that just illustrates the lack of concern for people starting off in the sport.

Any successful sport be it football, rugby, cricket understands the importance of the grass roots of the game. That could be schoolboy cricket where counties spend large amounts of money and time to recruit youngsters. It could be junior football clubs or rugby academies a huge effort is spent interesting, training and securing the next generation of players. Most sports fully understand the need to maintain and improve interest and indeed improve the product of their sport so it survives and grows. Not field trials. The Kennel Club was not even interested enough to fill its junior handlers day at Chatsworth last year and very few clubs make any effort at all to help newcomers. Retriever based clubs are certainly better at it than most spaniel based clubs. The Utility Gundog Club Spaniel section put on an excellent training day for novices and included, judges education last year, but that is a shining exception to the norm. The end result of this over the years has been a steady flow of newcomers who have drifted into and out of the sport fairly quickly as it becomes ever more skewed towards the professionals. Although figures are not available I would hazard a guess that the retention rate of new starters would be very low. A long standing member of the Field Trial Sub Committee, basically the governing body of the sport, told me many years ago the a huge majority of cocker field trial awards throughout the season are won by a surprisingly small number of the same handlers year on year. He is still on the Committee and I doubt things have changed since he told me. Some of the new starters would have left because the sport was not for them but equally a good number because they had a bad experience through no fault of their own. I have said in recent years as an experienced competitor that if a certain trial I had just been to was my first I would never have gone to another. If you want a strong healthy sport you need new ideas, a new throughput of people and a healthy grass roots, not the prevailing attitude among some professionals of “well if the dog is good enough it will win an open stake without bothering with a novice”. At the Cocker Championships in January, 2 handlers ran nearly a quarter of the dogs in the trial, between them they had won 17 of the qualifying trials and were placed 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th. Out of 44 or so dogs competing only 7 handlers received awards. This says a lot about the dogs and the handlers but some people would suggest that the sport is not in a healthy place as people begin to walk away asking what is the point if, as they say, winning is all that matters?

I have heard on lots of occasions in the last few years that the standard of Novice cockers is poor and indeed there have been trials I have judged or run in where the standard has not been good. With more people owning and training cockers than ever, more effort and money spent on training and easy access to “successful” bloodlines you would think it would be completely the other way with the standard going up. Over 20 years ago I ran in a Novice cocker trial where some years later 6 of the runners ended up as Field Trial Champions and another 4 Field trial winners. For many reasons, that would never happen now, but it is an indication of the change that has occurred. If the standard is poor as many suggest, surely that is an indication that something in the system is seriously wrong. Maybe if Clubs chose the best ground for Novices with experienced judges you would get the best dog winning rather than the luckiest which sometimes happens on difficult grounds. It’s easy to say that the winner should be ready for Opens but rather than just treating the Novice trial as a stepping stone to Opens surely it should be an event in its own right to get the best dog on the day. The judging education and training system also needs a radical overhaul as you can often get an inexperienced and nervous handler running in their first few trials being judged by an equally nervous and inexperienced judge judging their first trial, sometimes not an ideal opportunity to get things right for either party.

The sport is in danger of distancing itself from the shooting field it is meant to be a part of. A robust club system with good contacts to the shooting community and access to ground is the basis of the whole sport. Unfortunately many trials are now held on bespoke training/trialling grounds where the day seems to be all about getting through it as soon as possible and getting a result. As the standard stays the same and the sport is more dominated by professionals it is harder to find grounds apart from the ones they have influence on. This means the whole thing turns in on itself and makes it harder for an outsider. Trials cannot afford to lose touch with the shooting public and shooting contacts if it wants to survive.

In these difficult times there is real uncertainty about the amount of shooting that will happen this coming season and also how many trials will go ahead. There seems little doubt that this coming season trials will not continue in the same number and intensity as in recent years. Rather than bemoan that fact the Kennel Club, field trial clubs and societies have an opportunity to take a breath, maybe look at the sport in a slightly different way and consider making it more inclusive and open to everyone and consider carefully how the grass roots of the sport are encouraged. The future of trialling depends on it.