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Buddy's owner wrote about him:
Profile of an Open Trial Winner
Loveloch Valentino (Buddy)
Born 22/06/2013
"We looked at adverts and there was a woman near Harrogate who had a litter of Golden Retrievers for sale.
We were undecided on which dog to choose but chose Buddy because he was the most chilled out one. For a first dog we didn’t want high drive!
At that point I had never even heard of Gundog training. I’d never been on a shoot and had spent most my life being vegetarian! I knew I wanted to do ‘something’ with Buddy so his life would be as rich as possible, so started general obedience training. That’s when I saw someone with a trained Gundog for the first time. It totally blew my mind that you could send your dog out running full pelt, to nothing! And that they’d stop to the whistle and hunt on command. I knew then that I wanted to try it with Buddy so I went to a local (ish) trainer and that’s when I got hooked.
The bond it gave us Buddy and I was unbelievable. He is a pleaser and just wanted to make me happy. We took things slowly and I had the twins when he was 2, so that lost us a good 18 months of proper training, but we started to ramp it up and he got better and better. We were doing well at Tests and soon made it opens. I had done some picking up and lots of training on cold game so decided to try Trialling. The adrenaline of trialling is addictive and I absolutely love it.
Buddy came in to his own when he turned 5. He got two seconds in AV novice trials then won the third trial (also AV). Unfortunately we didn’t get any Open runs that season, but the first Trial of the next season was the NGRA 2 Day Open (our first 2 dayer and first Open trial), which we were lucky enough to win allowing us to Qualify for the IGL Championship in 2019. It actually still seems a bit of a dream that we made it to the Championship!
Buddy probably has this one last year of Trialling and then he will be retired to picking up and probably Junior handling for the twins (poor dog!).
Buddy also won the Field Trial class at Crufts in 2019. He’s a handsome boy (I might be biased!) and a good stamp of a dog. He is powerful and loves nothing more than getting into thick cover to find that lost bird.
He’s a dog of a lifetime that’s for sure ."