About Shady Meadows Gundogs
Shady
Meadows Gundogs grew out of our passion to hunt behind beautiful, well
disciplined, hard working bird dogs. Like most people, we started with
1 dog, a classy orange and white female Elhew pointer. From there, our
passion for watching the dogs work has grown. We started with staying
in a lodge in north central Kansas, hunting with family and friends on
private land and wild birds. We always came back to the lodge with more
birds than the lodge's paying hunters on the lodge's land on wild and
released birds. They finally talked me into guiding for them and that
was the start of the business side of hunting.
Working on pen
raised birds under the supervision of someone who knew nothing about
hunting got old quick, so I struck out on my own and soon had clients
from Georgia to California hunting only wild birds. As the numbers of
clients grew, so did the need to have more dogs to keep fresh ones on
the ground at all times. That, combined with clients wanting to buy the
guide dogs and puppies out of them, brought into existence Shady
Meadows Gundogs.
Shady Meadows was
carved from the woods of west central Missouri by my grandfather in the
late 1960's and early 1970's. Construction was completed on the log
cabin that we now call home in 1977. We purchased Shady Meadows from my
grandfather in 2004 and began construction of the kennel buildings to
move our operation. Our cabin overlooks a very well stocked fishing
lake that provides excellent water training facilities for our German
Shorthairs and Labrador Retrievers.
Originally, we
started with breeding and training for what we wanted in a bird dog. A
close to medium range, hard working, strong nosed bird dog with tons of
style. We found that a lot of our puppies started going to NSTRA guys
around the country and thus was born our interest in foot trialing and
then to horseback dogs as well to run on our trips in Texas.
We now keep several
strings of dogs. Short range pheasant dogs for hunting South Dakota and
Kansas, medium range quail and pheasant dogs for Missouri and Kansas
and big running pointers for our Texas hunts.
We got off to a
rough start with a full time trainer that really hurt our reputation by
not producing what he said he was on about 10-20% of the dogs. If
nothing else, it showed our customers that I'm an honest guy because I
had to replace a few dogs. Now Shady Meadows Gundogs has grown from
just me and 1 mediocre trainer to a partner/professional guide out of
Texas and 5 professional trainers that make up Shady Meadows Gundogs,
Shady Meadows Outfitters and AB Joint Outfitters.
We now breed dogs
for foot hunters like us, foot trialers like my partner and horseback
trialers alike. The training aspect of our business though still
focuses on producing quality, high style, hard hunting foot hunter and
foot trialer dogs. We also train Labs for upland and waterfow