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 and I bought a couple German Shorthairs. We started with staying at 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 then the lodges paying hunters got on the lodges 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 and we hunted 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. We also have hundreds of acres of fencerows and natural cover for upland training. We specialize in English Pointers, German Shorthairs and Labrador Retrievers.
Originally, we started with breeding for and training for what we want 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 to me and 1 mediocre trainer to now we have a partner/professional guide out of Texas and 8 professional trainers that make up Shady Meadows Gundogs, Shady Meadows Outfitters and AB Joint Outfitters.