The envy of the world

British-trained gundogs are growing in popularity with sportsmen around the globe but what is it about our home-bred dogs that appeals so much?

- Written by Eleanor Doughty

THE FIRST time I catch up with Charlie Thorburn, the gundog trainer to the 1%, he has just joined the M6 Toll and has been awake for a long time. Thorburn is on his way home to Perthshire from New York where he has been delivering a trio of fully trained dogs to their new homes with wealthy families across the USA. This jet-setting element of his very busy life forms a considerable part of the gundog-producing empire, Mordor Gundogs, that he runs from the home and kennels that he built from scratch 13 miles outside Perth.

Thorburn, the son of an Army officer, swapped a place at Sandhurst for training dogs. He has been producing labradors and spaniels for both domestic and international dog-loving, sporting families for the past 25 years. Though the UK market dominates his business, the international element – peopled by owners of American football teams, shipping tycoons, oligarchs and members of some of the world’s richest and most anonymous families – is ever growing. They know Thorburn as a friend, a man that provides them with their new four-legged family members: dogs bred not to be field trial champions but as working pets that live in the house and work under a gun on the smartest shoots all over the world.

With ample resources, they will do anything for their dogs. Thorburn’s roll call of anecdotes is legion: he describes one client dropping his dog off for residential training by private jet en route to sail his yacht across the Atlantic, another flying in to see their dog for half an hour, and the time when he was driven 120 miles west of Moscow to a James Bond-style lair with a police escort. In his kitchen at Mordor, as one of his seven house dogs, a beloved cocker spaniel called Sausage, wiggles on her bed, his wife teases him about calling American Airlines just ‘American’, such is his jet-setting.