Quotes from Gerald Hammond

For a moment his voice stilled the hubbub in the room. Dogs can arouse grander passions then love. 'A retriever's s'posed to retrieve what's shot yes? 'Sall right for you. Spaniels only have to rampage around the bushes, scaring out anything that's stupid enough to pay attention to them. They can't retrieve worth a damn anyway.

As I told the Sergeant, I never sold my pups to non-shooting homes. It would have been like selling a favourite daughter into a harem. A dog is happiest doing what it is bred for, and very few breeds were intended to be pets.

The gun then,' I said. She was a woman but she was Texan. She would know about shotguns. 'You must have given that more than a glance. You had it in your hands for most of the day.

They don't shoot ground game in his neck of the woods and the last thing he wanted was a dog which would take off after a gopher or a squirrel. And he said that bum-punching quail over pointers was no more interesting than shooting clays down-the-line – the same going-away bird every time.

She could forget a face, an appointment or a good resolution but her memory for dogs was always phenomenal.

Ten yards upstream of us, the body of a man was grounded face-down at the edge of the mud. Not much more showed than a hump of shoulder and the line of a leg but there was no doubting what it was. Below the water, lank hair of indeterminate colour floated as if raised in fear and the wavelets caused his hips to rise and fall in an obscene parody of the sexual act.

Not much of a return for getting out of bed before the crack of dawn, driving umpteen miles, staggering more miles through a howling gale in the dark and then squishing around in the freezing mud.' 'Good for the complexion,' I said, 'Keep telling yourself that it's fun, fun, fun.

All right, I thought you specialized in Labradors.' 'You spaniel men think that when God had created the springer and its near relatives he should have knocked off for a dirty weekend.

There's no such word as "finish" in the vocabulary of a working kennel,' I said. 'By then, it'll be feeding time. It's always feeding time or cleaning-out time or walking time.' 'Or singing them to sleep time?' 'Now you're getting it.' I said.