trekmoor wrote:I'd want the pup trained for me to a high standard and a good s/h vehicle thrown in for that sort of money!
You're onto something there, Bill - in an oblique way. Our "field trial washouts" - meaning Labs that have been trained by a professional for two years but deemed unlikely ever to compete for the blue ribbon in our all-age, open stakes - are often sold on for $8,000-$10,000 to become hunting dogs - or increasingly to become bomb detection dogs (the latter because the North American training for field trials is almost a template for how a "bomb dog" will work with its handler in a theatre of war). In any event, that $8,000-$10,000 purchase price won't even recoup the cost of the dog's training as a field trial retriever for the original owner who paid $1,000-$1,500 a month for those two years that went into the pro's determining whether the retriever "had it" or not for succeeding in FTs.
I sell mine for £1,000. They've been that price for past couple of years and I've stuck with it as I consider it fair. Although I have heard that I charge a lot more!! LOL......
