Sporting

How a Top Gundog Trainer Found His True Calling

From his time as a navy medical corpsman to working with bomb-sniffing dogs in Afghanistan, Grayson Guyer followed a winding path back to North Carolina and training companion gundogs

A man stands with a dog

Photo: ANDREW KORNYLAK

Guyer works with Remi, a client’s German shorthaired pointer.

My great-grandfather Bub spent his life managing quail properties from Union Springs, Alabama, to Tallahassee, Florida. All I have of him is a weathered notebook holding newspaper clippings, letters typed on onionskin, and his handwritten thoughts on quail, dogs, and fire. One letter he received came from a Mr. Lester Varn in 1947. Agreeing to serve as a judge in that year’s Georgia-Florida Field Trial, which Bub helped organize, Varn wrote: “I surely hope there will be three outstanding dogs, – that will place themselves, as often times happens in field trials, without finding it necessary to apply the rule of one’s personal likes and dislikes about a dog. Because, perhaps no two of us ever see things just exactly alike.”

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Seventy-seven years later, Varn’s observation rings truer than ever when it comes to our perceptions of sporting dogs. We live in an age of image-driven extremes, curating and cropping the presentation of our lives for maximum effect. It’s a condition from which the sporting world is not immune, whether it be tailgates draped with greenheads or turkey hunters who consider a selfie stick as critical as a 12-gauge. Speaking to Varn’s concern, what a sporting dog is and should be has been photoshopped, color enhanced, and set to a rock-and-roll soundtrack.

But at Lost Highway Kennels, on a farm tucked in the hills around High Point, North Carolina, Charles Grayson Guyer III (who goes by Grayson) exists as a refreshing study in honesty and the pursuit of practical reality. A son of the North Carolina Piedmont, forward-thinking but respectful of tradition, Guyer works with sporting-dog owners to deliver realizations of the life they hope to live with their dogs. From his home at the edge of a friend’s farm, he has access to two hundred acres in return for guiding occasional friends-and-family hunts for the owner. Under pine and hardwood, in cool green ponds, and on fields cutting across rolling hills, he’s devoted to training what he calls “companion gundogs.”

“A companion gundog is a pet you’re proud to own,” he explains, “that can not only exist within your house in a way that is not aggravating to you, but brings you joy…and be the same dog in the field in that it does its job efficiently and effectively enough that you’re not frustrated by your pursuits. At the same time, it’s that dog that gets you invited back. It doesn’t need to be a world-beater field champion. So much of what I do is helping people figure out not only what it is they need but what it is they want.”


After growing up in High Point, an eighteen-year-old Guyer only wanted to put the Piedmont in his rearview mirror. He joined the navy, leaping from airplanes, scuba diving in dark waters, and prowling deserts, jungles, and swamps alongside marines as a medical corpsman in elite reconnaissance units. He also volunteered to work as a padding-swathed bite decoy for military police dogs. “I always had an interest in bird dogs,” he says, “[but] I got to put the sleeve on, and it was over for me. I knew what I was doing with the rest of my life.” He joined a protection dog club in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and bought a Belgian Malinois pup he named Lacy, a move he now calls “the most irresponsible thing any junior enlisted guy could ever do.” Irresponsibility aside, “I was still able to do club stuff with my dog, and she was earning titles.”

The relatively unfettered life of a young sailor and his dog was a fun way to exist for a while. But after an extended assignment to Japan during which Lacy stayed with his parents, the Tar Heel felt the pull of the Old North State and found himself on a path back through High Point, to Boone and Appalachian State University to study geography and anthropology, before landing in Winston-Salem, selling medical equipment. When a college rugby injury took him to a chiropractor who worked wonders, Guyer, already well-versed in medicine from his time in the navy, decided chiropractic might offer a stable career path. So he and Lacy headed to school in St. Louis.

He had misgivings almost on arrival. But in the end, it all came down to the dog. Lacy developed a cough a vet diagnosed as cancer so advanced she never left the office. Immediately after saying goodbye to a once-in-a-lifetime dog, a grief-stricken Guyer walked into class as a professor was explaining how chiropractic cured a man of deafness—and decided on the spot he had made a mistake. “I just picked up my books, walked to the registrar’s office, dis-enrolled, got a U-Haul, and was packed up and on the way back home with my dog’s ashes that night,” he says.

Back in North Carolina, having trained dogs as a sideline while in St. Louis, Guyer parlayed his military background and protection dog experience into a job teaching marine corps dog handlers to work with Labradors to find bombs, then deployed to southeastern Afghanistan with them. There, the son of a psychologist and grandson of a bird-dog man—perhaps just the right combination for a trainer—found himself with a lot of downtime. “I had a small tablet that had a little keyboard attached to it,” he says. “I could write on that, and I would read everything. I was reading trash novels, but I could also read John Watson’s ‘behaviorist manifesto’ and all this [B. F.] Skinner work. I was geeking out on dog training.”

Hopscotching from base to base, checking on the Labradors helping clear paths for patrolling marines, he began to see his own way forward. “I had my little playlist of music, and Hank Williams was on it,” he recalls. “‘Lost Highway’ would come on, and I was like, ‘That’s me.’ This life I’m living is the Lost Highway.” He vowed that when he got back, “I’m going to have a business, and I’m going to build myself a life. When I get out of this place, I’m going to marry this girl I love back home, and I’m going to settle down. And now it’s Lost Highway Kennels.”


A decade on, Guyer, now forty-four, has grown into an authoritative, if unassuming, fount of training wisdom, whether offering a spontaneous discourse on canine psychology and the finer points of finishing a retriever or guiding dogs through sweat-soaked hours of hands-on work. He conducts three six-week flusher- and pointer-focused board-and-train programs from September to April, and a three-month retriever-focused program from May to July. He hosts the Companion Gundog Podcast, a deep dive (forty hours and counting) into his training methods and philosophy. Along with the St. Hubert’s Field Trial he runs in Cheraw, South Carolina, guided woodcock training hunts for dogs and owners, and his individual and group training efforts, he lives a busy, regimented life that starts before dawn.

When I join him in his basement at 5:46 a.m., Guyer already has a client’s Boykin spaniel on a place board. The dog came in excited but is now quiet, the room dim and cool as the morning begins to steam outside. Guyer is speaking calmly, attending to administrative tasks, but his focus is ultimately on developing in the Boykin the ability to “deflate,” a term he uses for a dog recognizing boundaries and relaxing when it is not the singular focus of its owner. Guyer wants “everything they’re getting to come through [the owner]. I think all the leash work or food work pales in comparison to ritualistic lifestyle stuff, and that’s the stuff nobody really focuses on.” It’s part of making a field dog a companion. Guyer cautions that in the modern sporting world, “there’s this move to breed these incredibly drivey dogs, and what you get is performance at the expense of attitude and mentality…that’s the part that so many trainers don’t seem to be grasping. They’re so focused on titles and ribbons, they’re missing client needs. When I realized that a dog that listens to what you say is vastly more impressive to the general public than a field-trial champion, it was a turning point.”

Dog training is cyclical: a life of reinforcing, pushing, and pulling, repeated again and again by dog and trainer. It’s a pursuit that demands patience and presence above all. Guyer loves the process and seems possessed of both attributes in ways that call to mind a Buddhist monk, particularly when he says, “You’re sharing energy with a dog when you’re training. And without getting too weird about it, there’s this dog and there’s me. We exist in an environment together, and my job is to manipulate the environment in such a way that it affects the dog’s behavior in a manner that meets my objectives or my desires. I’m acting as a counterbalance to whatever may be hindering the dog’s progress.”

Standing on a bumper-strewn trail in the shade of longleaf pines, Guyer explains over the buzz of cicadas that he roots all of his training work in the recognition that dogs perceive and respond to the world as dogs do. Their stress and fear, he says, come when we attempt to force them to view the world through our eyes rather than seeking to understand it through theirs. As I watch him work a young female black Lab through a conditioned retrieve, he narrates not just what is happening, but what will happen, predictions that the dog manifests within seconds of their coming from Guyer’s mouth. It feels almost supernatural on observation but springs from the countless hours he has spent focused on dogs in a wide range of settings. Accordingly, he never seems hurried or bored, never frustrated by recalcitrance. With an excited dog, he is calm; to an anxious dog, he is encouraging. Much of what he imparts is built upon an easily forgotten premise: having fun.

Guyer’s singular attention on each dog is returned in a way I’ve rarely seen. At his invitation, I brought my own Labrador, Jed, to Lost Highway. Though they had met once before on a woodcock hunt, Guyer had never worked with him. But somehow dogs seem to sense who he is. Sitting in the air-conditioned cab of Guyer’s truck as we visit a kennel full of active, barking dogs, I can’t help but notice Jed is completely ignoring me and the dogs, laser focused on Guyer as he moves about feeding and watering. When I express my amazement at his ability to draw my two-year-old Lab’s attention simply by being, Guyer smiles broadly, his summer-storm gray eyes crinkling. Then he shrugs and says, “It happens.”


What is Lost Highway Kennels, beyond a loose manifesto written in dusty forward operating bases spread across Afghanistan’s Helmand Province? It’s Guyer’s respect for classic, time-proven methods, tempered by his love of a quote from Pablo Picasso: “Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.” And it’s a devotion to the idea that dog training isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. “There’s a spectrum in all this, between the dog lying in front of the fireplace and that superbold dog breaking ice to make a four-hundred-yard retrieve,” he says. “My objective is to help the person and the dog find where they land on that spectrum.”

A man sits in a chair and pets a brown dog beside him
Guyer at his home at Lost Highway Kennels with Beretta, a client’s Boykin spaniel.
photo: ANDREW KORNYLAK
Guyer at his home at Lost Highway Kennels with Beretta, a client’s Boykin spaniel.

Later in the day, that morning’s Boykin, one of the five-at-a-time board-and-train dogs Guyer keeps in the garage kennel at his home, has a breakthrough on the lane under the pines, completing a retrieve from send to hand delivery. Guyer lights up, his constant “Nope, yes, good, here, fetch, here” monologue breaking into “Look at you! You’re having fun! Good girl!” The Boykin wiggles at his praise. As he walks her past me and the pigeons cooing in the nearby coop, he says, “If I can get two steps forward and one step back every day and keep that train going, I’m happy.” Patience and presence for the win.

Like Lester Varn in 1947, Grayson Guyer knows that we don’t live with, hunt with, or hold an expectation of our dogs “just exactly alike.” For that reason, unlike Varn, he happily applies the “rule of one’s personal likes and dislikes” in their training and development. Our dogs give us their lifetime’s worth of companionship and service. Guyer means to give each companion gundog the pleasure of being the best version of itself.


Grayson Guyer’s Five Commandments of Dog Training

1. Spend time with your dog

“When someone drops a dog off, I can tell immediately whether that dog is spending enough time with that owner and whether it’s a well-adjusted dog. I’m really interested in relationship-based training, because you can only develop that trust-based relationship that gives you a leg to stand on when it’s time to start training by spending time with your dog. There is no shortcut.”

2. Control the environment

“If my dog has access to unlimited stimuli and an environment in its most chaotic state, I can’t be upset when the dog learns to self-satisfy. A big part of my companion program is a thirty-day transition plan in which I tell owners, ‘Whenever that dog is a hundred percent unsupervised, it needs to be isolated. When it’s semi-supervised, give it a place to be but restrict its access to the environment at large. When it is loose on the ground, you’re interacting with intent with that dog.’ At the end of that, most people are going to backslide. But if you’ve given thirty days to that strict ritualistic lifestyle, you can use that crate and place board as tools to get back to a baseline.”

3. Maintain the joy

“Protecting your dog’s drive and attitude is your responsibility. If what you want is a fun, happy dog that does things that make you happy, you cannot take the dog’s joy out of interacting with you. If your dog doesn’t enjoy being around you, you’re not going to have a companion anymore, so be careful.”

4. Don’t discourage behaviors you intend to reinforce

“Improper or ineffectively applied punishments can create negative associations for a dog. If you want a retriever, don’t use punishment while it’s around bumpers, especially if the dog has one in its mouth. If a bird dog goes on point, and I start screaming “Whoa!” and shaking the dog, the next time it smells a bird, it perceives the bird as the catalyst for bad things and doesn’t want to go near it. A lot of times we’re looking for very refined behaviors before we’ve allowed them to develop.”

5. Don’t reinforce behaviors you intend to discourage

“If I don’t want my dog to chew on birds, I shouldn’t play tug-of-war with my dog with birds. Does it mean I can’t play tug-of-war with my dog? Some people say it does, but I say it just means I need to build that form of play into context. But I’m also a dog trainer who puts dogs in specific contexts and creates clarity. I think the rules are probably important to follow if you’re a novice. Regardless, it’s important to be aware of whether your actions have a punishing effect or a reinforcing effect.”


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