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.”
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 observes, are not radically different from ours; he believes dogs are asking us to consider the expectations we place on them. “What are we doing here? What is our purpose? We’re out here enjoying the outdoors with our dogs. So let’s do this so they can enjoy it, too,” he says, pointing out that training should bring joy to the dog as well. “The bigger picture is that there are hard truths of life out there for all of us—some tough experiences, and that’s where the reward comes from. I want a dog to be confident enough to go into the field and have fun.”
Guyer recognizes that there’s a balance to be struck. “If we go into a sporting dog situation, we need to understand that we are generally working with working breeds. So we need to honor the work that they do, but we also need to honor the fact that they can experience joy. People see that, and they want that for their dogs.” It’s this guiding principle that makes Guyer’s approach appealing to owners. “He has a way of helping people make their own choices about their dogs,” says client Matt Gunter. “He knows how to connect the dog and the handler, and his insights are rooted in an understanding of what the dog is.”
In a world of glamorous presentations, with screen-bound influencers hawking an image of the sporting life, Guyer stands apart. He eschews showiness for something that rings true, trading in expectations of perfection for real-world application. He is building dogs that work—and, importantly, live harmoniously with their people. “When I walk into a situation where people want their dogs trained, I always think about that quote from Varn. The dogs that go home with these families are not the dogs they thought they wanted but the ones they needed, and that’s something I can help them see.”
Related topics:
Seoul Warns Dog Owners: Get Permission or Face Legal Action
Saving the Akita-Inu: Japan’s Iconic Breed Battles Extinction
