Ryan Barnes for SPLIT REED
Photos Courtesy of Sporting Life Kennels on Instagram
There’s nothing quite like hunting with a well trained dog. A dog that comes back with the crippled bird you’d never expect to find, or the dog that is able to work all hunt and listen to each command with perfect obedience. It makes the waterfowl hunting experience feel a bit more “full”. Training dogs like these isn’t an easy task, but Marty Roberts of Sporting Life Kennels has found success in breeding and training high caliber British Labs to help hunters more fully enjoy their time in the field; with a four-legged companion to help them in their endeavors.
In 1976, 12 year old Marty Roberts made his way into the Arkansas timber for his first duck hunt with his dad and a good family friend. “That moment was pivotal, because it lit a fire” says Roberts, “at that point, I was totally infatuated with duck hunting”. Particularly hunting mallards in the timber, Roberts notes. “All things being what they are, within the next 5 years, I was given a retriever puppy for Christmas. His name was Jim Bob, and I trained him myself. I got some help about mid-way through. And I ended up finishing him. That turned out to be a life-changing moment for me because it really lit a fire under me.” Marty says that following the training of Jim Bob, he trained a few other puppies and sold them, and eventually got to the point where he would always have two or three of his own dogs that he had trained himself.
“Once I was in my early twenties I was wanting to do my own kennel, but I didn’t have the money,” says Marty, “and back then, most people weren’t going to give their dog to a twenty-year-old to train”. So until Roberts got the money saved up to start his own kennel, he got into the construction industry. “I worked up to home building; all that went well, and I really enjoyed it, but the market is just so up and down so in 2008 I just closed it down and jumped in with both feet into training retrievers”.
From that point Marty Packed things up, moved from Memphis and headed to Mississippi to train dogs. He bought a farm, and started the roots for what would soon become Sporting Life Kennels. Marty says that his choice of labs for breeding is geared towards British labs. “They have great genetics, they have a great temperament, with great hunting ability, and then it comes down to training,” he says, “if you reinforce and train for what they were bred to do, they are a joy to hunt with!”.
However, just because Roberts breeds British labs, doesn’t mean that’s all he trains. “We train all types of retrievers,” he notes. Anything from American labs to different breeds of spaniels. Marty’s training abilities have been put to the test with all different kinds of different breeds of dogs. “We’ve been very blessed to have a program in place that allows my team to follow a flow chart for each dog. They do that, and most of the time, the dogs end up in a real good place.” Using this program has allowed Marty and his team to develop and train multiple dogs every year to become world class retrievers and hunting dogs. However, training dogs isn’t something that can be learned overnight, and when you’re hiring college students to help with your kennel, it requires some “on-the-job” training for the ones doing the dog training. This required Marty to develop a system to train the trainers. Very few people have the abilities to work with dogs like Roberts does, so he had to develop a system to show his employees at his kennel how to work and train these dogs. This system would later become Retriever University. A full-course guide to helping dog owners train their dog. “We spent three years making films on how to train dogs, and that was all based around the system that I had made to train college students. People can go online and subscribe to it, and buy into it. It goes from start to finish. It’ll take you all the way to finished gun dog” says Roberts.
In talking about the demands of being a dog trainer, Marty says, “It’s demanding. I love it, but it’s hard work. If you don’t love dog training, you burn out. It has to be a consuming passion or it will wear on you. To do it, and to love it is great, but to do it, and to love it 24/7- it’s kind of like a waterfowl outfitter. You have to be totally obsessed with it, otherwise you’ll burn out.”
While most red-blooded Americans love dogs, there’s no denying that Marty’s love is a bit deeper than others. When asked where his love for dogs really stemmed from, he referred back to his first dog, Jim Bob. “The first working dog I had, Jim Bob, just lit something inside of me,” says Roberts, he continues on by saying, “a lot of dog training is intuition, and feel. You have to be able to feel a dog and read a dog and I think that, starting with my first dog, I just had a God-given ability to do that. I’m not bragging, but there’s just something there. I can feel them, and I can read them,” says Marty, talking about his ability to train dogs. Roberts says that being able to do these things are important parts of not only having a well-trained dog, but having a well-trained, happy dog. “You see a lot of dogs that get through training and look like they’re beat down and they’re not happy. You want to try to train, and have success reaching your goals, with happy dogs. That’s what everyone should do, but to be willing to do that, you have to be willing to spend time and make changes for each dog. You can’t just have one program and look at it like ‘they either do or they don’t’”. Marty talks about how his program allows for more flexibility when training his dogs. If one dog needs more time than others, that’s ok. If a different dog needs a different approach to a certain command or lesson, that’s ok too. “If a dog needs to break away and get some help off the main road, we can break off and help him with whatever he needs, then once he’s ready, we can get back on the main road and keep going,” says Roberts.
When asked about when he really undertook to learn how to train dogs professionally, Roberts said, “I loved to read. We didn’t have the internet back then, so a lot of what I learned is from reading and doing,” he continues, “obviously once I went full time, that’s when I felt like I had enough experience to know what to do”. While Roberts says that a lot of his learning came from reading, like most trades in life, he learned the most by hands-on experience with training dogs. I’ve never had a mentor. I’m pretty much self-taught. That’s where it comes back to intuition, and knowing how to read dogs”. One thing that Marty says has allowed him to see success in his training, and he encourages all trainers to do, is to constantly be looking for new ways to train. “Don’t get stuck in one lane and think that’s the only way to do it,” he says.
In the first year of becoming a dog trainer, Roberts didn’t pay himself a salary. He and his wife lived off of savings. “I was out in the rain training dogs, thinking to myself ‘what have you done?’” says Marty, “I was feeding, and cleaning up and training and doing everything by myself. And I was nervous for awhile, but it didn’t take long before we started building up”. Marty mentions that he knew a lot of people in Memphis, which allowed him to get things up and started, and eventually, the Sporting Life Kennels brand began to grow, and get bigger. Marty says that his wife was a large support for his jump into creating his kennel, and encouraged his passion for training dogs. “I couldn’t have done it without her. She’s a huge support, she works her tail off, and even now she still keeps our books and works in our office, she’s doing something for us literally 24/7” says Roberts about the support and help he’s received from his wife.
In talking about the success of Sporting Life Kennels, Roberts accredits a good portion of it to the decision to breed British Labradors. “Once we started selling them and people started seeing how wonderful they are, they spoke for themselves”. He also says that practicing good business ethics also helped in the success of SLK. “If a dog is going to wash out, or he isn’t going to make it, tell the owners that. Don’t hold on to the dog and try to make some extra money. If you sell a puppy, make sure you stand behind it. If there’s physical problems, get them another. It’s like anything in life, you want to be a man of your word, you want people to trust you,” says Roberts.
Another notch in the belt of Roberts and SLK is his time filming Sporting Life Retriever TV. A television show that started on the Sportsman Channel, where Marty was able to showcase his abilities as a trainer, as well as some of his dogs. You can find Sporting Life Retriever TV on Waypoint TV or Amazon Prime. You can also watch it from SLK’s website. “I wanted to present a show that was different, and I wanted to tell a story that was unique. And we did that and I was pleased with what we did,” Marty says.
When asked where he sees the future of Sporting Life Kennels in 5 years, Roberts was optimistic with some big plans that lay ahead. He mentions plans for another sister kennel being built outside of Nashville by his good friend David Spaulding. “My goal is to breed and finish the best puppies we can and always try to improve. In 5 years, I’d like to see us training less puppies here. I’m trying to scale down in the number of puppies that I’m training, and grow my online puppy program,” Roberts says. With plans to help Spaulding grow his kennel, Marty also has plans for a company called “Ultimate Dog”- a dog supplement product that he and partner have created to help dog owners get the most out of their retrievers. “My goal is to scale Sporting Life down as far as training, and have a full-time staff running that side of things, and make our puppy program second to none”. Marty hopes to see the success of SLK propel his plans for Ultimate Dog forward, and allow him to further his reach of helping customers and dog owners across the globe achieve better retrievers.
Marty Roberts and Sporting Life Kennels are top class. Having created one of the best dog kennels, and online dog training programs from the ground up, it’s no wonder why Marty has seen so much success not only in his dogs, but in his business as well.
