Hunting North America's Upland Birds: Tips and Tactics for Pheasants, Grouse, Quail, Woodcock, Dovers, and More

Reader Reviews
John D. Taylor is best known as being a shill for the "corporate" breeding program of DeCoverly Kennels, an English Setter breeder in Factoryville, Pennsylvania, who has pulled perhaps one of the biggest "George Ryman" scams ever conceived. Taylor and his con artist soulmate, Ken Alexander, claim (with varying and even contradictory accounts) to be pushing "Ryman" Setters, which in fact ceased to exist the day George Ryman had his stroke in 1955. As a johnny-come-lately to the scene, Ken Alexander purchased Calkins Setters which by then had developed many genetic problems, still prominent in the DeCoverly Setters of today. In this book (Taylor also wrote ~ if one can honestly call any of his output actual "writing" ~ "A Gentleman's Shooting Dog: Evolution of the Legendary Ryman Setter," another piece of mass-marketing hogwash and more fiction than fact), Taylor can't keep his facts straight, clearly does not know much about upland game hunting. There are too many holes in his observations from the gamebird stand-point. This book is just another ploy, another puff piece, to promote himself and Ken Alexander as being all-knowing when it comes to English Setter shooting dogs. As for his con artist buddy, Ken Alexander, as of this date it was brought to light that Alexander left DeCoverly Kennels under less than ideal circumstances and at least two groups of English Setters were surrendered by the kennel to the Bucks County SPCA, a shelter a good two hours from the kennel itself. The dogs were described as timid and skittish and although all were eventually adopted out, some were six years old at the time they were surrendered ~ which flies in the face of Alexander's long-standing claims that all the dogs were socialized and trained. These two men are nothing more than dog pimps, DeCoverly Kennels also still pimping puppies and leaning heavily on Alexander's and Taylor's fantasyland posing as a history of "Ryman" dogs which in fact, no longer exist. Anyone who purchases this or any of Taylor's other books is nothing more than an enabler, assisting and abetting a corporate puppy mill operation who (under new Pennsylvania laws) are no longer allowed to euthanize animals they no longer care to feed and instead abandon them to already-stressed animal shelters to meet whatever fate awaits them.