Oliver Ringrose

Oliver grew up surrounded by animals — dogs, horses, cows, sheep, ferrets, ducks and a cat all featured in his childhood on the North Downs. But it was his Border Terrier, Sam, who truly shaped him, following at his heels on countless days out across the Downs.

His connection to gundogs and shooting runs deep in the family. His older brother Lee left school to become an underkeeper on the Squerries Estate in Westerham, before going on to farm — and it was Lee's farming that gave Oliver real access to the land from an early age. The brothers even hatched and raised birds together at their parents' house. In his school holidays, Oliver worked alongside Alan Watkins on the Quebec Shoot in Westerham, catching up birds and working the rearing fields in exchange for rough shooting. He started beating at just 14 years old.

That early, hands-on grounding was deepened further when Oliver took his first job as a teenager at the local gundog kennels, run by Tony & Julia Casserly. It was there that Oliver met Briar, one of Tony's own favourites and a dog Oliver came to love just as much. Years later, when Oliver got his first wirehaired Vizsla — a different breed, but every bit as special — he gave him the same name, carrying that dog's legacy forward. Briarrose Gundogs is born from that connection.

Gundogs have had a special pull on Oliver ever since, and there's a particular place in his heart for all things ginger — the Wirehaired Vizsla variety above all.

After leaving school, Oliver trained as a Heating Engineer, following in his father's footsteps, and spent 18 years working for the family business as a building controls engineer — designing, constructing and installing complex control systems, and fault-finding on others. As he puts it, he "worked on machine behaviour before working professionally with animals," and that analytical grounding still shapes how he approaches gundog training and behaviour today.

In 2017, Oliver made the leap into a full-time career with animals — something he'd wanted since school, only to be talked out of it by a careers advisor at the time. He signed up for Victoria Stilwell's Dog Training Academy, an intensive six-month course combining theory and practical training, week-long residentials, mentor-shadowing, webinars, essays and exams — all completed alongside full-time work. He graduated in January 2018 as a VSA-Certified Dog Trainer (VSA-CDT), one of very few trainers in the country to hold this qualification, trained in-person by Stilwell and VSA faculty and assessed at the highest level in training, behaviour modification, canine ethology and creative problem-solving.

Since then, Oliver has continued building his knowledge specifically around ethology and emotional understanding in dogs — completing The Animal Emotion and Advanced Animal Training Course with Illis ABC, Suzanne Clothier's CARAT course, and most recently qualifying as a Family Dog Mediator through Kim Brophy's programme.

Ethology sits at the heart of how he works, and it's especially relevant to gundogs: understanding an individual dog's drives, strengths and motivations is essential to shaping useful, reliable behaviour in the field, all done in a genuinely force-free way.

This isn't theory for Oliver — he still works around 30 days a year on the shoots himself, either in the beating team or picking up, well beyond the dozen or so days most trainers in this field put in, in addition to this he is recruited with his dogs to help “dog in” after the birds have been released to keep them where they should be.

Decades of real fieldwork, from a 14-year-old beater to a professional gundog trainer, is what Briarrose Gundogs is built on.

Oliver has run Dog Smart Training and Behaviour since setting it up in 2018, and it remains his main practice today. Briarrose Gundogs sits under the Dog Smart umbrella — a dedicated space to bring that same fieldwork-driven, force-free approach to a gundog-focused audience.