About Minoggie Kennels Island Acres

Retriever training on Sauvie Island

Minoggie Kennels Island Acres sits on a 150-acre farm on Sauvie Island, 20 minutes from downtown Portland. It offers boarding and obedience training and is best known for training retrievers for hunting and competitive field events, along with breeding hunting retrievers.

The trainers

Doug Shade came to work at the kennel in 1984 and has run AKC hunt tests since the early '90s. He has qualified dogs 100 times across 25 Master Nationals, and 22 of those dogs earned Master National Hunter titles and places in the Master National Hall of Fame. Kim Shade joined in 2000, trained her first master hunter in the late '90s and trains with love, affection and praise balanced with discipline, with owners participating so dog and owner become a team.

Programs

The Hunt Test program is intensive and aimed at owners serious about AKC hunt tests. The 60-day fetch-it-up program is the starting point for gun dogs, and obedience and puppy obedience lay the foundation for advanced work. Boarding is open to all breeds, with facilities cleaned twice a day and daily off-leash walks.

What to ask

Ask about program pricing and current openings.