Lt. Colonel Robert Milner, Jr., Rest in Peace
Milner cut his teeth running bird dogs with his father. While his original plan was to graduate from college and to train dogs, his draft card was punched during the Vietnam War, and he spent five years of active duty and 15 years in the Reserves. His final active-duty post was at McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Washington.
A 1970 meeting with legendary Lab trainer Roy Gonia altered the trajectory of Milner’s career. Milner got a gimpy little pup that nobody wanted from one of Gonia’s litters, and he worked with the pup every day. The pair won derbies and field trails and that experience refined Milner’s focus from bird dogs to retrievers.
In 1972, Milner moved to Grand Junction, Tennessee and launched his first of two kennels. Wildrose Kennels, currently owned by Mike Stewart, began as an American Lab breeding and training kennel. A 1980 trip to England and a meeting with Major Morty Turner-Cook fueled what became Milner’s calling. Milner liked the dogs’ smaller size, athletic build, calm disposition at heel and boldness in the field. Equally he liked the positive training methods that were the opposite of the compulsion training he had been using. Wildrose Kennels introduced British Labs to the United States and Milner added positive training methods for use on those dogs and in his numerous articles, columns, seminars and clinics. His three books, Retriever Training for the Duck Hunter, Retriever Training, A Back to the Basics Approach, and Absolutely Positively Gundog Training: Positive Training for your Retriever Gundog are on the bookshelves of many libraries.
Milner shifted his focus to working dogs and designed and implemented a Disaster Search dog program for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and served as the Tennessee Task Force Leader. He oversaw projects at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, during Hurricane’s Francis, Ophelia, Ivan and Rita along with the Columbia Space Shuttle Recovery. Milner launched Duckhill Kennels, his second, to breed better retrievers to be used as gundogs and in scent detection and disaster search work. Duckhill Kennels’ focus was to remove as much force as possible and to replace the methods with operant conditioning and positive reinforcement techniques. Duckhill Kennels will close at the end of 2024.
Our condolences are to his family, friends and employees and extend to the legions of dog owners and fans. After a lifetime of monumental contributions and achievements may he Rest in Peace.
About the Author : Tom Keer
Visit authors website | View more articlesTom Keer owns The Keer Group, an outdoor marketing company which works perfectly with his freelance writing career. He casts his four English setters in Northeast upland coverts and Southern quail fields with fortunate regularity. Hes been lucky to be surrounded by people and dogs that are much smarter than him. Visit him at www.thekeergroup.com or at www.tomkeer.com
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