TEMPLETON – Athol-based Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust has secured a conservation restriction on the 44-acre Swift River Retrievers property in Templeton, owned for more than 20 years by Orange resident Buck Shope, a professional dog trainer.

A release from Mt. Grace states, “The soon-to-be protected fields, forests, and ponds have been carefully managed to train hunting retrievers – dogs that require large, clean, and distraction-free spaces where they can run, swim and work at distance in realistic field conditions.”

Seth Kelly, community conservation program manager for the organization, told the Athol Daily News that Mount Grace doesn’t plan to make any changes to the property.

“Actually, Buck has made all the improvements on it. The space itself is unique because it is totally geared toward the training,” he said. “There’s a logic as to how the ponds are arranged, the obstacles in the ponds themselves, or on the hills. Right now, there’s no hunting on it because the debris from hunting, whether it’s the shells or whatever, can interfere with the dogs….Everything is very controlled, so it’s a safe place to train.”

Kelly said Mount Grace was interested in the property in order to facilitate its community conservation efforts.

“It’s tied to hunting, and to protect a space like this, to allow that sport to grow was really important to us,” he said.

Shope said it was he who first broached the idea of preserving the property. A year or so ago, he sold about 80 of the site’s 135 acres to Mass Fish & Wildlife, which created the Templeton Brook Wildlife Management Area.

“My whole goal was to not have this property developed,” Shope said. “This portion that is getting the conservation restriction, about 45 acres or so, I wanted that to remain as a place for people to go and train retrievers.”

Shope said he felt it was important to ensure the parcel’s continuation as a training area.

“It’s one of those things where, if you go the local wildlife management area or you go to a field or park, you run into broken glass, barbed wire, holes you didn’t know were there,” he said. “It’s really unsafe to run the dogs. This is a place that’s as safe as you can make it.”

He has also added features that allow trainers to teach the dogs to be more competitive.

“We run hunt tests and field trials,” Shope explained.

Asked how long he has been training retrievers, Shope said, “I started in the 1990s with my own dogs and I started helping other people about five years later. I had a regular job until 2005 and in 2005, I quit my regular job and just trained retrievers from then on. Mostly, I do Labradors, but I’ve had goldens and Chesapeakes and flat-coats. I don’t know much about pointing dogs. People have asked me to help them with them, but what we do for retrievers is very, very different than what they do.”

According to the Mt. Grace release, more than $45,000 in project funding has already been raised from public supporters, including a matching grant from the Worcester County League of Sportsmen, the project’s largest gift to date.

“For us, this project exemplifies how land trusts can adapt to meet today’s conservation needs,” said Mount Grace Executive Director Emma Ellsworth. “Protecting habitat and the human traditions tied to it go hand-in-hand.”

The Swift River Retrievers property is located off of Pail Factory Road, just southwest of the Gardner Municipal Airport.