NAHRA’s mission is the preservation of our heritage of hunting with retrievers: Conservation of game through the development of trained retrievers.
NAHRA’s purpose in establishing this concept is to discover and reward dogs that can fulfill the hunter’s needs in the field by performing in a manner consistent with the demands of actual hunting conditions. NAHRA Field Tests utilize duck blinds, numerous decoys, boats, calls , and other hunting implements in a manner simulating normal hunting. Under the NAHRA concept, the objective is to recover the bird as quickly and efficiently as possible, to create the least amount of disturbance in the marsh and upland and to give the hunter the maximum amount of time to actually take game. Dogs are placed in five categories based on ability not age: Beginner, Started, Hunter, Intermediate and Senior. Dogs do not compete against one another for placements, but rather their performances are judged individually against a “standard.”