The Evolution of the Sporting Dog

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226 – April, 2016

By Amy Fernandez

The Sporting Group may rank as the premier showcase of dog breeding artistry and/or canine genetic versatility, depending on personal perspective. Over the course of a millennium the plain old hunting dog blossomed into Pointers, Setters, Spaniels, and Retrievers, with countless breeds under each heading perfected for very specific functions.

It’s a big, big topic. Here’s the Cliff Notes version.

Gundog specialization actually commenced long before the invention of firearms. Basically, selection focused on sociability, responsiveness, hunting drive, and the instinct to pick up and carry virtually anything. The relative importance of these traits continually shifted as hunting methodology evolved. But they all required skill, patience, timing, and coordinated effort, which all became much easier with the help of a good dog.

Individually, many dogs fit the bill, but Spaniels rose to the top of the heap by the fourteenth century. Watson cited that era’s only comprehensive authority, Count Gaston Phoebus, to confirm that defining Spaniel traits were well-established by then. “Living as he did, close to the borders of Spain, we can accept without cavil, what some recent writers have thrown doubts upon, that the spaniel owes its name to that country; but whether it originated there or whether it was bred from dogs which came with the early migrations from the East, will never be known.” The Count’s famed hunting treatise, Livre de Chasse, made his little fiefdom in Southern France the medieval source of cutting edge canine innovations.

Spaniels were something new, but even back then their possibilities seemed endless as 19th-century historian Edward Ash reiterated. “At first there was no such thing as a breed. Any dog that did what a Spaniel did was so named. It does not really matter to us who taught Spaniels to crouch down so that men could drag the long net right over them. …they set about teaching them to do all that might be useful when hunting birds, firstly to show where the birds were, then to keep down whilst the net was in use, to swim and fetch birds after they were shot with a crossbow, to collect the arrow fired by the crossbow. Spaniels were also useful to start up hares when coursing….So the Spaniel became the maid of all work.” Unfortunately, that detailed account from Ash was followed by a gigantic historical gap of unanswered questions re-garding centuries of Spaniel evolution. “One can only suppose owners bred Spa-niels, kept Spaniels, and gave Spaniels away. Anyhow, the breed went on,” he wrote. When documentation re-sumed, specialization had advanced far beyond the initial division of land and water Spaniels. It was then that things got really complicated.

The ultimate Sporting dog expert, Idstone, explained that the Pointer emerged from the same general time and place as the Spaniel, saying, “I cannot find out at what date the Pointer was introduced into this country …but he seems to have been ignored in the time of Edward II, though his huntsmen sung the praises of the Spaniel for hawking and netting.” Like Pointers, guns floated around Europe for centuries before anyone paid attention. Occasionally, guns were used to hunt waterfowl in combination with setting Spaniels. But even then, it was considered a last resort when all else failed. Watson called the punt gun “a most unhandy weapon”. Actually, it was like a rocket launcher in a rowboat, blasting everything in range into oblivion, sometimes including the shooter.

Primitive versions of the flintlock debuted in the 1600s. Despite their drawbacks, they herald-ed the end of complicated hunting methods like falconry, netting, trapping, crossbows– and Spaniel supremacy. Sportsmen need-ed dogs to locate game over wide territory and point them in the right direction to take a shot at it. And that could take awhile because shooting was a multi-step procedure.

Pointing dogs have existed since Classical times and the Romans perfected at least one, the shaggy Tuscan. However, this instinctive skill wasn’t consistently de-veloped into specialized breeds until the Middle Ages. By the thirteenth century, smooth, rough, and longhaired pointing breeds proliferated throughout Wes-tern Europe. Early headliners included the Braque Fran-çais, the Bracco Italiano, the Perdiguero Navarro; the extinct Perdiguero de Burgos, and the famously slow, heavy-boned Gorgas Pointer, which is frequently cited as the foundation Pointing breed.

Opinions vary about that, but either way the Spanish Pointer existed for centuries before. Ash remarked that it suddenly came out of the closet. “The original Pointer had a remarkable nose; a dog able to scent game much father than could a Spaniel. Moreover, it had a habit of freezing when it scented game. It was considered the ideal dog in the early days of shooting.” He described its working style in The Practical Dog Book. “It worked very slowly and cautiously. It warned the sportsman, allowing him to be wholly prepared. He had time to make a final examination of the charge, to see that the gunlock was in order, ready to be fired…Standing quite still, the dog would appear as if it had in some mysterious manner turned to stone. The foot raised to place on the earth remained on its way to earth, the head held out to catch the scent remained straining forward, the tail appeared to have changed to metal.”

The Spanish Pointer’s long overdue 15 minutes of fame ended abruptly as gun design made the flintlock safer and simpler. Before long, getting off an accurate shot was refined from many painstaking minutes to a matter of seconds. And that, as Watson said, invited the unimaginable possibility of actually hitting a moving target. “This new weapon, with its quicker firing, opened up a vastly larger field for the sportsman and rendered shooting from the shoulder without rest possible, as well as shooting on the wing.” That prospect once again revised all the rules and highlighted some previously unnoticed deficiencies in the Spanish Pointer.

After years of faithful service, as Idstone admitted, it got the axe. “Gradually, the notion prevailed that the old Spanish Pointer was too slow…,” he said. But this was fixable as he explained, “To counteract this it was found absolutely necessary to cross him with some lighter frame even at the peril of injuring his staunchness, for all confessed that they could put up with the tedious old sort no longer.” Idstone and others credit one particular source for taking the reins and setting this right. “Colonel Thornton tried the Foxhound cross with success, in one instance at any rate, in 1795,” he wrote. The good old Colonel messed around with numerous breeds, and it’s quite conceivable that he also added a dash of Greyhound to the mix. Vero Shaw and other historians noted that this strategy had unforeseen complications. He wrote, “The Greyhound is a dog which hunts by sight and not by scent, and therefore the introduction of his blood into the veins of the Spanish Pointer would have the effect of a great addition of pace…a tendency to chase was also deeply instilled.” Needless to say, breeding is a perpetual tradeoff. The new, improved Pointer was chock full of speed and energy–and other hound traits, which led to the next conundrum. “Owners tried experiments with other breeds, or saw good reasons for certain improvements, with the result that in all countries, the Spanish Pointer, after a time, lost its individuality entirely,” he said.

As Ash explained, breeders everywhere joined in to debug the Pointer, doing so according to their particular vision of perfection. A cascade of new pointing breeds emerged all over Europe along with some other interesting stuff.

Pointers remained the main focus, but one emerging Spaniel type was on an upward trend. Overall, Setting Spaniels could-n’t match Pointers as Gundogs. But no one disputed their ability to quarter ground, find game, and guide hopeful shooters in the right direction. Above all, they were far more manageable than the wired-up modern Pointer. The next obvious step was the Pointer/Setting Spaniel blend, which immediately qualified as a purebred classic. Setter breeding became quite a busy hive as creative geniuses (and some nuts) devoted themselves to this emerging project.

For instance, the Gordon Setter, originally dubbed the Black-and-Tan, featured a Collie cross. Authorities including Vero Shaw contended that, “this ren-dered the two breeds nearly indistinguishable for a period.” Controversial per-haps, but there was a method to this madness as Watson noted. He wrote, “The ability to stand motionless on scen-ting game is not the privilege of any breed of dog. We read in old books of other dogs, which also pointed and stood game. The adaptability of the collie as a dog to stand on the moors was recognized years ago, and it is beyond dispute that the Duke of Gordon did use such a cross on one occasion.”

Although these Pointer, Setter, and Spaniel experi-ments were all over the map, they shared the same basic objective of tweaking various nuances of behavior and conformation to produce the ideal hunting companion. And that bar got higher by the minute.

For centuries, Gundog breeding consistently yielded amazing treasures like a Yukon gold strike. Exploring those parameters inevitably delineated its limitations, which came into sharper focus as expectations for Gundog performance rose. By the late 1800s dogs not only had to be fast, efficient, and totally attuned to their work, they had to do it with flash and style. Traditionally, Pointers worked alone. As sport hunting morphed into a social event, showing off became mandatory and, as Idstone emphasized, that reset the dial. He wrote, “How long ago it was discovered that a dog would ‘back’ the point of his kennel companion it would be hard to say, but at the present time no dog is considered thoroughly broken unless he will acknowledge the point of his fellow worker and become cataleptic directly as the other dog draws up to game.”

That drama sufficed for awhile. Inevitably, more specialization was required as Croxton Smith said in British Dogs. “A century ago Pointers and Setters were entrusted with the duty of retrieving game when shot as well as finding it for the guns, and then it gradually began to occur to men that it would be more convenient to have what General Hutchinson, in his classic work on dog breaking, called ‘a regular retriever’” He added that the General considered this a ludicrous addition to the normal Gundog toolkit. Developing another breed exclusively for that job may have seemed over the top in 1847. but the Retriever soon became the next de rigueur element of stylish hunting. Of course, as Gaston Phoebus noted 500 years earlier, some dogs loved retrieving, and others not so much.

By 1850, various Setter/Spaniel/Newfoundland concoctions yielded prototype Labradors, Flat-coats, and Curlies along with the realization that retrieving ability varied drastically and frequently came in combination with drawbacks like a hard mouth or gun shyness.

A badly behaved dog not only ruined a day’s hunt, but it qualified as a major social faux pas. Ash cynically observed, “When shooting with friends it does not look well to be seen racing about after your Retriever, trying to tear the game out of its mouth and hitting it over the nose with a stick!”

The precision rifle heralded the age of precision dog training. Stating the obvious, Croxton Smith said, “This required more highly-trained dogs, training often beyond the skills of amateur hunters.” Especially when it came to that holy grail of Gundogs, the “no-slip” Retriever. At that point, a previously insignificant aspect of this business came to the forefront as Sidney Turner said in his 1909 Kennel Encyclopedia. He wrote, “Breaking to perfection–that is getting all that canine nature contains out of a dog–is a high art, no matter what race of dogs is concerned.” Traditionally, gamekeepers were in charge of dog breaking and Idstone conceded that results varied drastically depending on individual skill and dedication to the task. “All modern breakers profess to teach this but many are too idle or ignorant to do it, the result is mischief and disappointment,” he said.

Maybe the Toomer brothers didn’t invent dog breaking, but they definitely redefined it with a groundbreaking experiment. Among others, Watson considered it worth recording for posterity. “Gentlemen throughout England sent their dogs to be trained by Richard and Edward Toomer,” he said. Like most early dog breakers, they began as gamekeepers; in this case, working the Royal game preserve at New Forest. As the story goes, during a disappointing training session with some Pointers and Setters, a young sow trotted by, which led the brothers to speculate on her training potential. They offered her a treat and she surprised them by approaching quite close to take it. “From that time they were determined to make a sporting pig of her.” It was a proverbial watershed moment in Gundog history. Within a day she knew her name and two weeks later she was finding and pointing partridges and rabbits. A month later she was retrieving birds, and “her nose was superior to any Pointer they had ever possessed and no two men in England had better.” Encouraged by their success, the Toomers kept going. Hunting her on the moors and heaths of southeast England, “She stood partridges, pheasants, snipes, and rabbits, including game that the Pointers missed.” She was always keen to hunt and at the end of the day, “she would come home full stretch from the forest.” Word got around and in 1801 the Rev. William Daniels detailed her accomplishments for his bestseller Rural Sports. He wrote, “She has frequently stood a single partridge at forty yards, her nose in a direct line to the bird. After standing for some time, she would drop like a setter and keep in that position until the game moved. If it took wing, she would come up to the place and put her nose down two or three times. If the bird ran she would get up and go to the place and draw slowly as the bird stopped, when she would stand it as before. She has sometimes stood snipe when all the pointers had passed by it; she would back dogs when they pointed, so she has been frequently standing in the midst of a field of pointers.”

This unorthodox experiment hinted at major discoveries that eventually evolved into behavioral science. But back in their day, the Toomers revolutionized perceptions about training. And almost overnight, these insights sent Gundog development spinning into brand new ter-ritory. And that topic deserves more attention than this brief synopsis can pro-vide. But it’s fair to say that after 600 years, the quest for Gundog perfection contin-ues to amaze us with fresh refine-ments and innovations.

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Posted by ralbee on Apr 19 2016. Filed under Current Articles, Editorial, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.