The primeval forests, with their clouds of waterfowl and passenger pigeons, their multitudes of squirrels and flocks of turkeys, determined in large part which hunting dogs would become popular in North America.
The eastern hardwood forests rendered sight-hunting hounds like salukis and Afghans useless, but there was a huge need for retrievers in the New World. The gun dog breeds that originated here clearly prove we were once a nation of waterfowlers: the Chesapeake Bay retriever, the American water spaniel, and the Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever. The Lab is considered an English invention, although the St. John's dog, the Lab's direct ancestor and a waterfowl retriever, came from Newfoundland.
The abundant forest game of the New World shaped breed development as well. The black-and-tan coonhound is a distinctly American dog, refined from bloodhounds to be taller, faster, and better suited to chasing and treeing raccoons. The Boykin spaniel of South Carolina hunted turkeys as well as quail and ducks.
Even today, breeds continue to change and evolve. The tremendous comeback of the wild turkey in recent years inspired a few dedicated breeders to create a strain of turkey dogs in the tradition of the fall turkey dogs of the mid-Atlantic. Others are converting Labs into pointing dogs, reflecting the reality that the days of huge waterfowl flights are gone forever, and the modern bird hunter tends to be a generalist.
Taking a jaundiced look ahead to an increasingly paved and suburbanized future, we have to wonder, what will the hunting dog of the 21st century look like?
"When the buffalo are gone," said Sitting Bull, "We will hunt mice, for we are hunters." If we ever do have to hunt mice, we'll breed American mouse-pointing terriers to help us, for we've been dog men almost as long as we've been hunters.
Canine Ancestors
The miacis, a clever, tree-climbing little critter that lived 50 million years ago was the common ancestor of the bear, raccoon, and dog. Miacis begat Hesperocyon, a short-legged, weasel-like animal, who begat Temnocyon and Cynodesmus about 25 million years ago.
These latter two were larger, shorter-tailed, definitely doglike. Temnocyon became the ancestor of today's wild dogs in India, Africa, and Brazil. Meanwhile Cynodesmus begat Tomarctus, the direct ancestor of our modern wolves, coyotes, jackals, and foxes.
Breed Variations
You will often read in dog books that a certain breed is wide-ranging, or close-working, or aloof, or good with children, or whatever. While such breed stereotypes often are true, individuals within breeds vary widely. Don't automatically expect any German shorthaired pointer, for instance, to be close working; it may have been bred to compete in horseback field trials with English pointers.
The best way to judge how a pup will turn out is knowing something about the dam and sire. Make sure they were active hunters; hundreds of years of selective breeding for the field can be undone in just a few generations. Moreover, many breeds, like the English springer spaniel, have virtually split into two strains: one for show and one for the field. Caveat emptor.
Breed Profiles
Labrador Retriever
America's most popular gun dog probably derives from an old French breed, the St. Hubert's bloodhound. English fishermen took hounds with them to Newfoundland, where they were used to retrieve both ducks and fish! The dogs, by then known as St. John's dogs, were brought back to England in the 1800s, where selective breeding turned them into the Labs we know and love today. Labs appeared in the U.S. around 1920.
Beagle
The beagle is basically a miniature English foxhound descended, like all scent hounds, from the bloodhound. Beagles have been around in more or less in their current form since well before Elizabethan times. Always used for hunting rabbits and hares, beagles became popular in the mid-19th century and were imported to the U.S. in the 1860s.
German Shorthaired Pointer
German shorthaired pointers, along with many other continental "versatile" breeds, originated in the 1800s in Germany in response, the story goes, to high dog taxes that made owning more than one hunting dog prohibitively expensive.
The Shorthair is a mixture of Spanish pointer, bloodhound, and English pointer. They will point birds, retrieve waterfowl, hunt fur, and track deer. The first litter of shorthairs in America was whelped on July 4, 1925.
English Springer Spaniel
Although not recognized as a separate breed until 1902 by the English Kennel Club, English springers date back at least 600 years. Some even believe the Romans brought spaniels to England as early as 43 B.C. As the name suggests, spaniels probably originated in Spain, and trace their origins back to the Great Pyrenees and other large mountain breeds. Springers came to America around 1920.
Copyright (c) 1997 Philip Bourjaily. All rights reserved.
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