Retrieverman's Weblog

Have a look at this dog.

Her mother was a basset. Her father was a golden retriever.

The hound features dominate, except in the face. The golden that was her sire probably was a field bred, judging from her narrower muzzle and very dark color.

Bassets got their features from being crossed with bloodhounds, so if you crossed a golden with a bloodhound, it would look like this dog, just with normal legs.

Can someone show me a photo or painting of a golden with short hair, very long ears, and loose skin?

You can’t.

The closest I can find is this dog, but she has only the short hair. She was half Tweed water dog or Tweed water spaniel, and these dogs had coats like the modern Chesapeake Bay retriever.

I am very skeptical of this cross, not only because the evidence for it amounts to heresay. Lord Ilchester said that the cross happened (when he was a boy and wouldn’t have known for sure), and that it was written down on a piece of paper that was later lost. (How convenient!)

He also said that the dogs with bloodhound in them were rather savage. I laugh at this, because the hound dog called a bloodhound is a pack hound. It is not an aggressive breed at all. He may have been confusing them with the Cuban bloodhound, which, as far as I know, never existed in Britain.

I think it is more likely that the story of the bloodhound cross is a vestige of the story about the Russian circus dogs. Remember, the legend went that the 1st Baron Tweedmouth bought these circus dogs at Brighton and then linebred from them. When he needed new blood, he crossed them with a bloodhound.

Bloodhounds may have been crossed into the Tweed water dog, and they were probably used in Irish and Gordon setters, as well as some of the early retrievers. That said, there is one good way to make breed lose its trainability, and that is to breed it with a dog known for being less than easy to train.

Bloodhounds are nice dogs with wonderful noses, but I don’t think anyone says that they are very easy to train. They are meant to follow their noses.

A very similar story got worked into the Chesapeake Bay retriever. They were said to be part otter, which is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard (even worse than theory that chihuahuas are derived from fennec foxes!) This story was amended to say that they were part otterhound, which is, at the very least, a member of the same species. Now, there may be foxhounds or proto-coonhounds in the Chessies, but it seems to me that this story is also a permutation upon an breed legend. After all, the short-haired Chessies were called “otter-coated” dogs well into the twentieth century.

This is why you must be skeptical of official breed histories, even ones that have copious documentation, as is the case with the golden retriever.