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.
The Labrador as a breed of beef cattle
This is a very interesting development in the Labrador.
But it seems to me that they’d rather have them look like beef cattle than retrievers!
I didn’t realize how much bone (which looks a lot like fat) that they were breeding into the Labrador.
I knew the KC was proposing a standard revision for the Labrador, but I didn’t realize how bad things actually were.
The things that could save this dog from this form are pretty obvious: there are a lot of them and not all of them are show dogs bred to this standard.
The poor Sussex spaniel has none of those things going for it.
Willie and his squirrels.
Willie is a young Jack Russell from Fayetteville, North Carolina, who recently spent a weekend at my grandpa’s house in very rural West Virginia. Willie lives with my aunt and uncle, and he’s very smart. He is dead serious about retrieving things, which is more than I can say about Miley.
Like many of his breed, he is likes to chase small furry things. At home, Willie and Madeleine, the other Jack Russell who lives at that household, can be launched with the mere mention of the word squirrel. They take squirrel hunting very seriously. It is as if it is their main duty to keep the bushy-tailed rats off the lawn.
However, they are contained in a fenced yard, allowing the squirrels an easy escape from the jaws of these small brown and white wolves. In all the years they have been chasing squirrels in North Carolina, they have caught only one squirrel. (Of course, dogs have a hard time catching squirrels, whether they are fenced in or not.)
As I have mentioned earlier, West Virginia’s trees have not produced enough mast this year to feed the large numbers of squirrels, turkeys, and white-tailed deer.
My grandpa has taken pity upon the squirrels, in part because he actually wants to keep their numbers high for next year. He hunts squirrels, and he knows that if they squirrels go into winter without a bounty of nuts from the fall, there will be fewer squirrels next year.
So he has set up a massive squirrel feeding operation. One of his feeders is on the deck in full view of his sliding glass door. Here, the vast hordes of fox squirrels and normal and melanistic grays fight over the corn in the feeder all day long. It is quite entertaining to watch.
And when Willie and Maddy were at his house a few weekends ago, they very much agreed. They would stand by the sliding glass door like wolves staring down a herd of caribou. Maddy would quiver all the way down to the tip of her docked tail, and Willie would stand like a pointer with one foot raised. When the sliding glass door was opened the first time, Maddy ran right off the deck after the squirrels, and Willy chased them out of the yard and across the old pasture into the woods. This was Jack Russell heaven.
Getting to watch and chase so many squirrels really had an effect on Willie.
When they returned home, Willie went to his toy box and took out three of his stuffed toys.
Now, Willie has a collection of toys. He has more stuffed toys than many children do. He had a wide selection to choose from.
So it was very interesting that Willie picked out the three stuffed squirrels that were in his box.
Willie was expressing himself with his toys. I don’t think it takes a genius to recognize this.
He was showing his people that he really liked watching and chasing those large numbers of squirrels all weekend.
And it is really quite remarkable. He was using objects that represented the animals that he saw. It is obvious that he knows those stuffed squirrels aren’t the same as the real ones, but he does know that they somehow represent the real ones.
***
Willie is not the only dog to use toys to represent things.
I saw this program on the National Geographic Channel a few years ago. This doberman had been abandoned and had trouble trusting people. He eventually came out of his shell, but what was really interesting is that he also used toys to express himself:
Tool use is not very common in non-human animals, snd in many cases, it is unclear whether the animals are using tools as the result of inherited motor patterns or are actually using learning too use through observation or reasoning.
Chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans have been seen using tools as a result of their novel intelligence. They clearly learn tool use through observation.
Now, I think that is the latter type of tool use that we’re seeing here. This dog probably watched children use that raft and then decided to use it to fetch without getting too wet.
This is actually a more sophisitcated and unusual behavior than you might suspect.
