Of course this is intended to be hypercritical, but it is necessary to point out that Gaby is 22 inches at the shoulder, and Count Wind’em, his best ancestor, was nearer 25 than 24 inches. This is too much to lose in twenty years, for it really means losing nearly half the size of the dog.
It is pleasing to note that the American cross with the old blood, even with small dogs on both sides, seems to recover the lost size. This is a great point; because, although a good little one is enormously better than a lumbering big one, yet a good big one is out of all proportion better than the same form on a small scale.
A few years ago, Mr. B. J. Warwick was winning all before him in the field with setters of very small size. The blood of most of them was a blend of all the sorts named above except the American strain. That is, they were descended from Ranger on one side and from the late Mr. Heywood Lonsdale’s sort on the other. They were beautifully broken, had for the most part capital noses and plenty of sense, but few of them are likely to breed dogs better than themselves, because they mostly lacked external form and size. Many of them were bred by Mr. Elias Bishop, who ran a better sort in the Puppy Stakes in the spring of 1906,—Ightfield Mac,—more fitted, in his then form, for American than for English field trials. The demand there is for a dog; here it is a little too much for a breaker. It is a question whether allowance enough is made at field trials for the indiscretions of youth. The consequence of judging puppies as if they were old dogs is that, when they become so, they are not a very high-couraged lot, and the winning puppies seldom become mature cracks.
There is plenty of evidence that the encouragement of docility instead of determination in puppies has done more to run down English setters than even in-breeding itself. The doer of the most brilliant work will go out if he makes one mistake. In practice there is always a duffer that does not make one.
That is the worst thing that can be said against field trials, and it has only been true of late years. The old style of judging was to select the most brilliant worker for highest honours, and under it English setters made rapid strides.
This handicapping of great capacity goes farther than merely turning a dog out for a trivial fault. The judges often seem to demand a dog with small capacity—that is, compared with the old demand. Here is a comparative instance. In 1870, when Drake the pointer won the Champion Stake, he and a competitor were turned off in a field through which there ran a line of hurdles cutting the field in two. Drake disregarded the hurdles and beat the field as if there had been none, and did the whole field in the same time that his competitor took to do the half—that is, only one side the hurdles. He did not scramble it, but methodically quartered every inch. Precisely the same kind of field occurred at the National Trials in 1906; but when Pitchford Duke got through the hurdles, his handler, knowing the feeling of judges generally, ran after him, whistling and shouting, to get him back to do the 150 yards wide strip that the hurdles divided from the bulk of the field. It is true that Pitchford Duke did not make as if he was going to quarter the whole field in Drake’s style, but had it been Drake himself the breaker would probably have done just as he did for Duke, and scolded him for what was held to show brains and capacity in 1870 by some of the best sportsmen in the country who were acting as judges, and at a time when everybody knew what dogs should do, because everybody used them.
However, it is dangerous to say a word by way of criticism of an institution to which we owe it that setters and pointers have been preserved at all. We should have had no dog with a will to imitate Drake had it not existed. The only object of saying anything is to appeal for a little more value for “class,” and a little less for trick performers. It is very difficult to give effect to a wish of this sort in judging, because faults are facts, and facts are stubborn things; whereas class is generally, but not always, a matter of opinion, on which judges may hold conflicting views. The author was once hunting a brace of setters at the National Trials, and they had done such remarkable work that the late Sir Vincent Corbet, who was judging, was heard to tell someone “that black-headed dog has been finding birds in the next parish.” Much of this work had been done under the slope of a hill, where the spectators could not see it; they had formed a semicircle at the other end of the last field that the brace had to do, and the black-headed dog came up the field, treating as a fence the line of spectators who had formed up 100 yards or so within the field. He hunted up to their toes before turning along the line, and dropped to a point within 10 yards of several hundred people, who had been standing there so long that they were obviously and audibly quite sure there was nothing at the point. When the author came up, he could not move the pointing dog; the latter evidently thought he was too near already, and he had a brace of partridges, much to everybody’s surprise. This dog, Sable Bondhu by name, was the very highest “class,” and to show how right the judge’s estimate of him was, it may be recorded that he was the performer of a very remarkable piece of work on grouse.
CAPT. H. HEYWOOD LONSDALE’S FIELD TRIAL IGHTFIELD DOT AND IGHTFIELD ROB ROY, WITH SCOT THEIR BREAKER
