The Complete English Wing Shot

by George Teasdale Teasdale-Buckell

There may be dogs of the old type hidden away in Ireland, and if so they are much more worthy of attention than those which for so long have been bred for show points. The best Irish setters the author has seen for the last ten years are those of Mr. Cheetham. This gentleman kept them for grouse shooting in the Lews, and as his shooting was late in the year, when the heat had departed, they were admirably suited for the purpose.

The opinions given are of course based upon comparisons of the breed with the very best of other races of setters and pointers. There is one point, however, in which the Irish setters seem to be the inferiors of all others—namely, the large proportion of inferior animals bred, compared with the small number up to a fair English setter working standard. This remark has reference to the natural ability, and not at all to the difficulty of breaking the breed. The latter charge against them is true also, but only because their excitement is greater than their love of questing. Mostly they would rather chase a hare than point a bird. It has been said of them that they want breaking afresh every year, but that has not been the experience of the author, who has invariably found that a thoroughly broken dog is broken for life, of whatever breed it may happen to be.

Irish breaking, however, has not always been very thorough.

It has sometimes been said of the old dogs of Ireland that they required half a day’s work before they were steady. In that case, they would require similar renewal of breaking every day, and the author has made the observation that such dogs are too wild all the morning and too tired all the afternoon to be a pleasure to shoot over.

But they are not all hard to break; some of those which are not too excitable are very collie-like in their intuition of your wishes and their anxiety to obey them.

It is noteworthy that the Irish have always held their field trials in the autumn.

An old writer says that the English claim theirs as the true English spaniel, whereas the Irish claim theirs to be the real true English spaniel. This is not very informative. The dogs alluded to were of course both setters, but of what colour we are not told in respect of the Irish dog.

The author shot over the celebrated field trial winner Plunket for several seasons and ran him at field trials, but after he had turned two years he was little use in the spring, whereas he won well in the autumn, when game was shot to his points. In this he was similar to a much better dog, his own son, already referred to. Plunket was a fast dog, and his boldness and beauty in going up to game was quite remarkable, as he would draw up to birds at racing speed, as if he meant catching them, but stopped suddenly and in time. Then, when they ran away from his point, the moment he was ordered to draw on he would again dash forward, and again locate his game with equally sudden points. But the majority of good English setters at that time could out-stay him, and particularly the Laverack setters Countess and Nellie, with which he often worked, could have killed him. Mr. O’Callaghan’s setters were rarely good enough to go to field trials, and although two of them won there, they were very lucky to do so. Perhaps these dogs deteriorated less than any other breed that were bred for show, or perhaps it would be safer to say they declined in work slower than others, but there is no doubt that they were on the down grade, not only in work but in true setter appearance. That they were as pretty as any dogs could be at one time is freely admitted, but they had lost three-parts of the scope of Palmerston and Kate, and their character of work was spaniel-like rather than setter-like—in fact, just what their looks led one to expect they would prove to be.

Unfortunately, the author has never seen the Irish field trials: the reason is that the English pointers have usually proved better than the Irish setters, so that there seemed to be nothing novel to see by going. But it is very difficult to believe that the show Irish setters that usually represent the breed at English trials are the best workers of the race. The character of the breed when the author first saw it at work in the sixties was distinctly setter-like, and not spaniel-like.

There has been a great deal of controversy upon how the dark-red colour arose. Mr. John King, who knew more of Irish setters than any other man known to the author, affirmed that red-and-white was the original colour, and the general opinion was that those of the last-named markings were the most easy to break. All the most setter-like Irish that have come before the author have had more or less white upon them, and as colour certainly denotes blood or origin, and the manner of hunting of the whole-red dogs is spaniel-like, it does not seem to be unlikely that the springer spaniel, the colour of a blood bay horse without a white hair spoken of by a Suffolk parson in the middle of the eighteenth century, may have had a good deal to do with the origin of the red Irish setter. At any rate, no other setters or spaniels of the colour can be traced in the early history of what was then the English spaniel, or the setter.