SPORTS AND PASTIMES.

DOG BREAKING.

To ensure good sport, the shooter must be provided with good dogs. However abundant game may be, there can be no real sport without good; and however scarce game may be, a good day’s sport is attainable with good dogs, by a person who feels what sport is, and who does not look upon filling the game-bag and loading the keepers with game, as the sole end and aim of the sportsman’s occupation. The mere act of killing game no more constitutes sport, than the jingling of rhyme constitutes poetry. Since, then, good dogs contribute to good sport, the shooter should be careful to whom he entrusts the breaking of them. Bad habits, by dogs, as well as by bipeds, are sooner acquired than got rid of. If it suit his convenience, the shooter should frequently accompany the breakers when practising his dogs: he should direct them to make use of few words, and those words should be the same that he is in the habit of using. A multiplicity of directions only serves to puzzle a dog, as a person’s speaking Irish, Scotch, and Welsh alternately would perplex a Spaniard!