The daily grooming should consist first of a combing with a fairly fine comb to clean out matted dirt and hair. This should be followed by a sharp brushing with what is called in stable a dandy brush. The finishing touches will be a rub down with a hound glove, such as is sold in the kennel supply stores. Such treatment will keep a terrier in almost perfect show form all the time and the stimulation of the skin will be found to act as a regular tonic.
Housed in clean, draftless kennels; given good food with lots of exercise, and with some little attention bestowed on his toilet, a terrier is sure to be healthy and happy. Prevention is proverbially better than cure, and the little work of keeping a terrier well is nothing compared to the care of a sick dog. Dogs do not make very pleasant patients, and there is the added difficulty in finding out just what really ails them, for even the most intelligent of our animals cannot tell us where his aches are and how a dose of certain medicine affects him.
CHAPTER IV
BREEDING TERRIERS
The principles upon which Darwin based his theory of evolution—which are now accepted by scientists the world over as biological laws—are the very same as those under which the dog breeder works. Modern animal breeding is evolution in which man plays Dame Nature's part.
Breeding is, however, far from being an exact science, though it is continually becoming more and more scientific in its methods. We cannot sit down, a pencil in our fingers and paper before us, and with the aid of the stud book and a set of mathematical formulas figure out a dog that will surely be a champion. We can, however, with a knowledge of the scientific data that biologists have collected in their research work supplementing the lore and traditions of the kennels, come nearer and nearer to the breeder's ideal of "a champion in every litter."
It is quite obvious that with such plastic materials to work with we can never hope to have a perfectly uniform product, but who would have it so? Dog breeding is now more uncertain than roulette, twice as fascinating as the stock market, as interestingly exciting as auction bridge. Make it a matter of mathematically exact rules working out as invariably and regularly as a machine, and the charm has vanished.
The three principles of Darwin's idea of how and why evolution acts, are heredity, variation, and selection. The law of heredity says that like will produce like; that two Airedales will have Airedale puppies; two Scotties will have Scotties; two Irish terriers will have Irish terriers. The law of variation says that no two dogs, even if they be of the same litter, will ever be exactly alike even in the smallest details. No two St. Bernards were ever alike, nor were the smallest teeth of the two smallest Pomeranians ever identical. There is ample evidence to show that the chemical composition of the muscles, bones, and blood of different animals of the same species are different, and even vary considerably in one individual at different times. The law of selection is the law of the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest. The three laws together make up the theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
What man does in breeding is the making and improving of species by artificial selection. He takes advantage of the law of heredity to establish breeds. If like always exactly reproduced like, however, that is as far as he could ever get, but because there is infinite variation, the offspring differ from their parents. By selecting those that come nearest his ideal, the breeder does just the same as Dame Nature when she kills off the unfit.
Since earliest times, man, more or less without thought or any knowledge of the whys and wherefores, has been carrying on scientific breeding in an unscientific way. Ever since he has kept domestic animals, his selection, formerly more or less unconscious, has been exerting its powerful force. For generations, the dog fanciers have been doing this: picking out the dogs and bitches most to their liking and mating them. The result is that while all breeds of dogs are closely enough related to inter-breed, still some are of comparative age and most breed wonderfully true to type.
Until quite recently, the dog breeders have been following the old, unscientific method, with some additional effort to correct faulty points in their dogs. That is, they have picked out individuals for breeding stock that came as near as possible to their ideals, and if the prospective mother was bad in head they selected a stud dog strong in this point; while a very good coated matron might be mated to a poor coated dog provided he possessed marked excellencies in other directions.