The Drentsche Patrijshond a.k.a Dutch Partridge Dog

That, my friends is a nice looking dog. And I can tell you that he is a heck of a  good hunter too!

Barak (yes, that's his name) is a Drentsche Patrijshond. He is Dutch born and bred and spends most of his time in the Netherlands chasing the surprisingly abundant game birds there. But I've actually seen Barak do his thing in France and in Canada as well as in his native land. And one day in particular really stands out in my memory.

We were hunting grouse and snipe in the Interlake area of Manitoba with Barak's people, Roel and Marjolein. I had my Pont-Audemer Spaniel Uma with me and Marjolein was handling Barak. As we made our way through a "bluff" of poplar trees, Barak slammed on point about 30 yards in front. Marjolein was about 40 yards to his right and began to move in. I heard Uma's bell coming towards me from the left. As she ran past she saw Barak and slammed into a back. 

So there I was, rare French gun (a Darne) in hand, walking up to a rare Dutch breed of pointing dog that was being backed by an even rarer French breed of pointing dog.  And to top it all off, instead of sharing the scene with one of my rough-around-the-edges hunting buddies and his beat up pump gun, my partner on the shoot that day was a beautiful Dutch woman carrying a fine over and under shotgun!

Like the English, Dutch hunters train their pointing dogs to flush on command and then stop for the shot. So when she got to within about 10 meters of Barak, Marjolein said something in Dutch that probably meant "get em up boy!"  Instantly Barak made a bold charge toward the grouse and slammed on the breaks at the flush. The bird got up at the edge of the bluff and flew into a large open meadow offering me a perfect right to left crossing shot. I fired. It dropped. Marjolein yelled whatever the Dutch equivalent is for "Good Shot!" and Barak made the retrieve. 

As he came towards us with the grouse,  I realized that Mar and I had just witnessed something that no other hunter on earth has before or since: a Drentsche Patrisjond, backed by an Épagneul de Pont-Audemer pointing a ruffed grouse for a lovely Dutch woman and a curious Canadian fellow who really wanted a grouse for diner.  

For more information on the Drentsche Patrijshond, check out the chapter on the breed in my new book or visit the website of the Drentsche Patrijshond Club of North America. 

Read more about the breed, and all the other pointing breeds from Continental Europe, in my book Pointing Dogs, Volume One: The Continentals

The Drentsche Patrijshond a.k.a Dutch Partridge Dog

That, my friends is a nice looking dog. And I can tell you that he is a heck of a  good hunter too!

Barak (yes, that's his name) is a Drentsche Patrijshond. He is Dutch born and bred and spends most of his time in the Netherlands chasing the surprisingly abundant game birds there. But I've actually seen Barak do his thing in France and in Canada as well as in his native land. And one day in particular really stands out in my memory.

We were hunting grouse and snipe in the Interlake area of Manitoba with Barak's people, Roel and Marjolein. I had my Pont-Audemer Spaniel Uma with me and Marjolein was handling Barak. As we made our way through a "bluff" of poplar trees, Barak slammed on point about 30 yards in front. Marjolein was about 40 yards to his right and began to move in. I heard Uma's bell coming towards me from the left. As she ran past she saw Barak and slammed into a back. 

So there I was, rare French gun (a Darne) in hand, walking up to a rare Dutch breed of pointing dog that was being backed by an even rarer French breed of pointing dog.  And to top it all off, instead of sharing the scene with one of my rough-around-the-edges hunting buddies and his beat up pump gun, my partner on the shoot that day was a beautiful Dutch woman carrying a fine over and under shotgun!

Like the English, Dutch hunters train their pointing dogs to flush on command and then stop for the shot. So when she got to within about 10 meters of Barak, Marjolein said something in Dutch that probably meant "get em up boy!"  Instantly Barak made a bold charge toward the grouse and slammed on the breaks at the flush. The bird got up at the edge of the bluff and flew into a large open meadow offering me a perfect right to left crossing shot. I fired. It dropped. Marjolein yelled whatever the Dutch equivalent is for "Good Shot!" and Barak made the retrieve. 

As he came towards us with the grouse,  I realized that Mar and I had just witnessed something that no other hunter on earth has before or since: a Drentsche Patrisjond, backed by an Épagneul de Pont-Audemer pointing a ruffed grouse for a lovely Dutch woman and a curious Canadian fellow who really wanted a grouse for diner.  

For more information on the Drentsche Patrijshond, check out the chapter on the breed in my new book or visit the website of the Drentsche Patrijshond Club of North America. 

Read more about the breed, and all the other pointing breeds from Continental Europe, in my book Pointing Dogs, Volume One: The Continentals

Dog Breeds. What are they good for? Part 2.

Félix wearing a camo neoprene vest in the Libau Marsh

If, as we've seen in part 1, dog breeds are nothing more than wobbly man-made creations, the question is: should we even have breeds?

For me, the answer is yes. But it is not because I think closed stud books and "pure" breeds are in and of themselves, good ideas, but because they are, for all their faults and frailties, all we have to work with.

We've learned to live with the quirky system that created our breeds in the past and maintains them now. For better or worse, breeds have become a part of our sporting heritage and represent personal, regional and national identities within the overall community of hunters and well beyond.

Breeds are not very practical entities, they are forever fighting against their very being and would disappear within a couple generations if we let them go. But they do provide a certain level of predictability (Labs produce litters of Lab puppies) and can be easy to understand (Pointers point, Springers spring etc.).

In fact, having breeds is actually a good idea...on paper. They are like having different brands of a consumer item, different flavors of ice cream as it were. But the way they are created, developed and maintained is inherently flawed. It is based on a bizarre mix of "blue blood" myth, magical thinking and misunderstood Darwinism. Instead of improving breeds, our systems actually sacrifices real progress on the alter of breed purity.

The sled dog concept on the other hand is a far less dogmatic and more pragmatic approach to breeding the better canine mousetrap (for whatever purpose). It removes the burden of the closed stub book and allows breeders to focus on one goal only: create a better dog. Period. I wonder what would happen in pointing dog field trials and tests if the organizers opened up a category for "mixed" breeds. If breeders were allowed to breed to whatever they want and run their dogs against all others. My guess is that give enough resources, really smart, driven, dedicated breeders would come up with some fantastic dogs.

We tend to view the creators of our current breeds as brilliant men from a bygone era...and they were. But they were not supermen and most of them had the equivalent of about a 6th grade education and were completely in the dark regarding the science of genetics. Give the brilliant men and women of today the same freedom and resources as Korthals had in his day (imagine a genius level breeder working for Bill Gates) and what do you think we would get?

I think we would end up with a situation similar to what we already have, minus all the hand wringing about keeping breeds pure and all the fuss about DNA testing etc. There would be a type of dog that looks remarkably like the Pointer kicking ass in all age field trials, a dog that looks remarkably like the Lab dominating retriever trials and a bunch of wiry beasts with beards and moustaches along with GSP looking dogs at the top of the NAVHDA heap.

Because at the end of the day, the top performing breeds in the world today are those that have allowed a certain amount of wiggle room when it comes to being a pure breed. Their creators from the past and the people who breed them now focus (mainly) on one goal: creating a better dog....meanwhile all the others are still running around in circles, chasing their Victorian age shadows.

The Pont Audemer Spaniel

Me and Uma the Ponto with a Dakota rooster

Last week's B.A.W. was the Brittany, one of the most popular gundog breeds in the world. This week we'll have a look at its cousin from Normandy, the almost completely unknown, curly-haired "clown of the marsh" named the Pont-Audemer Spaniel.

The 'Ponto' as it is affectionately called, is one of several Épagneul (pointing spaniel) breeds from France. It is named after the small city of Pont-Audemer, in Normandy. The breed was once relatively common in north-western France, but time, fashion and two world wars took their toll. Today, the Ponto is just hanging on with an average of only 30 to 50 pups born per year in the whole world! 

As far as I know there are only 3 Pontos in North America, all of them in Canada. Two live here in Winnipeg and one in Ontario.  In France there are only about half a dozen breeders and because there are so few Pontos around, the breed doesn't have its own club but is part of a club that represents three breeds, the club de l' Épagneul Picard , du Bleu de Picardie et du Pont Audemer.

The preview of the book that I now have on-line includes the entire Ponto chapter. It has a ton of information on the breed and features photos of my wife's dog Uma, Uma's cousin Vinnie and various aunts and uncles from France. You can click on the book below to flip the pages or to enlarge it for easier reading on screen.

Enjoy!

Read more about the breed, and all the other pointing breeds from Continental Europe, in my book Pointing Dogs, Volume One: The Continentals

Dog breeds. What are they good for? Part 1.

Recently someone asked me about dog breeds. Specifically, how and why the various breeds were created in the first place? and why do we still have them now? Here are my thoughts:

The concept of a breed of animal or plant is relatively new, only taking hold about a 150 years ago at a time when people were moving away from the idea that everything was controlled by the all-knowing sky wizard and towards the notion that through science (or at least science-y sounding systems) man could control nature and mold it to his tastes. The "sport" of pure breeding dogs came about when social, political, and scientific forces such as Darwinism (and its twisted off-shoot Eugenics) and the Victorian mania for classifying everything from insects to elements all sort of lined up.

Soon, all kinds of "pure" dog breeds were created synthetically by mixing general types of dogs or, in some cases, by distilling naturally occurring land races that had been around for centuries. Studbooks were opened for them, then slammed shut as soon as enough fathers were bred to their daughters and mothers to their sons. Next, the breed's back stories were written and greatly embellished or even pulled out of thin air.

And for a while it worked! Breeds flourished and seemed to pop up everywhere. They were declared independent and separate from the others over the flimsiest of excuses...a different shade of coat colour, a few centimeters of size, being on the wrong side (or right side depending on where you were) of some political border or river or mountain range. In fact, the divisions between breeds are the most artificial aspect of the entire system. They exist only in the overheated imaginations of breed supporters. Skin all the pointing breeds out for example, ignore a few inches of height and some aspects of head shape and they are all pretty much interchangeable.

But here we are in 2011, and we know all about the dangers of closed studbooks and the risks of shallow gene pools and breeds kept so "pure" that all the members are nearly clones of each other...and suffering terrible disease as a result.  So why do will still have "pure" breeds and why do we spend so much time, energy and money keeping the artificial divisions between them intact?

Because their very existence depends on people being people...sentimental, superstitious, silly, not nearly as bright as we think we are... people.

Dogs exist to please us and somehow we find pleasure in having so many different breeds. Somehow, knowing that on many levels it makes zero sense to keep breeds "pure", we recoil from the thought of "polluting" our breed with the unclean blood of another. Dog breeds still exist because we've all bought into an outdated, disproved Victorian fantasy about pureness of blood, royal families, breed improvement and social climbing. Basically, our forefathers brewed a batch of kool-aid and we are still eagerly sipping on it. 

Yet some people have managed to see past the smoke and mirrors. But they are not running pointing dogs. They are running "mutts" in the Iditarod. And their dogs would run circles around ours.

Continue reading in Part 2: Should we maintain the "pure" breeds or just mix them all up?

Dog breeds. What are they good for? Part 1.

Recently someone asked me about dog breeds. Specifically, how and why the various breeds were created in the first place? and why do we still have them now? Here are my thoughts:

The concept of a breed of animal or plant is relatively new, only taking hold about a 150 years ago at a time when people were moving away from the idea that everything was controlled by the all-knowing sky wizard and towards the notion that through science (or at least science-y sounding systems) man could control nature and mold it to his tastes. The "sport" of pure breeding dogs came about when social, political, and scientific forces such as Darwinism (and its twisted off-shoot Eugenics) and the Victorian mania for classifying everything from insects to elements all sort of lined up.

Soon, all kinds of "pure" dog breeds were created synthetically by mixing general types of dogs or, in some cases, by distilling naturally occurring land races that had been around for centuries. Studbooks were opened for them, then slammed shut as soon as enough fathers were bred to their daughters and mothers to their sons. Next, the breed's back stories were written and greatly embellished or even pulled out of thin air.

And for a while it worked! Breeds flourished and seemed to pop up everywhere. They were declared independent and separate from the others over the flimsiest of excuses...a different shade of coat colour, a few centimeters of size, being on the wrong side (or right side depending on where you were) of some political border or river or mountain range. In fact, the divisions between breeds are the most artificial aspect of the entire system. They exist only in the overheated imaginations of breed supporters. Skin all the pointing breeds out for example, ignore a few inches of height and some aspects of head shape and they are all pretty much interchangeable.

But here we are in 2011, and we know all about the dangers of closed studbooks and the risks of shallow gene pools and breeds kept so "pure" that all the members are nearly clones of each other...and suffering terrible disease as a result.  So why do will still have "pure" breeds and why do we spend so much time, energy and money keeping the artificial divisions between them intact?

Because their very existence depends on people being people...sentimental, superstitious, silly, not nearly as bright as we think we are... people.

Dogs exist to please us and somehow we find pleasure in having so many different breeds. Somehow, knowing that on many levels it makes zero sense to keep breeds "pure", we recoil from the thought of "polluting" our breed with the unclean blood of another. Dog breeds still exist because we've all bought into an outdated, disproved Victorian fantasy about pureness of blood, royal families, breed improvement and social climbing. Basically, our forefathers brewed a batch of kool-aid and we are still eagerly sipping on it. 

Yet some people have managed to see past the smoke and mirrors. But they are not running pointing dogs. They are running "mutts" in the Iditarod. And their dogs would run circles around ours.

Continue reading in Part 2: Should we maintain the "pure" breeds or just mix them all up?