Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.
Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.
My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.
–Robert Burns “My Heart’s in the Highlands.”
In the early to mid-nineteenth century, Scotland experienced a kind of land rush. As the clan system fell apart, many Scottish tenant farmers were driven off the land. Many moved to other parts of the empire, especially Canada. Scotland was thought of as a backward place. Then Sir Walter Scott gave it a total image makeover. It became a place of where Britain’s former wildness held on. Totally enthralled by Romanticism, various people of the upper classes sought out estates in the highlands, where they could spend their days basking in Scotland’s former glory. Never mind that the Highlands were not always such an empty, desolate place. They were now.
Scotland itself does not have a national dog in the same way that England does. It is true that most people associate the collie with the Scottish agricultural scene. If I were to ask you about a breed that came from Scotland, I bet you’d think of the rough collie.
However, the collie was a commoner’s dog. It was the animal that the tenant farmers, or crofters, kept to maintain the flocks that belonged to the clan chieftains. The height of its glory came a little later. By the end of the nineteenth century, the collie became the Scottish dog.
But during this earlier period, I’ll submit that the dog that most symbolized what Scotland represented to these moneyed Romantics was the Scottish deerhound.
After all, most of these people had come to Scotland to set up estates for outdoor sport. Shooting grouse on the moors certainly was the main activity for many estates. Remember that the golden retriever was developed to work the grouse moors.
However, the real sport of a proper Scottish noble was deer stalking. Deer stalking is to Scotland what foxhunting was to England.
Scotland is still known for its large herds of red deer. To hunt such an animal, one needed a good, stout coursing dog.
And Scotland already had one. Its “rough-haired greyhound” had been coursing deer and wolves for centuries. The legendary last wolf of Scotland was said to have been killed in 1743 by a hunter named MacQueen. MacQueen’s dogs caught the wolf. Although the one that first gripped the creature was his longdog (probably a greyhound/deerhound cross), we can imagine that some of his hounds were “pure” Scottish deerhounds.
Killing off the wolf meant that the wild country had finally been tamed for more civilized pursuits. However, it was still wilder than England or Wales (or anywhere in Ireland.)
And to purchase an estate was to bask in that former glory.
To stalk deer was to bask in the former glory of the Scottish clan chieftains.
This symbolism explains why there are so many paintings of Scottish deerhounds. One of the photos of Nous, the foundational stud dog of the Guisachan line, also includes a deerhound. There is also this painting of Robin, one of Lord Ilchester’s dogs from the Guisachan line, that also included the deerhound.
If one wants to really see the extent of the deerhound’s popularity on those estates, one merely has to go to Google images and search “deerhound paintings.”
The volume is quite high. One can find so many depictions of deerhounds, including portraits of those that are in the now defunct fawn coloration.
Because the deer on these Highland estates were hunted with firearms, one wonders what utility a coursing dog could actually have.
Stonehenge grouped the deerhound with the retrievers. The reason for this classification is that when shot, the deer stalker would send his deerhounds after their quarry, and, in a similar fashion to a retriever, they would catch it.
That is not the most efficient way to hunt deer with firearms. If one knows anything about hunting deer, the absolute worst thing one can do if you wound one is to make it run. A mortally wounded deer will literally run and run until it collapses. For proper Victorians with a strong sense of sportsmanship, I doubt that this was ever the preferred way to hunt deer.
The more expedient way to hunt them was and is to shoot them and then track them. A dog could be used in this case, and the bloodhound would have been perfect for it. The bloodhound was common enough on these Scottish estates for that very purpose.
However, it had none of the symbolism and romance of the deerhound.
The deerhound’s symbol as the dog of the clan chieftains meant that no Highland estate was complete without one. Guisachan had its share of deerhounds.
Deerhounds are pretty docile dogs, as one could expect from any British sighthound. They also like to lie around the house in very regal positions.
Such animals would have been perfect for these nobles, who were very image conscious. The dogs become fixtures of the house as much as anything else.
One never needed to use the dogs to bring down deer. One merely needed to have them.
The images of Scotland and its deerhounds that were so popularized by Sir Walter Scott were very potent symbols. Those symbols meant that people would buy land in Scotland and own a dog whose job had essentially been ended with the advent of accurate firearms.
Of course, deerhounds proved to be excellent coursing dogs. They proved to be excellent hunting dogs on the American frontier, in the Australian outback, and in the wilds of Africa.
But as deer stalkers in the Scottish Highlands, their original utility shifted. They became symbolic of the Scotland that lived in the imaginations of certain wealthy people.
The deerhound became mythic.
And when those symbols no longer sustained it, the population of deerhounds crashed. The dogs still exist, and some still hunt quarry today.
But these animals are very rare.
It is actually quite a shame for the deerhound breed is known for its docile nature and its high adaptability to urban life.
But most people have never even heard of them.
The dog no longer has symbolism.
Scotland has had moments of nationalism in recent years. There have been swells of support for the Scottish nation to have its independence from the United Kingdom (and thus make what I would call the “Untied Kingdom.”)
I have seen no moves by those advocates of Scottish independence to use the deerhound as symbol. I would have thought they would have, simply because of the breed’s connection with Scottish history and culture.
Maybe the similarities between this breed and the Irish wolfhound, which is erroneously called the national dog of Ireland, prevent them from using this breed as a symbol. Maybe its connection with the nobility prevent the animal from being used as a popular symbol. Or perhaps because it was used to dispatch deer and wolves that an animal rights-conscious polity cannot use them in this fashion. (I seriously doubt that England could ever use the foxhound as a national symbol for this very purpose.)
The deerhound looms so large in Scotland’s history that I cannot think of a single breed that represents that nation so well. It is the dog that coursed the Scottish red deer that Robert Burns wrote about stalking in his poems. It is the dog that the clan chieftains kept and celebrated through the centuries. It is truly the dog of Caledonia.
Our species organizes the world through symbols. This has affected the evolution of so many dogs, for even without consciously thinking it, we allow allow dogs to represent things.
The fate of the deerhound shows that we still have to be careful about how we choose those symbols. At some point, the symbols may no longer sustain the breed or type.
And that’s when breeds become stagnant, then rare, and then extinct.
The dogs that will last through the ages are those that can be redefined through different symbols. That is the trick for preventing breed and type extinction.
