Noranby Diana is the second dog from the right. She was an English conformation champion, and she had completed a leg or two of her field championship.
This picture always haunts me when I think of golden retrievers. These are mostly Noranby dogs, mainly descendants of Lady and Culham Brass. Diana’s sire was the famous Michael of Moreton, a dog that also can found in the pedigrees of a great many goldens. I cannot find a good picture of him, but he was similar to Diana in color. However, he had a wavier coat than she did.
The second dog from the right is Ch. Noranby Diana. She would never be shown today. If someone saw a dog like her today, they’d declare her a setter cross. If you did see a dog like her, it would be in a field line golden strain. She placed in trials, but she never finished her field championship.
Diana represents what goldens once were. The dark dogs are now out of favor, except in the performance bred lines, but even in those lines, the dogs of this type are being bred out.
My first golden was very similar to Diana, but she had a lighter colored coat and a white tale tip. She was very clearly of field breeding, with a wild obsession about retrieving all sorts of things and flushing birds. She had a litter of puppies in which one of the dog puppies was exactly Diana’s color. He was given to the stud owners as pick of the litter for his strong retrieving instincts (retrieving at 5 weeks) and dark color (dark color’s association with working ability is an old superstition about goldens).
I’ve always wanted a dog like that dog puppy. A dark colored male golden. Unexaggerated. Rustic. Biddable. Intelligent. Perfect.
It is because of this desire and my deep appreciation for these dogs that this picture haunts me. And it sickens me that the golden is degenerating into a lazy rug with long “white” hair. Should we lose the old type golden retriever, it would be a terrible event in the history of dogs, very much on the level of the extinction of the St. John’s water and the Tweed water spaniel.
I’ve been searching high and low for even a single genetic disease that anyone…. anyone has ever successfully bred out of their dogs. I can’t find one. I keep finding example after example of coat colors and coat lengths and eye colors that have been bred out. But not a single disease.
I even see a ton of sites that believe that aggression has been bred out of the bull dog (gag!) but still, no major accomplishments when it comes to something very simple like disease.
From what I’ve seen, even the hand full of DNA tests we have now are simply used by the matrons to breed the dogs they want to breed, even justify that their dogs are healthy enough to inbreed and linebreed, and not make a concerted effort to “improve” their breeds.
And really now, what is with this notion of constant “improvement” … it seems just like homozygosity enforcement to me. To me, dogs should be like the Jeep Cherokee which remained, virtually unchanged, on the market for 15+ years. Or perhaps many of the German models which had shelf lives of decades. Get it right, and stop. Maintain. Stop “improving,” especially when the only tool you use for improvement is inbreeding and tossing out the riffraff.
Very good points.
The only genetic disease I heard of disappearing from a breed by selective breeding is a disorder called “night blindness” in the Irish setter. I don’t even know what this disease is! But apparently they don’t have it. It may not have existed in the first place, but it’s gone now.
Some recent studies of ancient wolves show that they were far more genetically diverse 30,000 years ago. Today, they and dogs are mere shadoes of that genetic diversity. We selected for tameness in the dog, then for low predator behavior, then for other behavioral traits, and finally for closed registries. All of these truncated dog genetic diversity. Then wolves were shot over so much and poisoned that their genetic diversity began to drop. We have discovered some genetic remnants of that diversity in India and in the Himalayas, where there are divergent genotypes in the wolves. Because of this genetic divergence from the main wolf lines, some scientists want them to be recognized as separate species. I don’t know if they’ve squared this genetic divergence with this new evidence on how diverse wolf populations once were.
In a weird way, I like to think of myself as a dog reactionary. Conserve as much as possible!
Me too. Conserve as much as possible. I’d hope that future scientific breakthroughs will allow us to splice and cut crap genes and thus really “save” our breeds.
But I know that the kennel clubs et al will ban this practice just like they have banned cloning. The funny thing is, a clone is exactly what they really want.
Your point on declaring remnant genotypes in wolves also rings home with Border Collies. If you take a tree and cut the middle third out of it, do the left and right sides suddenly become different breeds when we had no problem calling them the same breed when it was just one tree?
I write about this issue in two posts.
It amazes me how much pigeon holing the breeding community is want to do. You can only fold a piece of paper in half so many times, or cut it in half so many times before it becomes problematic. Yet we need “improvement!”
I think I may have found two relect populations of “old-type collie.” http://www.welsh-sheepdogs.co.uk/ These are loose eyed.The solid black dog in the gallery looks like the English shepherd I had as a boy.
The other can be found out in rural America, where you can find ads for old farm shepherds. Engliush shepherds are usually what they mean, but sometimes, it’s very different dog, more like a collie.