Natural History

It was a Bracco Italiano puppy.

You could be forgiven for thinking it was some breed of scent hound.

After all, it grows into a dog like this one:

The Bracco Italiano is a heavy pointer that has developed into an HPR.

There are four breeds of heavy pointer/HPR left: the Bracco Italiano, the Spinone Italiano (which looks a lot like a griffon-coated Bracco), the Burgos Pointer (Old Spanish Pointer), and the Pachon Navarro. These dogs are the oldest extant pointers and most likely developed from St. Hubert-type hounds, which were a cross between a mastiff-type dog and a lighter scent hound.

It’s likely that a few of these heavy hounds gave off pointing behavior. I’ve actually read of bloodhounds (which are known today as St. Hubert hounds) will occasionally point. Montague Stevens’s motley crew of bear hounds included a bloodhound that pointed.

So it’s very possible that heavy hounds are the ancestral strain of the original pointers. Whether their ancestry is in Spain or Italy, I cannot definitely say.

I do know that virtually all pointing breeds in existence today claim ancestry to both the Burgos pointer and the Pachon Navarro, which were made faster through cross-breeding with light scent hounds. (The Pachon Navarro’s most unique trait is its occasional double-nose, which it has passed onto the Catalburun or Turkish pointer and the odd German shorthair.)

The Bracco Italiano developed as two distinct types. One of these was the Lombard pointer, which was darker  in color and heavier in build. The other form was the Piedmontese pointer, which was nearly white and lighter in build.

During the Renaissance, these dogs were very popular among the rising merchant classes. Both the Medici and Gonzaga families kept these dogs, which they used to hunt partridges and other birds.

I should point out here that this breed is virtually unkown on this side of the Atlantic.  That means they are almost impossible to find.

The dogs above are Roano-Marrone, which in my parlance is liver roan.

The dogs also come is Bianco-Arancio (white-orange). All of these dogs are bb’s, and these dogs have brown skin, regardless of  wither they are liver roans or orange and white.

So the dog from yesterday wasn’t a French scent hound. It was just an old breed of HPR.

This breed nearly went extinct by the end of the nineteenth century. A few dedicated breeders led by Ferdinando Delor de Ferrabouc were able to standardize the breed and increase its numbers. However, as I said before, this breed is very uncommon in the United States.

If you want one, it will take a lot of work just to find a breeder.