Natural History

This image comes from Dog Breaking by William Nelson Hutchinson (1865).

The dog at the front is obviously an English setter.

The other two are listed as retrievers, but they are very setter-like. Not unusual when Hutchinson clearly states that the best retriever is a setter crossed with the “true Newfoundland” (St. John’s water dog).

However, one dog– and I’m assuming it’s the dog to far right of the image– is said to be a retriever with bloodhound in it.

It may have some bloodhound ancestry, but the dog doesn’t look that much like it has any bloodhound features, except for the prominent occiput, which can occur in a variety of breeds from very different ancestries.

It appears that this dog has some feathering. Feathering would have been almost axiomatic in retrievers of that day, for they were mostly crossed between (long-haired) St. John’s water dogs that were exported from Newfoundland because of their inferior coats and some sort of setter.

However, this trait is recessive.  No bloodhound is feathered.

If this dog were an F1 bloodhound/feathered retriever cross, it would have something nearer to the bloodhound’s coat.

I don’t see that sort of coat on this dog.

And the other retriever looks so much like a setter that only the labeling in the text gives away its identity. However, it could be part bloodhound because of its “furrowed brow.”

If either of these dogs had bloodhound ancestry, it would have to have been more distant that the F1 cross. Perhaps it had a bloodhound grandsire or grandmother.

Of course, it is actually hard to tell if the dog on the far right is actually feathered.

But it appears to have some feathering, which means that if it’s part bloodhound, the bloodhound ancestry is more remote than implied in the caption.

I don’t know why anyone would cross a bloodhound with a retriever. The number of bloodhounds that actually have retrieving instinct has to be incredibly small. Bloodhounds aren’t bred for biddablity, but because they were bred as limers (scent hounds that tracked game and spoor on a leash), they were more biddable than foxhounds or harriers. The only advantage that bloodhound blood would impart onto any retriever is nose, which is important and would have been even more important in the type of battue shoots that were commonplace in nineteenth century Britain.

But you might lose quite a bit of biddability through such a cross.

I should note that I have always been skeptical of the common story that golden retrievers are part bloodhound. I think this is mostly a hold-over from the circus dog myth, which very often stated that the circus dogs were crossed with bloodhounds to decrease their size and darken their color. There is some evidence that there were bloodhound retriever experimental crosses at Guisachan. Giles Stephen Holland Fox-Strangways, 6th Earl of Ilchester, claimed to have seen these dogs,  but from my understanding, there was only one litter of crossbred retriever bloodhounds — and these were given away.

There is no record of the bloodhound cross in any of the kennel records at Guisachan.

I can see the possible logic for trying to add bloodhound to a line of retrievers, but it seems that the addition of the bloodhound would add too many deleterious traits to compensate for the supposed increases in scenting ability that should come from the cross.

Having grown up in a culture that worships the large scenthound, I can say that the traits of a good coonhound are the antithesis of a good retriever. A retriever is supposed to be biddable and ruled by the voice and whistle of his master. A coonhound is supposed to be ruled by his nose.

Coonhounds aren’t bloodhounds, of course– although some of them do have both bloodhound and Old Southern hound ancestry.

But even a limer isn’t going to be as driven to listen or retrieve– as in pick up thing– as a retriever would have to be.