Natural History

(Source for image)

Grand Bruit was a very outport on Newfoundland’s south coast where Richard Wolters, the Labrador retriever historian, also encountered the last remaining dogs of this type at roughly the same time this dog was photographed.

The two dogs he encountered were two males, aged 13 and 15 years. The 13-year-old, named Lassie for some odd reason, is probably the most famous of his breed. If one does a Google Images search of St. John’s water dogs, one comes across several images of Lassie and his brother.  They had very little white on them– just some white on their chests and toes.

The dog in the photo above is Irish marked. That was actually not uncommon in the St. John’s breed. Some of the literature actually discusses the “tuxedo markings” that were common in this breed, which should more accurately be called a landrace.

All retrievers descend from these dogs, although the Nova Scotia duck-tolling retriever likely has a bit less of this ancestry than the others do. With the exception of the toller, the other retrievers count this dog as their primary ancestor, as does the big Newfoundland dog and its close relatives, the FCI Landseer and the Leonberger.

The “black water dogs” of Newfoundland were ubiquitous among the outport communities, which were settlements where the fishermen lived. These were often inaccessible, except by boat, and the fishermen used their dogs for a variety of task besides setting and hauling nets and lines on the fishing grounds of the Grand Banks. The dogs were also used to haul carts and sled and to retrieve shot ducks and sea birds. They were also used in the uplands of Newfoundland’s interior to flush and retrieve ptarmigan.

The dogs were also used in wilds of Labrador and were occasionally cross-bred with the indigenous hauling husky-type dog for use as a sled dog.

It is amazing that this rugged water cur would have such a profound impact upon the dog world. Its descendants have become among the world’s most widely distributed domestic dogs. Not only is the modern Labrador retriever the most common purebred dog in the world right now, the big Newfoundland was the first mass-produced large family dog. In the late eighteenth century and through much of the nineteenth century, the Newfoundland dog was the dog that every up and coming family had to have. With a growing middle class as a result of the dual forces of greater democratization and increased wealth through the Industrial Revolution, the Newfoundland dog became amazingly popular.

But its popularity is nothing compared to the Labrador retriever of today.

The Labrador is so widespread that it has largely replaced its ancestor in its native land. There are plenty of black water dogs in Newfoundland today. These dogs are allowed to roam freely in small towns and in the remaining outports. The bulk of these dogs are of modern Labrador retriever blood, but because many of them are not registered, they might still have a bit of the old St. John’s breed in them.

It is often said that the main reason the breed went extinct is because of Newfoundland’s Sheep Protection Act of 1885. That certainly may have played a factor.

But I think a bigger cause of the extinction was the simple decline of the outport communities, which began when Newfoundland joined the Confederation in 1949. There was a big push by the Smallwood government to industrialize Newfoundland, and in order to have an industrial workforce at hand, the small fishing communities were gradually closed.

When Farley Mowat lived in Newfoundland during the 1960’s, the outports were still around, and there were plenty of black water dogs around. He writes about them in several of his works, most notably in Bay of Spirits. Mowat eventually took in one of these dogs, which he named Albert, which he then bred to a dog that was primarily of Labrador extraction, named Victoria (get it?).  In the outports, the local contingent of water dogs were the main welcoming committee, and virtually all the outports had them, save one named Grey River. When Mowat and his wife visited Grey River, it had no dogs, which Mowat thought was very strange. They happened to have Albert with them, and the children of the village were so mesmerized by Albert that they didn’t know what to think of him.  It was so isolated from the other outports that these children had never seen a dog before. ( There is actually very strange story about why Grey River had no dogs, but that will have to wait for another post.)

The other thing that did the St. John’s water dog in was the simple success of its descendant, the Labrador retriever. Labrador retrievers spread throughout Newfoundland after joining Canada, and Labradors largely replaced the old water dogs– or absorbed them, which is most likely.

The old St. John’s water dog breed is gone, but its genes live on in the retrievers and the big Newfoundland dog.  Perhaps some of the black Labrador types that live in Newfoundland have some of these dogs a bit closer in their ancestry than other dogs in the greater retriever family.

If they do, then they are truly special dogs.

I think it may have been an error in the later days of this breed to assume that if a dog had Labrador retriever in it that it was somehow tainted. The truth is that Farley Mowat did breed his “pure” dog to dog of Labrador ancestry, but when he didn’t get enough white markings on the puppies, he stopped breeding for them.  The truth is that an outcross program could have been used to augment the St. John’s water dog’s genetic diversity and then through more careful selection, the St. John’s water dog phenotype could have been better preserved.

And because the dogs actually lived in Newfoundland, they could still been subject to the selection pressures of climate and utility that truly made the St. John’s water dog what it was.

But when Newfoundland’s government so strongly rejected the sea in that era, saving an artifact of the maritime era probably wasn’t what people were thinking about. After all, it was only when Richard Wolters wrote his book on the Labrador retriever’s origins that the greater public had an understanding of what these dogs actually were. Stonehenge and others from the nineteenth century knew what these dogs were, but no one really thought that it might be a good idea to preserve them. In that era, the goal was to “improve them” into retrievers and pet Newfoundland dogs.

These dogs were a product of the culture and environment of the Newfoundland outport.

As those outports have declined through the decades, the dog’s chances of surviving became remote, and then were dashed through haphazard cross-breeding, likely absorption, and eventual replacement by the “new and improved” Labrador retriever.

The dog is more or less a metaphor for the outports. When these fishing settlements began to disappear, the dog’s days were numbered.

A creature formed in the hunting and fishing culture became out of place as that culture disappeared.

We might try to recreate this breed using Labrador retrievers, Portuguese water dogs, and whatever else.

But we’ll never get it back.

Just as we’ll never breed back the aurochs using domestic cattle breeds or the tarpan horse using domestic horse breeds, the St. John’s water dog can never be recreated.

We might get a strain of dogs that looks the part, but it will be a shallow imitation.

To recreate that dog, you need the outports, the fishing boats, the stormy seas, the howling gales, the heavy lines and nets, and the frigid winter winds.  These forces forged the St. John’s water dog through the centuries that these dogs helped the early fishermen and the later settlers.

We have no idea where St. John’s water dog came from. We have some educated guesses– and some pretty good debates.

But all we know is that it was the working dog of Newfoundland. It is the ancestor of the retrievers and the big Newfoundland.

And it no longer exists in its original form.

But although its origins are a bit of mystery, the reasons for its extinction are not hard to understand.

Landraces exist only so long as they have “land.” In this case, the land was the outport communities and their hunting and fishing culture.

Extinction of the outport was the extinction of the St. John’s water dog.