This yellow crossbreed is a cross between an Afghan hound and a golden retriever.
One would think that this dog would be much shaggier, but the truth is we don’t yet know the genetic mechanism behind the Afghan hound’s profuse coat. Afghan hounds, yorkies, and silky terriers have anomalous coat genetics. All other dog coat types have been to derive from variations on just three genes.
This particular dog looks very much like a lightly built golden retriever. Only the ears and “prehensile tail” suggest Afghan hound. It is also quite a bit thinner along the back and ribs than one would normally see in a golden retriever.
I don’t know why anyone would cross these two breeds. They are pretty different from each other. This dog would technically be considered a lurcher, which is a cross between a sight hound and a non-sight hound. Afghan hounds are not normally chosen as the sight hound in the lurcher cross, but golden retrievers are occasionally the non-sight hound.
My guess is this dog was bred to be a pet.
But it does look a lot like Falkor the luck dragon!
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My guess is that he was an oopsie, i.e., I left my dog out in the back yard and she’s in heat!
No. There are people who breed this cross:
http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/afghanretriever.htm
The croup angle, topline and hip bones are very much that of the Afghan Hound/Saluki/various related types group as well.
I was soooo waiting for you to say it was half-bloodhound-half-Sarah-Jessica-Parker or something though! Not obscure enough! haha
I find it interesting that the lurcher is usually made with a herding dog as the cross, and not a retriever. I wonder if there is a reason for that.
Brian Plummer thought golden retriever/greyhound lurchers were pretty good.
Sporting breeds are just not common crosses, though. I am curious as to whether there is an actual reason or whether it’s tradition.
Don’t herding dogs have really strong drive for chasing and stalking? More than a retriever would?
Retrievers actually have very strong prey drives. Retrieving is predatory behavior.
There used to be quite a few golden retriever lurchers, but my guess is they just couldn’t find golden retrievers in Britain that were up to snuff. Brian Plummer wrote about them being fairly common in Wales:
https://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/david-brian-plummer-had-contradictory-views-on-the-golden-retriever-lurcher/
If you read why Plummer himself didn’t want golden retriever lurchers, he didn’t want a dog that was so friendly to everyone.
Perhaps that is the reason.
it’s also harder to find a really svelte golden retriever in the UK, unlike here.
Good points. I was just thinking of the extremely refined stalking patterns in herders and thought that may be more helpful in shaping the chasing behavior for lurchers. When I entered my dogs in coursing tests, the retrievers did way way worse than the tervs, mals, BCs, even corgis. The retrievers (admittedly not your working field champion, but fat American show variety) lost focus and interest on the moving lure in search of stationary birds in the grass.
Well, you’ve never seen my dog on a rabbit. LOL.
I think that she wishes she had been born with a bit longer legs because she’s really a coursing dog at heart. She has no interest in retrieving at all.
You already have strong chasing behavior from the sighthound side. And most dogs have some prey drive.
My understanding is that the herding dog is used to add biddability and brains. (Greyhounds, lovely dogs though they are, are not the sharpest tools in the shed.) Most lurchers and longdogs are expected to retrieve, this is taught as a pup.
I have seen lurchers (collie/grey) and longdogs (Saluki/grey) being used for the same purposes, over and over again. What cross is used is highly dependent on what success the breeder has had in the past, and when you are talking about people just using the dog for their own purposes (not competition) you will find breeders that are highly experimental and will use anything that seems to have something that is useful about it. Most of these dogs do what their owners want them to do. And not all of the dogs come from ‘proven’ stock.
I know of a line of staghounds that have Catahoula, foxhound, Saluki, Afghan, and Greyhound behind them. Interesting.
The way retrievers are used on land is not that different from the way one would use a sight hound either.
The only big difference is that retrievers are trained not to kill what they catch and the quarry is wounded or dead when the dog is sent.
You really need to take a look at the working-bred Goldens in the UK. Many are very handsome, athletic dogs of classic type. In fact, a Golden won the national championship trial not long ago– FC Marcus May Be of Wadesmill.
Would love to see this dog in action!
If it were a Golden / Saluki cross, I would have visualized as his owner a super lethargic Bedouin who wanted him to bring a gazelle down and then bring it back to him :-)
Looks a bit like the Af- standard poodle “taigan” owned by some friends I blogged a while back.
I am sure unless someone can tell me different that beautiful pic of the
afghan retriever under the
retrieverman’s heading is my
Cliff” who I lost in December of 2013. He was my best friend for 10 years. He was always with me. I got him from the Golden Retriever Rescue in So. Ca. His heart gave out and I had to let him go. I would guess if correct that the pic was taken at his “temp” home of the wonderful family that worked so hard to bring him up to par for his adoption as he had been abused and feared most everything. After I got him it took several months for him to lose that fear and he became a most content and loving friend. I became his “job” and he dutifully looked after me till his last day. He seemed to almost become a “spiritual” being in his grace and love that he shared with all. He made many friends and joyfully greeted them each time they paid “him” a visit.
I understand that poaching rabbits use to be a death penalty offence in England. Also,
it was illegal for common people who lived near the forest to own a greyhound unless he had been crippled.
Since the whole point of owning a greyhound was to catch rabbits, poachers had to very careful.
The law didn’t split hairs much about what was or wasn’t a greyhound – if it looked like a greyhound, it was a greyhound. So it helped to cross a greyhound with a sheepdog that had lots of coat to disguise the greyhound parentage.
People who tended flocks of sheep would often be out where here were lots of rabbits and few people. And sheepmen had sheepdogs, so cross what you have. Even if a poacher though a half foxhound lurcher would be better, he didn’t own a foxhound and how could he pass such a cross off as one of his sheepdogs?
And as long as your dog also herded sheep, it was a sheepdog. Nobility owned greyhounds, poachers owned lurchers. At least, that is my understanding of it.
It took me awhile, but it did dawn on me. There were lurchers before there were duck retrievers, or any type a gundog, right? Lurchers are older than guns!
Maybe I should leave Engliish History to someone else.
Actually, “gundogs” are older than firearms as well. Spaniels were used to flush birds for the hawks of falconers to bring down, centuries ago. Also, the “setting spaniels” that located birds on the ground and lay down flat so that nets could be drawn over both dog and birds. Ducking dogs retrieved waterfowl killed with arrows. The tag of “Gundog” came later.
How can a dog retrieve an injured duck with an arrow in it?
I can ss it now: a man has a duck retriever but it gets too old to hunt, so he breeds him and gets pick of the litter.
Junior retriever dog comes home from a long weekend retrieving shot ducks from an icy lake for their master and three of his hunting buddies. He plops down on the soft carpet of home, enjoying the warmth,
and he hopes his dad will be sympathetic about the stress that he has been through this weekend – the noise of the guns, the contradicting orders from their masters friends, master getting angry and yelling at him “stupid dog I siad the duck is over there!”, their laughing at him when he made a mistake (let’s let them jump in the lake and we will see how well they do!), and the icy water.
Dad looks at tired junior plopped down on the carpet and says “Huh, You think you have it bad? I had to put up with everything you did AND I had to retrieve ducks with a long arrow sticking through them, and do it all swimming uphill too”