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by Scottie Westfall

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Scientists are not religious prophets »

West Virginia St. John’s water dog?

July 29, 2012 by SWestfall3

This is Lassie, one of the last two “pure” St. John’s water dogs.  Despite the name, he was male, and he was featured in Richard Wolters’s history of the Labrador retriever.

 

Although he had a thicker coat and more high-set ears, it always amazes me how much he looked like Kizzy, the late “golden boxer” (golden retriever mother, brindle boxer father).

Her mother must have been a golden retriever that was masking dominant black with e/e preventing any black pigment from appearing on the fur.

Those St. John’s water dog genes are quite prepotent.

Many golden retriever crosses are mistaken for Labradors or Labrador crosses because they are black and smooth-coated.

But the golden retriever traits of a feathered coat and red-to-yellow coloration are recessive, and they are easily lost when crossed to other breeds.

This image used to get me a lot of hits via Google Images, but I guess she didn’t look enough like what people expect to see from a golden retriever/boxer cross.  I no longer get many hits from people looking for images of “golden boxers.”

But I can tell you that both her parents were known. The mother was so definitely a golden retriever that no one would mistake her for anything– and she had papers.

People have a very poor understanding of the inheritance of coat and color in domestic dogs.

I bet she would have been listed as a Labrador mix at any shelter, even though she had no Labrador ancestry.

 

 

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Posted in golden retriever, St. John's Water Dog | Tagged boxer, golden boxer, golden retriever, St. John's Water Dog | 11 Comments

11 Responses

  1. on July 29, 2012 at 5:58 pm massugu

    Sheba, my Black Lab-Chessie cross had a lot of this look as well–though she was lankier.

    Also, in looking at Saint-Golden crosses and Saint-Yellow Lab crosses, I’m always struck by how much they look alike–kind of like lightweight English Mastiffs.


  2. on July 30, 2012 at 10:36 am Jen Robinson

    Color genetics can get confusing . . . and provides good puzzles if you like to do work probabilities.
    I’m ok with basic color genetics for Labbies, and am easily confused by K locus, C locus and Agouti genes. Is it the case that Goldies are (almost) all B/B K/K and e/e, so you never get pink nosed ones from b/b e/e ‘s and you don’t get the occasional brindle from k^br (as happens with Labs)?
    I tried Vetgen’s website:
    http://www.vetgen.com/canine-coat-color.html
    to try to understand what happens, color-wise when you cross a boxer to Goldie. They say they’ve found a dominant ‘mask’ gene E^m that causes “reverse face masks”, and boxers can carry it (see http://www.vetgen.com/canine-coat-color.html).
    Would Kizzy be BB / eE^m? Probably also K/k^br? Wonder if there’s a recessive equivalent to E^m that causes elderly Goldies to end out with white goggles, while the same is rare in yellow Labs.


  3. on July 30, 2012 at 12:07 pm Peggy Richter

    If Kizzy had been a competent retriever, prior to the creation of an official “labrador”, there would have been no reason why she wouldn’t have been used and bred as one. That’s the difference between stud books/purebred insistance and use of say, appendix registries. In a merit based registry, she might well have been used for breeding. That’s why I’m not so accepting of the genome “cladistic” studies that seem to assert that this breed is “unrelated” to that breed or “decended from” this other. Obviously a breed will be MOSTLY related to another and MOSTLY decended from one or another, but the employment of mix/match back when the “breed” was a landrace means that dogs may have contributed a large portion of genes OR may have contributed one or two major characteristics but not be as closely related as one might think. Most of the studies seem to look at only a handful of genes and using these to determine relatedness.


    • on July 30, 2012 at 3:17 pm Jen Robinson

      What amazes me is that Lassie’s group were not a breed, and don’t seem to have been a well defined land race. Or do land races come and go over timespans of a few centures?

      How did these dogs bought off rough fishermen combine with gentrified English gun dog stock to create the incredibly successful modern Labrador Retriever?

      According to Wolters’ sources, the Newfoundland fishermen who used what might be called ‘proto-Labradors’ . . . which the locals called ‘water dogs’ . . . used the dogs primarily to retrieve fish that escaped from the drag line before the advent of barbed hooks — working out of two man (and one dog) dorys. They were fish retrievers as much as gun dogs. We can only speculate about how they were used in hunting exercises by the fishermen who overwintered in Newfoundland.
      The earliest that dogs could have arrived with the fishermen is around 1600, only a couple hundred years before dogs started moving back to England to be used as gun dogs. Hardly long enough to establish a land race (or do land races come and go in historically rapid order?). We have little information on these dogs. Did they look like Lassie, or were they of various types? Did some blood get mixed in from Native American dogs? Did they somehow cross with the dogs of the Portuguese or French, who also fished off Newfoundland in the same period. DNA studies may give us some help here, but there’s some distance to go before a clear message comes out. Wolters makes a good case that the historical evidence is difficult to work due to story telling and garbled nomenclature. All we really know is that these dogs survived in a harsh environment with some people who lived a tough, marginal existence.

      I think, basically, Peggy is right. Selection for performance rather than conformation was at the crux of the breed’s origin. Probably performance driven by necessity, not by performance as defined by field competition.

      MRS . . . the more credible genetic studies seem to show fairly strong separation of the English breeds arising from Lassie’s bloodlines from other breeds. Generic in looks doesn’t necessarily mean generic in behavioral terms.


      • on July 30, 2012 at 5:20 pm retrieverman

        The dogs varied a lot in appearance. This was a landrace. I have a lot more on this post:

        https://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/teasing-apart-the-history-of-the-newfoundland-dog-the-st-johns-water-dog-and-the-retrievers/

        I disagree with Wolters on some things. I don’t think the St. Hubert’s hound has anything to do with this breed, and I think Portuguese and Iberian dog breeds do play some role.

        I’m not so sure about native dogs, but there are accounts of Mi’kmaq dogs working as retrievers.

        The Mi’kmaq were encouraged to settle in Newfoundland in teh seventeeth or eighteenth centuries. The French did the encouraging.


        • on August 1, 2012 at 9:21 pm Kathy K

          There were indians indigenous to Newfoundland. They were not Mi’kmaq, or at least I don’t think so. They were elusive, and famous for scavenging scrap metal left behind by the fishing fleets when they went home for the winter. The indians would rework metal tools to suit their own purposes. Anyway, these indians fished using fences to fence off waterways to trap fish, kind of a large scale affair. Eventually they either died out or were killed off, possibly by Mi’kmaqs who were encouraged by the French to go to Newfoundland.
          Source of info: probably Wikipedia, can’t remember.


      • on July 30, 2012 at 5:35 pm DesertWindHounds

        A large breed bitch can breed at, conservatively, two years old. The Silken Windhound was established as a breed (kennel club definition) within thirty years. Now, do you think a landrace could be established, have a heyday, and die out, within a span of a couple of hundred years (approximately 200 dog generations)?


        • on July 31, 2012 at 10:11 am Jen Robinson

          DWH: Weren’t most ‘breeds’ established in a few decades? Many by one breeder.

          Isn’t the normal definition of a landrace a STABLE phenotype associated with a geographical area? Given the variation described in Retrieverman’s post of 4/20/2012, I’d say that Newfoundland was a big melting pot for various dog breeds, but the melting was far from complete, not uniform, and distorted by breeding for export. I am amused how many of the enthusiasts quoted insisted that their dogs were ‘pure’ bred. It sounds l like, by the 19th century, there were lots of dog types to select from. I doubt that fishermen were fussy about purity. If they wanted bigger dogs, they’d look for greater stature; if they liked the dogs some Portuguese or French fisherman was using, they would have brought in the blood lines. If they needed stronger guarding traits . . . cross to a dog with greater guarding instincts. If they wanted dogs for body heat and companionship in winter, they’d go for docile and affectionate. I can imagine a fishing camp having some individual dogs more valued for water work and some more valued for hauling loads . . . and not having the fencing needed to keep the dogs away from a bitch on season. I don’t see any of the sources being very clear about where the core bloodlines came from. Are they, as Wolters infers, from some English landrace (Devon?)? Is that landrace now extinct?


          • on July 31, 2012 at 5:35 pm DesertWindHounds

            You’re not being very clear. You seem to be saying that these people were selectively breeding, then you intimate that they couldn’t possibly be that selective. Obviously there had to have been some selection going on for there to have been enough dogs with specific physical and behavioral characteristics to export, yes?

            “I can imagine a fishing camp having some individual dogs more valued for water work and some more valued for hauling loads . . . and not having the fencing needed to keep the dogs away from a bitch on season.”

            You underestimate ‘primitive’ peoples. Do not forget that most of the dog ‘types’ were developed and selectively bred by mostly nomadic peoples. You also need think, very, very carefully, about culture; any subsistence culture is going to be very ‘make do.’ One cannot be too picky. This will be reflected in the dogs produced by the culture. This is why landrace dogs are typically not heavily specialized.


      • on July 31, 2012 at 11:16 am M.R.S.

        when I used the term “generic” it was only in reference to phenotype. Behavioral characteristics are, of course, inherited quite separately from visible physical characteristics. As Scott and Fuller so nicely demonstrated by crossbreeding Cockers and Basenjis, in a few generations arriving at a dog identical to a purebred Cocker in appearance, but with the temperament and behavior of a Basenji.


  4. on July 30, 2012 at 12:28 pm M.R.S.

    The “Labrador” phenotype is a fairly generic sort of domestic canine, that is, unspecialized (when compared to such variations as greyhound, bulldog, toy dogs, etc). And many combinations of more distinctive breeds/types often result (in the F1s at least) to be this “basic” sort of dog. From which a clever breeder might often be able to re-create one or the other of the original types, or proceed toward something different, making use of factors from each.

    Breeders sometimes worry about “the drag of the breed”, which is the natural tendency of any variant from the canine norm, to regress toward it’s earlier, or original, form. One might say that Mother Nature doesn’t much like exaggerations, and would prefer “normal”. Or at least, closer to “normal”.

    And Peggy is quite right about the complexity of relationships, and genes, shared by the various breeds.



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