Natural History

A reader named Tim, who blogs as the Wicked Yankee over at the Daley Clan blog sent me photos of what his family insists was an Irish water spaniel that belonged to his great-great grandfather, Daniel Duggan. Duggan was a poacher and lover of dogs and horses:

Daniel was a very talented trainer of animals. I have even heard him described as a horse-whisperer. Daniel was also very fond of poaching, which was very illegal in Ireland. According to family lore, he had an Irish water spaniel named Drake who he had trained to catch salmon as they went over the shallows in the Blackwater River. Unfortunately, Daniel was caught poaching on the lands of a Magistrate by the name of Grehan, who lived on the estate at Clonmeen House.

At this time one of the consequences for poaching was forced transportation to Australia. According to relatives, Daniel was not willing to accept the punishment. He is said to have stated, “It would be like going to law with the Devil when the court was in Hell.” Instead of accepting his sentence, Daniel decided to move his entire family to the town of Mallow (only about 20 miles). However, before he left, he made sure to go back and get his dog.

The dog in the photo is not Drake, but Drake and this dog, whose name was Rock, were very similar.

There is some debate as to whether Rock was a water spaniel or an Irish setter.

My guess is that both Rock and Drake were a regional type of water spaniel that became either got absorbed into other strains of spaniel or retriever.

The dog actually reminds me of smaller version of a very dark golden retriever.

Of course, it’s very hard to tell what color he was. He could have been a liver or a very dark red dog.

Maybe this is one of the last photos of a Tweed water spaniel or Tweed water dog. There isn’t much wave to this dog’s coat, but he has featured that are suggestive of retriever ancestry, too.

One of the great disservices that kennel clubs have given us is that they have destroyed the English language’s descriptive abilities.

Look at the AKC name for the “English” coonhound. It’s called the “American English coonhound.”  The name is so bizarre that one would laugh at it.  (First of all, there are no raccoons in England!)

In a similar way, the dog fancy has got us thinking that the only Irish water spaniel was the rat-tailed liver dog with the Afro.

Careful reading of historical documents show that there was McCarthy’s breed of water spaniel, and there was another type of water spaniel in Ireland. It was always described as being  more like a retriever, and it was always associated with the north of the country. There was actually a debate as to whether it was the same thing as the Tweed water dog, which is from the Scottish Borders and Northumberland. (One should note that the settlers of the protestant plantations of what is now Northern Ireland came largely from this part of Scotland, where centuries of border warfare and rule by warlords had forced large numbers of these people into deep poverty.)

County Cork is, of course, in the southwestern part of the country, which nowhere near the core territory of the Northern Irish water spaniel.

But that doesn’t mean that the Duggans couldn’t have been able to procure one.

I think there is almost as strong a likelihood that these two dogs represented a regional breed of water spaniel that just simply wasn’t documented because it wasn’t fancy enough to turn into a show dog.

The history of dogs is really mostly the story of dogs like these two.

They were the dogs that helped people poach and played with the kids.

These dogs really don’t get much mention in the books.

Because the dog fancy was an elitist sport, we know all about the Labradors owned by the Dukes of Buccleuch, the water spaniels that Justin McCarthy bred, and the yellow wavy-coats at Guisachan.

We know so little of Tweed water dogs that helped net salmon near Berwick-upon-Tweed, though they are mentioned in just about every book about golden retrievers.

We know so little about the water spaniels of the British Isles.

Only one of them still exists.

Lots of romantic histories are written about it. Fantastical claims of antiquity are bandied about.

But the truth is the average Irish water spaniel was most likely a dog like Drake and Rock. Nothing fancy. Rustic.  Handsome. And very smart.

***

Please do not take this post as an attack on Irish water spaniels of the McCarthy type.

It’s not meant to be.

Rather, it’s an attack on the homogenization that the modern dog fancy has exerted on domestic dog strains. Regional types have fallen out favor as “global breeds” like Labrador retrievers have moved.

The modern dog fancy is global, but because it originated in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, it was going to have a global impact in a very short time.

Only the French have been able to hold onto their regional breeds. For most of the history of the American dog fancy, there was always a denial that there were very many American breeds.  (There are actually many, many American breeds, but most stayed out of the kennel club system until very recently. So I guess they didn’t count.)

In agriculture, there is a strong movement for the preservation of heritage breeds of livestock. These animals fell out of favor due to market forces, but now there is a movement afoot to keep esoteric breeds of cattle and sheep alive– mainly to keep the food supply at least somewhat genetically diverse.

In a Dog’s History of America Mark Derr writes that something similar swept the dog world in the late nineteenth century in Europe and America. In age when virtually everything was mass-produced and homogeneous, there was a move to go back to the old ways of doing things.  People with money and time on their hands spent lots of both scouring the countryside for traditional crafts and tools. In the realm of dogs, it caused people to go to rural areas and pick out various working dog landraces and bring them home as artifacts.

It’s from this movement that the collie dog became a fancy breed, as did the Old English sheepdog.

But those dogs were mostly herding dogs belonging to noble stockmen.

They were not the dogs of poachers, like these water spaniels.

It’s also the reason why no one ever thought of creating a show club for lurchers. (The thought of which gives me the creeps).

This world that the twentieth century has left behind is a strange one. It may be wealthier and more technologically advanced.

But it’s certainly lost a lot.

Especially the old water spaniels.