Most sources list the Tweed water spaniel or Tweed water dog as a breed strongly resembling a small liver or yellow curly-coated retriever.
In the late nineteenth century, the flat-coated retriever expert Stanley O’Neil encountered some of the Tweeds helping salmon fishermen with their nets on the Northumberland coast:
Further up the coast, probably Alnmouth, I saw men netting for salmon. With them was a dog with a wavy or curly coat. It was a tawny colour but, wet and spumy, it was difficult to see the exact colour, or how much was due to bleach and salt. Whilst my elders discussed the fishing I asked these Northumberland salmon net men whether their dog was a Water-Dog or a Curly, airing my knowledge. They told me he was a Tweed Water Spaniel. This was a new one on me. I had a nasty suspicion my leg was being pulled. This dog looked like a brown Water Dog to me, certainly retrieverish, and not at all spanielly. I asked if he came from a trawler, and was told it came from Berwick.
The dogs were water spaniel/Newfoundland (“St. John’s water dog) crosses, which were essentially a regional variant of the curly-coated retriever.
I would venture that by “small”, the writers describing the Tweed refer to a dog roughly 20-22 inches tall, or a bit less. The breed we know as Curly-Coated Retriever is distinctly larger, often well over 25 inches.
And “spaniels” can vary considerably in type: in size, coat, head shape, shape of ear, leg length, and other variables. (Even the St Bernard was once called the “Alpine Spaniel”!) So the labels may or may not be very meaningful. It does seem that those called water spaniels do seem to be somewhat more “retrievery” in their morphology than “spanielly” like the land spaniels such as the springer. Even so, both retriever and spaniel (both land and water) seem to have more in common with each other than with the pointers and setters,which are somewhat racier, “houndier” sorts.
All very general, however, and there is considerable overlap. Not really possible to draw immutable borders between them.
Okay to outcross and I know my old trainer is married and will not bother with any of you anymore. I have too much knowledge of former co-workers. I normally I the one to suffer and walk away. Crimes against humanity.
Don’t hike my ideas you will get caught.
Stealing of intellectual property is a crime. I have bought all the manuals. If you need help don’t have sex with the trainer unless you are legally married. This is what we call train the trainers. No people just dogs. You can call me but must be careful.
Denise
Humane Society Supporter :) Dog rescue :) US Army Veteran with PTSD.
I don’t understand. Genomics, to date, put the retrievers closer to the Rottie and BMD than to the spaniels. If retrievers include crosses to the non-hound British land races used in hunting, you’d think they would cluster together in genomic studies.
P.s. deniseatkinson, it’s not clear what your comments have to do with this blogg. Have you lost your way?
That’s because non of those studies include curlies, which would be a missing link or they might show that curlies don’t have much water spaniel ancestry. The Tweed water spaniel was horribly misnamed. It was a rougher form of curly coated retriever.
Any two-dimensional chart of canine genomics is bound to be extremely inadequate. I prefer to think of the history, and relationships, of our dogs as an elaborate tapestry made of interwoven threads of various sorts, sizes, colors. With many sections obscured from our eyes. and more yet to be woven.
The fact that we don’t have most of these water spaniel strains left anymore makes things even more complicated.
I’d say a tangled web is a better analogy. But even if it is a complicated mixing, rather than linear descent (as assumed in evolutionary models), I’d think that the clustering algorithms they use would pick up on genetic similarities introduced by frequent inter-breedings between lineages. I don’t have the library resources or the patience to work through the statistical part of the genome papers (I took a graduate level course on statistical classification and what I remember most was headaches). If the models used do assume linear descent, the scientists are pretty stupid, cause everyone knows dogs breeds don’t have species barriers between them. . . and there are many many alternative models available to use in the stats literature.
back to the tweeds…the Curly is an interesting breed. I’d like to know more about its origins.
I’ve only know a couple of them. They seem like retrievers, but very reserved for retrievers. The coat is definitely different in lacking a dense undercoat and being nappy. The UK Curly club says the breed was popular in the 1860s, before the presently-popular retriever breeds rose to popularity. This seems to suggest that the Curly has less influence from the dogs imported from Newfoundland than other retriever breeds. Or is it possible that the ancestors of the curly were sent to the Grand Banks centuries earlier and contributed to the St. John’s dogs?
p.s. many clustering algorithms are n-dimensional, although it’s common to show only two of many dimensions, and common for a large share of the variation to be explained by the first two dimensions.