REFLECTIONS ON TIME AND TYPE


Lord Home's Nan, born 1855 (photo aged 12) 
Note the typical kindly expression which can still be found today, the roomy skull which is not over-done, the otter tail and the double coat

There would appear to be two distinct reasons for freezing semen. The most obvious is to facilitate breedings with dogs where distance is a real problem. For us here in France and in Europe in general, distance is rarely a stumbling-block, but for international exchanges or for a country as big as the USA, AI with frozen semen makes a breeding program more flexible and more exciting. The second reason is to conserve semen of an outstanding dog for future use, basically because dogs have an exceptionally short life span and the perfect bitch for a particular stud may be sitting in your kennel five years after the stud’s death.When I sold Sandylands Rip Van Winkle to Gordon Sousa in 1985, Gordon encouraged me to freeze semen before Vanny’s departure to the USA. At the time this appeared to me to be ethically unsound (how could I sell a dog and keep on using him at stud through AI ?). so I didn’t do it. A while ago I decided to stock semen from my current dogs for future personal use. In fact, some has gone to the USA and elsewhere and puppies whelped from these AI breedings have added considerable interest to the ‘dog game’ and will, I hope, continue to do so. 

Sketch done by a visitor after a shooting week-end on the Buccleuch estate in 1857 :

Typical labrador stance, note the shape of the head and the shape of the tail - this should also be the shape of things to come !

However, a long conversation with a geneticist some months back gave me food for thought. He maintained that stocking semen is only useful for current problems of distance, availability, sterility and sickness etc. and that, long term, such semen as has been preserved would become obsolete because the ‘ideal’ phenotype changes from epoque to epoque and because the gene pool of most breeds is large enough and rich enough to enable one to find the dog one wants without going backwards in time.Thus I decided to check on fashion in type concerning our breed. I’ve been back as far as I can go with photos of sketches and drawings, photos of paintings and still more photos of dogs once photography became widespread. The earliest painting is from 1814, but if we eliminate Bernadette we still cover a time-span of over 150 years : 1848 – 1998.

'Stranger', imported in 1911...

my very favourite dog 1970...

60 years separate these two dogs... 
This gives us all a lesson on preserving type

When you consider a breed such as ours, bred and maintained to do a specific job, or other more modern ‘deviations’ of this job which require the same physical and mental attributes, one supposes that fashion should play a fairly limited role. The breed standard, which is precise enough to differentiate a Labrador from a Jersey cow, is sufficiently imprecise as to allow for a wide scope of personal interpretation. And since the Labrador has become ‘everyman’s’ dog, this notion of personal interpretation has been used and abused.Until after the second World War, the breed was almost exclusively in the hands of those using their dogs for picking up. The idea of making money out of dogs was not yet born and the dog fraternity was just that and with the future of the breed at heart. The first trials and the first shows around one hundred and thirty years ago, were only organized to search out natural qualities of conformation and instinct. Style counted, not speed, and one didn’t ‘handle a dog to it’s championship’ (what a detestable phrase !) It’s the human mind that has fouled up what was a very sound idea for improving the breed.

  Jasper Briggs (USA) in 1930 with one of his dogs...

50 years later...

Ch. The Dog of Tintagel Winds (1982)

The exclusively field-trialing fraternity in the USA as in GB and now in France too, have dedicated themselves to producing a sleek, slick, high-speed performance dog, Their counterparts, the show-bench crowd, have produced a statuesque, heavy-boned, heavy-headed photographers’ dream subject. These are the extremes, and both comply vaguely with the standard where the words ‘large’, ‘wide’, ‘strong’ and ‘short’ are totally subjective since one can always retort ‘Compared with WHAT ?.Hours and hours of searching through photos have resulted in producing a happy and reassuring notion in my mind. For every twenty-year period that I considered, there were dogs who oozed correct type – from fading sepia-colored ‘dog-eared’ pictures I could pluck dogs I should be glad to show and work today. Dogs of excellent type in 1850 were very close to those of correct type in 1870, and so on and so forth over ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS. In each section that I considered, there were dogs who were famous in their time, but whose type appeared to me to be incorrect.

2 superb dogs photographed in 1927 (Liddly Crow and Liddly Blackcock)...

Midnight of Mansergh born 1954 (100 years after Nan)

So I came to the conclusion that I could safely take the bitch sketched by Peter Hawker in 1814, or the Earl of Home’s Nell born in 1856, or Stellshaw Nell and her son Brayton Sir Richard and put them in the context of the 1998 Labrador scene and they wouldn’t look out of place. I was struck by the similarity of heads between Munden Sentry (whelped in 1900) and a group of Mansergh dogs of Mary Roslin-Williams’ breeding seventy-five years later. Banchory dogs of the 1920’s and 1930’s look quite at home with the Ballyduff dogs of the 1970’s.Since those days when the best kennels bred for a good-looking, working type of Labrador, with nothing exaggerated or spectacular just the perfect dog for the job in hand, two different podiums, two different dogs and basically two different breeds have formed. It’s so much easier to select for one specific purpose than to breed for the whole dog and never ‘handle the dog to his championship’.A lot of coarse heads and general type deviations have crept in over the last fifteen years, directly commeasurable with the Labrador’s success as a pet. An active, intelligent shooting dog is a pain in the neck in an empty pet-home, fast on the way to become a hooligan. But if we breed out the active, intelligent part we end up with a suitable couch-lounger but we’ve lost the essentials of the dog called Labrador. However famous some of our dogs are today (‘in fashion’ for my geneticist) the thumb rule for guidance could just be : What would he look like in my 150 years’ Labrador parade ? If he looks the odd dog out, it’s probably not because he’s an improvement but because HIS TYPE IS WRONG even though he’s just been ‘handled to his championship’.

...2001... and so on and so forth...
Multi-Ch. & Trialer Poole's Memory of Tintagel Winds and Ch. & Trialer Oozing What It Takes of Tintagel Winds

 
Felicity Leith-Ross
Tintagel Winds Labradors
- 1998 -