Rosette Hunters vs. Working Terriers

The AKC continues to publish nonsense about working terriers, the AKC "December Breed Profile" on the border terrier being a good example. It can be read in its entirety >> here.

This article is typical of the genre -- a breed profile about a working terrier written by someone who has never worked a terrier and who is quoting people that do not own a Deben collar.

Though the border terrier is always described as "a working terrier" the facts suggest otherwise. Very few of these terriers hunt anymore, in part because the dogs are getting too big thanks to rosette-chasers in the Kennel Club.

Do you know what two border terrier owners say to each other when they want to hunt? "Let's go find a hole dog." That would be a dog that can actually get into a hole and go all the way through, i.e. NOT a border terrier.

There comes a time when a dog's gene pool is so crapped up with large dogs that have never worked that it cannot be saved. We're almost there with border terriers. Not yet, but very, very close. The ban in the U.K. may be all that is needed to push this dog past all possible recovery.

Borders have been going down the AKC rabbit-hole-to-Wonder-Land for a long time. Walter Gardner's border terrier book gives chest measurements for 29 borders in the back. As I note on the Terrierman.com web site:

"Of the 29 Border Terriers measured, 12 had chests larger than 18 inches, 13 had chests that were 17-18 inches in size, 3 had chests that were 16-17 inches in size, and one had a chest that was 15.5 inches in size. Only the last 3 dogs -- the two with 16-inch chests and the one dog with a 15.5-inch chest -- were of a size small enough to follow a regular-sized vixen into a tight earth. "

To read an honest autopsy of the border terrier standard -- what you really have in the field and ring versus what is called for in the standard -- see this table.

No one should be allowed to talk about spanning dogs until they have spanned quarry. The very nice elderly ladies quoted in this article have driven a million miles to attend shows, but I do not believe they have ever dug 5 feet to anything anywhere at any time. They are not alone. It is a telling thing that neither Walter Gardner nor David Kline have a single picture of a border terrier with fox in their otherwise well-done books. A working border is a rare picture indeed!

The fox to be seen here ( link ) was an accidental termination. As a consequence we have pics and measurements for the inquiring mind. Looks like a big animal doesn't it? It's not -- it's just 10 pounds. The average vixen weighs just 10 to 14 pounds.

How big is a fox chest? The picture below shows this same vixen being spanned by a not-very-large woman -- notice that the fingers are totally overlapped. This fox was a young adult vixen in a natal den (she was mated to a dog fox in the area) and she spanned 11.5 inches and was 40 inches long from tip of nose to tip of brush.




Most fox run a bit bigger in the chest than this one, but not by very much.

Fox taxidermy manikins are sized with 12" 13" and 14" inch chests. There are none larger, anywhere in the world.

A 17" chest span (the minimum chest span of 25 of the 29 border terriers listed in Gardner's book) is that of an adult coyote, not a fox. Unfortunately, coyote's rarely den anywhere, and they never den in England

There is a lot to like about border terriers. As far as I am concerned, the brain between their ears is the highest quality in the terrier world. They have teeth like piano keys, and good ones have wonderful coats that shed rain like a rubber raincoat, and delight in the coldest weather.

That said, most border terriers are too damn big to work, and the gene pool is so loaded with large dogs with large chests that you can have little confidence that the dog you pay $1,000 for as a pup will be usable in the field when it gets to be an adult.

$1,000?? Yep -- that's what they're going for from AKC breeders -- and more. I bet that price makes some drool with envy.

From the working end, that's just another reason to take a pass on this breed. Not for the rosette chasers however. Their judge is not a fox in an earthen sette on a cold and snowy morning, but an overweight plaid-skirted AKC judge on an early Summer afternoon. Their quarry does not have legs of its own -- it is a ribbon, an inanimate object no terrier has ever expressed the slightest bit of interest in.