More on Dandie Dinmonts -- and a Small Challenge

In yesterday's post, I noted that the Dandie Dinmont was sliding over the abyss of extinction with more Giant Pandas born last year than these once-upon-a-time working dogs.

I suggested that the cause for the demise of this dog was that market forces were at work: the Dandie Dinmont was no longer a working dog and no longer satisfied a need, and so had lost whatever constituency it once had.

Forced to compete head-to-head with other poodle-coated mops, this dog found few customers due to a high initial expense, an odd-looking sway back, and poor movement. If the Dandie had ever been bred for work in the last 100 years, it might have a client base today; it would certainly have much better structure. Instead, one of the oldest terrier breeds is about to go all the way throught the fanciers pipe and into the dustbin of extinction. Or at least that is the fear of some.

In short order I was inundated by lengthy emails ... from two people (a small joke). The first post was from Hilary Cheyne (quoted in the first article) who runs the Caledonian Dandie Dinmont Terrier Club. She wrote to say they were not trying to market the dog -- did I get that impression from their press release?

She went on to say that there were almost no Dandie puppies being born and that in her Club they were now running coefficients of inbreeding on the remaining dogs "so hopefully we will realise that what we call 'linebreeding' is just another name for 'inbreeding'." She then went on to say that "Outcrossing has and will be considered but it isn't needed at the moment" and then, a few sentences later, she observed that "Everyone now knows that Dandies can have Cushings, Glaucoma and Hypothyroidism" and that the dog also sometimes has "narrow angle glaucoma that is unique to Dandies."

OK. Good to know. A very small gene pool with serious health problems and even unique health problems? No reason to outcross then! Carry on!

Ms. Cheyne then went on to let me know that there were a lot of working Dandies -- look at all those American earthdog trials. At this point, I have to tell you, I started to chortle a little bit. So it's come down to this, has it -- fake work against a caged rat in a foreign country (and not many Dandies showing up even for that). Nothing wrong with earthdog trials (I have a section on the web site and in the book on earthdog trials, and I have written articles for magazines in favor of them), but let's not confuse a go-to-ground trial with real work, please.

The next letter in the email box was from Paul Keevil who wanted me to know that "it is actually against the law to hunt with dogs here in the United Kingdom, just as it is against the law to own firearms," so I was completely off the mark to suggest the Dandie might yet be saved if it ever saw a bit of honest work underground.

Of course, Paul is simply wrong. It's NOT illegal to hunt with terriers in the UK -- many thousands of fox are being dug to legally every year under the brand-new Hunting Act thanks to the exception for fox abatement on private bird-shooting lands.

And, ironically, the new law requires that any fox that is dug be shot with a gun -- you cannot move it to a new location as before.

In fact, guns and hunting fox with terriers is regulated in the UK, but neither is banned, as anyone who hunts with terriers in the UK can affirm. BASC alone has 120,000 gun-toting members, and somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 fox a year are being dug to today.

The funny thing here is that the Hunting Act is just one year old and the Dandie Dinmont has been sliding into the abyss for 100 years due to the fact that the shape of the dog has been seriously distorted by show ring breeders.

Mr. Keevil and Ms. Cheyne were not digging on the dogs when it was wide-open to them; and neither was almost anyone else in the incredible shrinking Dandie Dinmont community.

Mr. Keevil upbraided me for only quoting Rawdon Lee, asking me if that was "the best terrier book you have?" Well, no, I have quite a few more books. So let's quote a few of the ones that are actually about working terriers and are not all-breed books or historical novels:

• Mark Giles in "Working Terriers" (1988): "I don't know anyone who has a Dandie Dinmont that works."
  
  
• Jocelyn Lucas in "Hunt and Working Terriers" (1931) does not mention the breed as a worker.
  
  
• David Harcombe in "The World of the Working Terrier" (1989): Mentions Dandie Dinmonts in a single sentence list of 20 Kennel Club breeds, which is followed by "There, I have mentioned them and now we can forget about them. All, for various reasons, including size and temperament are not suitable to be considered for earth work. Any working terrierman who outcrosses his stock to such animals, and hopes to improve the working qualities, quite simply needs his head examined."
  
  
• Brian Plummer in "The Working Terrier" (1978): "[T]he Dandie can scarcely be regarded as a force to be reckoned with as a working terrier. I find them far too slow to suit my requirements, and their very shape indicates a fundamental lack of agility that is essential in working terriers...."
  
  
• John Broadhurst, et. al. in "Terriers and Terriermen" (2002): Not one of the 51 terriermen interviewed works this type of dog or even mentions the breed.
  
  
• Sean Frain in "The Traditional Working Terrier" (2001): Does not mention the breed at all.
  

And, of course, there are two books on American working terriers, neither one of which mentions the breed as a worker.

In a friendly exchange of emails, I extended a challenge to Mr. Keevil who says he has no interest in working his terriers but is very well-connected in the picture world (he runs a canine graphics-art business).

My challenge is for him to find even one picture of a Kennel Club Dandie Dinmont that was dug to in the last 50 years. I want a photograph of a Dandie (wearing a locator collar) and his fox or badger standing next to a hole freshly dug. No roadkill photos now! I noted that "It's very easy for show ring fanciers to drift into fantasy and spend their days mooning over paintings and standards. The end result is what you have with the Dandie Dinmont today -- a dog teetering on the edge of extinction and as far from its roots as a (theoretical) working dog can get."

The challenge is not yet very old yet (made yesterday), and I hope a photograph of a working Dandie will arrive and I can post it. That said, I am not all that hopeful. The first flurry of activity from Mr. Keevil produced five illustrations of Dandie Dinmont's (none of the illustrations showing a dog working fox or badger). I am confident we can do better than this. Even the Loch Ness monster and Sasquatch have real action photographs of themselves!

Perhaps we shall yet get an old picture of Alf Rhodes who the Caledonian Dandie Dinmont Terrier Club itself describes as "the last man going to ground with Dandies." Rhodes went to the Great Hunting Ground in the Sky in 2003 at the age of 81 or so. He did not work his dogs in his later years, but he did have a working Dandie or two in the mid-1970s. Since that's only 30 years ago, and well within my 50-year challenge, we may yet see a picture of a working Dandie.

A picture, of course, will not save the dog anymore than will pets-and-rosettes promotion of the breed. The last Dandie Dinmont owner on earth will talk of the "3rd Duke of Buccleuch" on the day he or she slides that last dog into the ground, but in fact, if past is prologue (and it so often is) the grave is the first and last hole that that Dandie Dinmont will have ever seen. There is some irony in that. Perhaps that will be the Last Great Dandie Dinmont Story. Sadly, I may yet be around to hear it.