Teckel X Terrier?

The October issue of Earth Dog - Running Dog has a great picture of an old Gypsy caravan on the cover with Dave Sleight, the lurcher and greyhound man, on the right. Great articles and letters are inside, as always, including a nice piece from Aurora Rubel in Kentucky.

Earth Dog - Running Dog has some amusing writers who, while they have differences of opinion on all manner of things, are worth listening to as they are genuine dog men.

For example, I always take time to read Colin Didrickson who is now thinking of crossing Teckels (i.e. working dachshunds) with working terriers to see if anything comes out of the cross. You can read a little about that here, and subscribe to the magazine here. 

Order Earth Dog Running Dog Online

Earth Dog - Running Dog Magazine is the oldest and largest-circulation publication on lurchers and terrier work in the United Kingdom.

Edited by David Harcombe (profiled in Terriermen & Terriers by John Broadhurst), this publication features pictures and tales of working terriers and long dogs in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and even the U.S, and mainland Europe.

If you're looking for a gift for yourself, a trial judge, or a fellow sportsman that has taken you out into the field and taught you the ropes, an annual subscription to Earth Dog - Running Dog is the way to go!

To order by credit card (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, eCheck >> click here
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Earth Dog - Running Dog Magazine

You can subscribe to Earth Dog - Running Dog magazine on line by simply clicking here. MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover, eCheck and several other forms of payment are accepted.

It's never been easier to subscribe (or to renew your subscription!) to the oldest and largest-circulation publication on lurchers and terrier work in the UK.
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Working Terrier Year Book: A Box Full of Jewels

The compilation volume entitled The Working Terrier Year Book, 1987-1991 is a box of small jewels, and a good read for the dedicated working terrier enthusiast.

The book is eclectic and full of short pieces on a wide variety of themes related to working terriers, but if there is a central thread that holds these pearls together, it is that the sand is always slipping steadily through the glass. Some of what what has gone before will never come back, and some of what what exists now may soon be lost forever.

The passage of time is not entirely unexpected as a theme in a Year Book, least of all one on working terriers in the U.K.

It was during during this five-year period, after all, when the political pressures to ban fox hunting really began their ascendency, and when the last vestiges of legal badger work had only recently gone the way of the buggy whip.

At the same time, the push was on to pull the Jack Russell Terrier into the Kennel Club, while some of the legendary greats of the terrier world from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, were getting long in the tooth and passing on to the Great Hunting Ground in the sky.

Add to this mix one of the constant beats in the terrier world: the loss of great dogs before their time, coupled with the rise of young know-nothings and fools who continue to give the sport a bad name.

So is the book grim, then?

Suprisingly, not at all, for the central voice is that of the diggers that have endured and will always endure, not the least of whom is editor David Harcombe himself.

A short section bemoaning "Which way for the Jack Russell Terrier?" is also somewhat bemused that otherwise intelligent people are going down the road to Kennel Club oblivion thinking this old road must now lead to somewhere else.

A piece entitled "The Spirit is Willing," is a celebration of an old dog who nearly loses his life due to the mistake of his owner.

A piece entitled "Respect for the Quarry" reminds us all that we safeguard our own self-respect when we treat dogs and wildlife with some reverance.

Again and again in this book we get quick profiles of notable characters, famous names, and unique voices in the world of digging. We also get a regular peppering of concern and amazement about about how terrier work is presented in the press.

I have to say I do not wonder why terrier work is often misrepresented: the world seems to be full of young fools only too happy to do it all wrong and present the ugly side up. This last week, for example, I was rather alarmed to read one person on a semi-public forum who suggested that a ban on fighting dogs was a threat to terrier work (it is not, and to equate the two is pure nonsense and an insult), while on another semi-public board a young digger posted pictures of the ugliest kind of fox culling. Did we need to see that?

Of coure the young who have done very little have to show all they have ever done, no matter how pathetic. And if some people waited for knowledge before they spoke, we would still not know they existed.

As an antidote to the poseurs, this Working Terrier Year Book gives us the varied voices of experience -- of those who observe that a mute dog was never valued in the old days, and who note that a really hard dog cannot stick with it over the several hours (or more) that it may take to dig deep.

My favorite line, is stolen from Napoleon Bonaparte, and is used to describe why show rings are incapable of judging the invisible but not emphemeral, qualities of a true working terrier: "The spirit is to the material as three is to one." Excellent!

Some book reviews are also included: a very nice (and well deserved) review of David MacDonald's Running With the Foxes, and an excoriating (and equally well-deserved) review of the awful novel Trog by D. Brian Plummer.

And, of course, there are stories of digs and dogs and men. The murky pedigrees of some famous terriers are debated as if they are important, while a well-thought out piece on Jocelyn Lucas wonders whether his dogs were really any good and whether Lucas himself was more of a writer than a digger (good question, good question!) Short profiles are given of such "names" in the world of working terriers as Bert Gripton, Arthur Nixon, John Park, Ken Smith, and Ken Gould.

All in all, this book was an easy and quite enjoyable read, as it presents a varied set of topics in easy-to-digest bits and pieces that are perfect for consumption between coffee and work, dinner and bed. A very worthy addition to any working terrier book collection.


4Hard cover, 425 pages, edited (and often written) by David Harcombe

4Available from: Fieldfare, P.O. Box 2, Llandro SA19 6EW at cost of £25 pounds including postage and shipping within the U.K. and £27 pounds to Europe and Ireland, and £29 pounds to the U.S.A.

4To order via credit card (PayPal), >> CLICK HERE

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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.

Good Reading Worth Noting

I have added three new buttons to the front page of the www.terrierman.com web site, which can also be seen to the right below the date links. The links below are provided as a service (and a thanks) to those who are passing it on in a sensible and permanent way.

• Read Country Books is the well-named online book store run by Ben Read who is doing a great service by finding and reprinting a lot of the old field sport books which have gone out of print. The prices are more than fair, the service excellent, the books a delight to read. Highest recommendation!
  
• Coch-y-Bonddu Books is another great online store (and physcial store too if you are in Wales) that has a wide variety of new and old books on field sports. Again, great prices, great service, and my highest recommendation.
  
• Earth Dog - Running Dog is David Harcombe's magazine in the UK which can now be ordered online.

David Harcombe's Book on Badger Digging

Badger Digging with Terriers by David Harcombe -- £19.95 from Read Country Books

Hardback, 129 pages, black and white photographs throughout.

"This little book has been produced in an attempt to impart a sense of balance to the hysterical atmosphere which surrounds the badger. The animal is now virtually untouchable, yet any farmer will testify that there are times when brock is an even greater nuisance than the fox.

The flaw prohibits humane capture and removal of the badger (at least, by terrier men) though 'naturalists' are quite often guilty and appear to place themselves above the law, even keeping them as pets, a role to which the badger is particularly unsuited.

Badgers thrive now as never before and it is hoped that the level will not cause unacceptable difficulties for those who earn their living from the countryside, whose views are usually completely opposite to the 'nature lovers' who are so often seen to be completely out of touch with reality.

David Harcombe is best known for his 'Working Terrier Year Book' which first saw the light of day in 1978 an proved to be very popular with terrier men. The Year Book is now in its fourth volume.

He is simply a worker of terriers, having a great enthusiasm for the worker and an equally great aversion to the working show scene as it exists today.

He is a campaigner for all that is best in terrier sport and seeks to counteract the unfortunate publicity which has often been attached by the actions of a certain sadistic, and untypical, minority."

New Italian Terrier Book Translated into English

I have not read this book myself, but it is said to focus exclusively on working terrier breeds (Paterdale Terrier, Jack Russell Terrier, Border Terrier, Deutsche Jagdterrier and Working Lakeland Terrier). Chapters deal with various aspects of field work, from the training of dogs for earth work to working boar, and with notes on first aid in the field. There is a section of interviews with terriermen.

The book is 224 pages long with 157 photographs and 15 illustrations. The foreword is by David Harcombe, editor of Earth Dog - Running Dog magazine.

Greg D. who has read the book, reports that it is a great read with a lot of good pictures and excellent interviews.

To order: Indigo Editor \ Via Case Palmerini, 8803020 \ Casamari (FR) \ email: info@indigo-editore.it

Earth Dog - Running Dog - Order Online

Earth Dog - Running Dog Magazine is the oldest and largest-circulation publication on lurchers and terrier work in the United Kingdom. Edited by David Harcombe, this publication features pictures and tales of working terriers and long dogs in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and even the U.S, and mainland Europe. If you're looking for a gift for yourself, a trial judge, or a fellow sportsman that has taken you out into the field and taught you the ropes, an annual subscription to Earth Dog - Running Dog is the way to go! To order by credit card (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, eCheck >> click here

"Silence is Golden"

The Story, below, was written by Eddie Chapman and comes from Earth Dog - Running Dog, No. 20, December 1993, pp. 12-14. This was on a UK bulletin board and so someone else had to type it in, thank goodness.

To order Earth Dog - Running Dog magazine >> Click here.

To order copies of either of Eddie Chapman's two books >> Click here.

"I have been known to get quite hot under the collar when someone has interfered when a fox is about to bolt for besides upsetting the plan it is unfair on the terrier who has probably already worked quite hard to get his fox out. My most memorable occasion when this happened almost cost me my job for I was, at the time, doing terrier work for a pack on the Welsh border.

Hounds had met at a really big country house and the "Lord of the Manor" was an eighty year old ex-Master -- an arrogant old son of a bitch and as big a snob as one could possibly find. Hounds found immediately in a big old spinny near the house and after a short circuit of the property they marked to ground within three hundred yards of the meet.

It was a three hole earth but about twelve feet deep and I could see it would be a difficult dig....I asked the master to take hounds well back so that I could try for a bolt.....I slipped a little bitch, a cracker for bolting a fox....five minutes passed, then ten, but I was sure of a bolt....just then this old boy from the big house came ambling down the field with an even older looking terrier under his arm. I waved to indicate to him to keep back, or at least out of the line of fire....I shouted at him to keep back but as he reached the stream he threw the dog across and as the dog landed, so the fox
came to the entrance, saw both the dog and the old man, and did a quick about turn back into the earth.... I literally screamed at the master to get the old fool out of the way, swearing at him and leaping across the stream to tell him what I thought of him. I could hear the fox lay hold of my bitch as he turned back at her, which sent me into more of a rage.... I shouted to the master to take hounds on as there was no chance of a bolt now and he would probably not see me again that day as, thanks to the old idiot, I was now faced with a long and difficult dig.....

I netted the holes and, leaving one man to watch them, set about trying to find the terrier.... After about three hours we were down to the sandstone but although the bitch could now be heard quite plainly, it would have taken a jack hammer to make an impression on that rock.....We would have to tunnel between the two layers of sandstone.... By eleven thirty that night I was just about done in and I had only gone in about ten feet or so.... I decided to call it a night and, lifting the nets, I left my coat on the top hole and drove the two hours home..... The next morning, with my brother to help, I got back to the earth at nine o’clock....the old bitch was still baying away steadily so I reset the nets and started to dig into the tunnel once more.....we got lucky and broke into a pipe that led directly to the bitch....She was lying on her back baying upwards, for the fox was directly above her. It would take several hours to reach her so I decided to call her back and try another terrier that might get hold of the fox....I released Cooper, with lots of encouragement to send her on her way. She hit the fox like a train and, taking an instant firm hold, started to draw. Actually, she had
gone in and then up a couple of feet to reach the fox so she was now really swinging in mid air, her back end six inches from the floor, jerking like mad to try to pull the fox away from his elevated position....The old man from the house brought us tea and sandwiches....Half an hour later Cooper had not made any progress, just swinging there, jerking so we just had to tunnel in to reach her. By late afternoon I had managed to get near enough to reach her and I got hold of her, helping her by pulling with her. The first bit of pressure saw the fox come with a rush and if I had not blinded him with the torch, which halted him for a moment, I reckon he would have been over me and away, even with the bitch holding him, for he was as big as an alsation and just as strong. I got him by the scruff with my free hand then, dropping the torch, got a leg, by mistake, with my other hand and before I could change my hold he got me, fair across the hand.

The next few minutes were murder as my brother dragged me back by my boots, fox, terrier and all and we shot this very big specimen, still gripping me like a vice. And all that just because the old man had interfered at the crucial time!"