David Hancock on Dog Breeding

"Uncle Sam," a St Bernard at the 1908 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, Click to enlarge.

This article by Col. David Hancock first appeared in the The Countryman's Weekly back in July 14, 2000:

The Way Breeding Standards Used to Be

"Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favour."

THESE WORDS of Robert Frost could so easily describe the relationship between some dog breeders and the wording of the Kennel Club standards laid down as the blueprint for each recognised breed.

Ignoring the true meaning of the intentional misreading of the written design criteria for any breed is a form of wickedness. Such an act suits the humans involved but rarely the dog. But can any genuine dog lover truly want to produce a Bulldog that cannot breath, an Old English Sheepdog that cannot see and a Bloodhound, which not only drools saliva over every item within range, but has discomfort from sunken eyes and an over-abundance of loose skin?

Can any breeder producing a Basset Hound which steps on its own ears and has chronic eye problems claim to love the breed?

Respect for the standard

An exaggeration, claimed Kahlil Gilbran, is a truth that has lost its temper. Being true to any breed involves respect for the standard and respect for the dogs of that breed.

Exaggerating the physical features of a subject creature, to its subsequent discomfort, to me indicates disrespect both for the breed design and, more importantly for the dogs themselves.

Less well-informed members of the public have come to think of exaggerations in some pedigree breeds of dog as being typical, traditional and not affecting the animal's quality of life. Not so. None of these is true.

Contemporary breeds like the Bull terrier, Basset Hound, Bloodhound, Bulldog and St. Bernard are now quite unlike their own ancestors. They defy their own breed heritage and mock their distinguished lineage. Man has deformed each of these breeds.

Broad-mouthed "holding" dogs like the mastiff breeds predate the much-mentioned Molossian dogs. They were valued by Assyrians, Scythians and the Sarmatians as heavy hounds over 2000 years ago. The Bullmastiff as a breed-type existed long before S.E. Moseley stabilised the modern breed from his Farcroft Kennels.

The English Mastiff was much more like a heavy hound before the advent of pedigree dog shows. The Bulldogs of the baiting contests were much more like Pit Bull terriers than the Bulldog.

And, if you look at portrayals of the prototypal Bullmastiffs and consult the official Kennel Club breed standard, you are struck at once by the incorrect skull conformation in so many specimens in the breed today. The breed MUST have a muzzle!

Yet time and time again in today's show rings I see pug-faced, apple-headed Bullmastiffs exhibited, with hyper-abbreviated muzzles -- in clear breach or the breed blueprint, and they win! And they win at the World Dog Show!

The early examples of the breed also had tight mouths. Now we are seeing loose-lipped drooling specimens quite unlike their forebears. It is bad enough when Bulldog, Bloodhound and St Bernard breeders produce such caricatures. But tradtionally Bullmastiff breeders have had more sense and kept faith.

However, unless contemporary Bullmastiff fanciers become responsible, realistic and reverse these tendencies, we are going to end up with giant drooling pugs - a complete travesty of the breed ideal and an insult to those distinguished pioneers who handed on the custody of this superb breed of dog for us to protect in our lifetime.

The sad fact is, however, that if you allow small exaggerations into a breed, then those small exaggerations soon exaggerate themselves. And, with a closed gene pool, the exaggerations get more pronounced with each generation.

The working Basset Hound fraternity has out crossed to the Harrier to remedy the problem of exaggerations exaggerating themselves in that breed.

Edwin Brough, the greatly respected pioneer-breeder of purebred Bloodhounds, recommended an outcross every fifth generation to retain virility and type. An outcross to the big black and tan Dumfriesshire Foxhound was used some 50 years ago. Now an outcross to one of the packs of hunting Bloodhounds is being mooted.

The St Bernard of today is revealing far too much of the Mastiff blood utilised by breeders a century ago and is not only quite unlike its own hospice ancestors, but markedly different from its native companion breeds, also bred to operate in the high pastures, the Bernese Mountain Dog, the Great Swiss Mountain Dog, the Appenzeller and the Entlebucher.

The pursuit of "great bone" and great size in the breed to the detriment of soundness, strength and virility, has not been wise.

Neither has the imposition of the rugger-ball for a head in the Bull terrier, in pursuit of the dreaded "down face," nor the strange desire to make the lovable Basset Hound more like the cartoon character in a national newspaper than is good for a living creature.

Dog breeders have a huge moral responsibility, magnified by the increasing loss of role for breeds which once worked. Function once decided design. Now the whim of man all too often distorts a design originally drawn up by knowledgeable people who worked their dogs.

Pastoral breeds were never intended to possess coats, which would hamper them at work. Working Bloodhounds do not display the degree of wrinkle seen in the breed in the show rings of today. Working Bassets, or English Bassets as they have now become known, do not display the over-long backs and under-length legs found in their show ring counterparts.

The pursuit of undesirable and harmful exaggerations in breeds of dog tells you more about the moral shortcomings of man than about the faults in individual dogs.Of what possible benefit to the dog are sunken eyes and ears this long?

The Kennel Club is looking all the time at the wording of breed standards, which result, for whatever reason, in harmful effects in dogs. As the holders of the copyright of the breed standards, the Kennel Club has the ultimate responsibility for undesirable words in them.


Tendentious interpretation

But, in the end, less honourable people will misuse any wording presented to them. The promotion of "their" type and their own tendentious interpretation of the standard will be their preference, whatever the regrettable long-term penalties for their breed.

It just needs one influential but misguided breeder or a dissident clique to put at risk over 100 years of devoted work by generations of worthier breed enthusiasts.

It would not be difficult to restore the historically correct head to the Bull terrier, a more athletic anatomy to our beloved Bulldog, a healthier physique to the appealing Basset Hound or to reduce the excess of skin on the admirable breed of Bloodhound.

The dogs suffer in silence. The public usually accept a breed as it's presented to them. A handsome but slab-sided Irish Setter or pointer is not exposed as a pet to the penalties such a feature would bring to a working dog on a grouse moor.

But the ratio of depth of chest to breadth has been shown to be a factor in the incidence of bloat, a dangerous disease. The amount of haw in the eye of a Basset Hound or Bloodhound might not be life-threatening but the considerable discomfort of constantly having foreign bodies irritating the eyeball is avoidable and surely must therefore be avoided by the custodians of any breed.

The critiques of judges sometimes reveal the failures of breeders when they describe poor movement, inadequate structure or lack of type. But I know of no breed council that sits down either to review judges? comments or consider the sate of their particular breed.

The dentition in Staffordshire Bull terriers, the movement in Mastiffs, the structure of Bearded Collies, the too-heavy coats in Rough Collies and the inability of breeds like the Clumber Spaniel, the Scottish terrier and the Bulldog to give birth naturally would all receive attention in any humane breed council, truly devoted to the best interests of its breed.

As a direct result of breeds being abandoned by their own clubs and councils, enlightened individuals are coming together out of despair and out of a genuine love of their breed.

The situation in the breed of the Bulldog illustrates this most vividly. Pip Nobes in Australia, Lolly Wilkinson in Canada, Jan Dirk van Ginneke in Holland, David Leavitt in America and Ken Mollett in the UK have separately been striving to produce a healthier, more athletic and more historically correct version of the Bulldog.

Pip Nobes has bred an "Aussie Bulldog" with a smaller head and chest, broader hips and a longer muzzle, good news for any Bulldog anywhere.

Ken Mollett has formed the Victorian Bulldog Society, composed of a dedicated group of Bulldog lovers with a difference -- they prefer healthier Bulldogs and breed them to prove it.

In Canada, using stock imported by earlier settlers, Lolly Wilkinson produces athletic and authentic Bulldogs, more like the famous prototypal Bulldogs "Rosa" and "Crib" than our show ring specimens allegedly inspired by them. Her dogs live a long time and give birth naturally. Ours do not.

It is to me shaming that an overseas breeder should have to show our breeders the way to breed the best examples of our most famous native breed of dog.

Change may well depend on the truth being in and out of favour, as Robert Frost declared.

Exaggeration may well be, as Gilbran considered, the truth having lost its temper.
Change is often needed and welcome, but changes in breeds that are harmful or alter breed type unacceptably are neither needed nor welcome, whether in or out of favour.


Needless handicaps

Harmful exaggerations should make us lose our tempers with those who inflict needless handicaps on subject creatures. Pedigree dogs are particularly vulnerable, sadly especially in Britain, where we have produced some of the most regrettable exaggerations displayed in the domestic dog.

Going back to the breeding of a number of breeds "the way they were" is neither sentimental nor regressive, it is sorely needed. Before we are humiliated by an edict from Brussels, we have work to do.

The Last Great Lurcherman

Parody is always a form of compliment, even if a back-handed one, and when it is done well it can rise to an art form as it does here in this piece from Gary Hosker's web site. Wonderful!

This is, of course, a twist on the sometime fawning magazine profiles about the late Brian Plummer (including one that once appeared in The New Yorker), which generally featured his ratting terriers, but sometimes his Hancock-bred lurchers as well.

I will see if I can find the old New Yorker piece and post it -- I think I have it somewhere. Note that the jump link at the end of this exerpt takes you to the rest of the story on the original web site.

John Higginbottom, the Last Great Lurcherman.


For this report we are indebted to the Sunday Spineless and its roving correspondent, Miss Wilhelmina Wordspinner.

This article first appeared in the 1991 lurcher yearbook. However, Miss Wordspinner has made ‘several’ trips to the Yorkshire Dales since 1991 and has agreed to publish her articles and extracts from her private diaries here on the Official Lurcher Web Site.


Part 1.

I drove north the three hundred long miles from my comfortable air-conditioned London office to interview a recluse, a self- styled eccentric, a man above men, a lurcherman. Name, John Higginbottom.

My journey started with a long drive north, then north and north again along the MI for what seemed an age. As the flat lands of the south turned first to gently rolling meadows of Northamptonshire and then to the hills of Derbyshire I drove ever onwards, finally arriving in the windswept dales of Yorkshire; a land where, if it's not raining one instinctively knows it must be snowing.

High limestone and millstone grit fells clad in an ever-present mist seemingly sweep up to the very base of the stratosphere. This North of England that lies on the wrong side of a theoretical line known as the north-south divide; a North of dark satanic cotton mills that belch black smoke out of imposing, discoloured and misshapen chimneys, chimneys reaching almost as high as the fells that surround them, blending with the landscape yet at the same time destroying it. A North of coal mines and colliers, of iron foundries and smelters, where work- hardened men lead lives so arduous their circumstances could best be described as an existence.

Yet, leave this industrial landscape that was once the pulsating heart of a proud British Empire and drive only a few short miles through the bitter driving rain and take a side road (track would be a more accurate description for metalled roads have yet to come to this part of Britain) signposted 'to the edge of the world' and one encounters an altogether unique England.

An England so blissfully isolated from the twentieth century that one feels encapsulated in an age long past.

Sheep hardened by many a long winter shelter behind 'dry' stone walls from the ever present torrent of rain, where men still scrape a meagre living for themselves behind horse and plough, cultivating crops on half an acre of boulder-strewn land, subsistence living that is this England. Yes this can truly be called a place on the edge of the world.

I took this path to find lurcherman John Higginbottom, John, a giant of a man with ruddy complexion, short greying hair, a beard of flaming red, and hands like the proverbial size ten shovel. Hands that were cut, bruised and contorted, he told me, through many a long desperate dig, rescuing his battle-hardened terrier 'Tootsie' from life or death conflicts with rabbit and other subterranean creatures, this reclusive, almost shy man refused to talk about.

John, a youthful forty-seven, a taciturn man who still retains most of his own teeth, was brought up in the Midlands and is a spot welder by trade. I asked him why? Why does any man try and live here, all alone pushing himself to the very limits of endurance in order to eke out a shallow existence in this particularly inhospitable place, with only the bark of his seven lurcher dogs and sound of the occasional crow for company. “Have you ever spot welded?” replied John philosophically. He sat quite still reading Kipling to himself.

Breaking the silence I enquired about the breeding of his battle-hardened terrier, Tootsie. “That,” explained John, ”is a Higginbottom terrier, the culmination of a twenty-five year selective breeding programme based on the Yorkshire terrier with just a dash of King Charles spaniel for temperament.”

Feeling that I had in some small way penetrated his rock-hard exterior and socialized myself with John, I asked, nay begged, to accompany him on one of his famous hunting expeditions -- expeditions, on which I was informed, he uses his homogeneous pack of Higginbottom lurchers to hunt all legal quarry. For John truly is the last of the self-confessed great hunters.

John fell silent, gritted his teeth, pursed his lips, and went into deep thought, almost a trance as if he were going through a metamorphosis or having an out-of-body experience.

Then as suddenly as he had entered the trance he snapped back to reality, kicked his dog and snapped: “Yes, the mad are in God's keeping. Tomorrow morning, crack of ten thirty, not a minute later and I hope for your sake you have a high attention span.”

Glancing in my direction before walking into his meagre shanty home, shared with his pack of Higginbottom hounds, John continued “I insist upon complete and utter obedience from both my dogs and those who chose to follow me.” Fixing me with those steely blue eyes, he gave a penetrating stare, a stare that I would come to know as his force 7 stare. I felt as the Apostles must have felt on the banks of sea of Galilee. I was in awe of this demigod.

Next morning we set off across the fields at a quarter-past- eleven precisely. I asked John why he was late. “Time has no relevance here on the edge of the world,” replied he, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

'Ferrets, ferrets I must have ferrets,' he whispered gently. Suddenly he opened a hutch door, and plunged his gigantic hand into a cage of these ferocious little carnivores. Five ferrets bit deep into the flesh of each of his massive digits -- yet did this man flinch? Not he.

With blood trickling down his forearm he throttled each ferret in turn in order to prise them from his fingers. "Aren't you concerned about infection' I asked “No,” said he “The poker's in the fire. I'll cauterize the wounds when we return.” I glanced ominously at the cumulus clouds gathering overhead, said a silent prayer and thought – ‘If we return.’ >> TO READ MORE

Small World Department

Steve Bodio gives a "big water bowl" boost to Lilly the dacshund.

The world is a small southern town. A while back, I discovered that Teddy Moritz's Harris Hawk was sired by Matt Mullenix's retired bird Charlie. Now it turns out that Steve Bodio's long-haired dachshund, Lilly, is related to Teddy's line of long-haired min-dachshunds, while his two lurchers, Pearlie and Plum (short for Plummer), are Hancock-bred animals as was Keeper, Teddy's old shattered-eye lurcher which was, I think, one of the spookiest-looking dogs I ever looked in the face.


Pearlie the lurcher looking guilty for having found a soft seat.



Bear the stag hound (left) and Plum the lurcher (right).

Since I've got a couple of lurcher pictures up, and I mentioned Col. David Hancock, I will quote from a Hancock article that first appeared in the The Countryman's Weekly back on July 14, 2000:

"Dog breeders have a huge moral responsibility, magnified by the increasing loss of role for breeds which once worked. Function once decided design. Now the whim of man all too often distorts a design originally drawn up by knowledgeable people who worked their dogs.

"Pastoral breeds were never intended to possess coats, which would hamper them at work. Working Bloodhounds do not display the degree of wrinkle seen in the breed in the show rings of today. Working Bassets, or English Bassets as they have now become known, do not display the over-long backs and under-length legs found in their show ring counterparts.

"The pursuit of undesirable and harmful exaggerations in breeds of dog tells you more about the moral shortcomings of man than about the faults in individual dogs."

8 To read the full article

The Cruelty of Crufts?

From The Daily Telegraph

It's the biggest canine beauty contest in the world, with 22,500 competitors fighting it out to be top dog, there will be bitching, grooming and millions of pounds spent on getting that million dollar look.

Shar-Pei dogs are noted for their folds of wrinkly skin
But as dog breeders across the world converge on Crufts 2007 to fight it out for the most prestigious prizes in the dog world, an almighty row is raging behind the scenes which calls into question the very principles on which such shows are based.

For some Crufts, and other dog shows represent a world which favours superficial beauty over health, putting the personal whims of breeders and judges before the well-being of the animals.

David Hancock, a dog expert and author, says the demands of breeders and judges who favour exaggerated features such as long ears, short legs or long spines, result in animals which suffer ill health and a reduced quality of life.

"The dogs should come first and they don't," Mr Hancock says. "Dogs that are not sound are capable of winning Crufts. Breeders shouldn't be looking for superficial perfection, they should be looking for soundness in structure, movement and temperament."

Bloodhounds, for example, now have so much loose skin around their eyes, thanks to modifications made by breeders, that they risk getting painful grass seeds in their eyes, Mr Hancock says.

The St Bernard, fondly regarded as a mountain rescue dog, is now so weighty with such heavy eyelids and loose lips that it would be severely handicapped in any snow rescues. And short-faced dogs like the Pekingese and Bulldog only have 20 per cent of the scenting capability of longer muzzled dogs - a real disability in the canine world which relies so heavily on scent, he says.

Shar Peis, famed for their soft folds of wrinkly skin, can suffer eczema and other skin complaints, and bulldogs which often suffer breathing difficulties due to the large heads which they have developed, more often than not are born by caesarean section due to their comparatively small behinds.

"When human excesses and arrogance get out of hand, it's the dogs who suffer. I see a lot of flawed dogs winning Crufts and other shows and it may be very flattering for the owners, but what about the health and well-being of the breed?" Mr Hancock told Dogs Today magazine.

He says vets and the RSPCA should do more to encourage the Kennel Club, which runs the competition, to change the breed standards upon which the dogs are judged, to encourage breeders to change their agenda. He also wants health testing, currently voluntary, to become compulsory.

Phil Buckley, spokesman for the Kennel Club, said it constantly looks at improving breed standards to safeguard the animals' welfare, and encourages breeders to take part in health schemes.

"If we notice problems with a dog, we contact the breeders association. For example, in the case of the British bulldog, the breeding standards used to say "head massive" which lead to problems in some areas.

We contacted the breeder's council and in conjunction with then we amended the breed standards to say "head in relation to rest of body. That was in the 1990s and we have already seen an improvement."

So far Britain is not among the 18 European countries who have signed up to the European Convention for the Protection of Pet Animals. This requires dog and cat breeding associations to revise their standards to eliminate "extreme characteristics detrimental to the health and welfare of the animals".

But the Kennel Club is actively lobbying parliament not to sign up to the convention, saying it has adequate measures in place without the need for "inference from politicians who are not experts in dogs."

Acting Chief Veterinary Advisor to the RSPCA, David McDowell said the charity broadly shared Mr Hancock's concerns and said responsibility for change lay with the club.

"We have highlighted the problem on many occasions. But until breeding standards are changed, breeders will breed dogs which will win shows."

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence.

Hancock on the Morality of Breeding

Writing in The Countryman's Weekly of July 14, 2000, Colonel David Hancock writes: "Dog breeders have a huge moral responsibility, magnified by the increasing loss of role for breeds which once worked. Function once decided design. Now the whim of man all too often distorts a design originally drawn up by knowledgeable people who worked their dogs.

"Pastoral breeds were never intended to possess coats, which would hamper them at work. Working Bloodhounds do not display the degree of wrinkle seen in the breed in the show rings of today. Working Bassets, or English Bassets as they have now become known, do not display the over-long backs and under-length legs found in their show ring counterparts.

"The pursuit of undesirable and harmful exaggerations in breeds of dog tells you more about the moral shortcomings of man than about the faults in individual dogs."