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The wolf who retrieved ducks
I came across a story of a wolf that learned to retrieve ducks from a water spaniel. This story appears in Durward Allen’s The Wolves of Minong (1979): This particular story clearly suggests that...
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Hunting big game with “Newfoundland” dogs
George Cartwright with his greyhound in Labrador. They have bagged a melanistic red fox. One probably doesn’t think of the ancestors of retrievers hunting things like polar bears and wolves, but in...
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Debating retriever recipes and the merits of dog shows
In the days when retrievers were not purebred dogs, everyone who had anything to do with them had some idea about what the ideal “recipe” of which breeds to cross. Most early retriever people used...
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Retriever and spaniel help bag a Tibetan antelope
Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii). The following account of two “strange deerhounds” comes from Large game shooting in Thibet, the Himalayas, Northern and Central India (1892) by Alexander Angus...
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An arctic hunting dog named Shep
A black retriever/husky cross. Source for image. The following description of a hunting and retrieving sled dog comes from “Mooney-ow,” a contributor to Hunter-Trader-Trapper in 1917. His piece is...
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4 million
According my stat counter, this blog will have crossed the 4 million hit mark within the next hour or so. Thank you for reading, sharing, and subscribing to my work. It’s been a lot of work. I have...
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Hunter with retriever by Frank W. Benson (1926)
It’s hard to tell what breed of retriever this is, but I have my suspicions.
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Russian gun dogs, 1907
These hunters must have been borrowing heavily from the British traditions. Two setters or a setter and pointer in the cart and black retriever in the front. These men may have even been British who...
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John Guille Millais’s retriever named Jet
Jet. A few months ago, I wrote about how Sir Everett Millais created the modern basset hound when the inbred strains of Norman basset that were being bred in England were crossed with a bloodhound. Sir...
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