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At the end of the eighteenth century, while dog varieties ebbed and flowed in popularity there were no established breeds in the modern sense of the term. Among the British landed classes, dog varieties clearly similar to modern spaniels were bred to assist gentlemen in finding the birds that they had shot down. However, until the late eighteenth century, the slaughter of wild birds was limited by the technology of guns and particularly their rate of fire. After each shot the muzzle-loading guns of the period took a long time to reload and this meant that only a relatively few birds could be downed in a day’s sport.
Although Henry VIII was said to have owned a breech-loader, it was not until 1772 that Patrick Ferguson, a British officer serving in the American War of Independence, invented the first practical breech-loading flintlock. The design took off and before long breech-loaders were the popular choice for shooting among gentlemen of leisure. The effect of the innovation was to greatly increase the kill rate of a shooting party. With that came the desire for a new type of dog capable of retrieving birds quickly, in large numbers and without damage.
Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks, son of a partner in the exclusive London bank of the same name and a keen sportsman, acquired sufficient personal wealth to purchase the 2,000-acre Guisachan Estate in Glen Affric, near Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands. He served as Member of Parliament for Berwick-upon-Tweed before being created 1st Baron Tweedmouth. Like many of his Victorian contemporaries, Marjoribanks was an enthusiastic naturalist and in 1868, he set out to create a new breed of dog by scientific means that would combine all the features required for a modern gun-dog: speed, of course, an acute sense of both sight and smell, intelligence and, importantly, a soft mouth to carry the downed birds back to the guns.
Others in the past had bred for desirable traits, but what sets Marjoribanks apart is his meticulous record-keeping. I have marvelled at his studbook, preserved in the library of the Kennel Club’s Mayfair headquarters. In the best copperplate script, he details all the breeding pairs at his Guisachan kennels. There is recorded the careful creation of the first of the nascent new breed: Cowslip the Golden Retriever from Nous, a yellow wavy-coated retriever, and Belle, a Tweed Water Spaniel. The family tree carries on with contributions from Sambo, a black Labrador and a sandy-haired bloodhound, down to Queenie, at which point the breed was established and closed to outsiders.
What this meant in effect was that Queenie’s Golden Retriever descendants, and that means all pedigree Golden Retrievers, had managed to survive from that point onward with a severely restricted gene pool, limited to the genes inherited from Queenie and her male companions. It is appropriate that the Tweedmouth studbook is housed in the Kennel Club library because one of the important activities of the club, which continues to this day, is to maintain a register of pedigree breeds. The Kennel Club was founded in 1873 in Victoria, London, by ‘ten gentlemen’, and, although it has grown enormously in size and influence, it still maintains the atmosphere and traditions of a London gentlemen’s club. I have visited the Kennel Club on several occasions in the course of my research for this book and have been warmly welcomed every time. Like other London clubs, the walls are hung with portraits, but other than Her Majesty the Queen, the Club’s patron, all the others are of dogs.
We have touched on the Victorian working man’s enthusiasm for competitive dog shows as an alternative to ratting contests. The first dog show was held in Newcastle upon Tyne town hall in 1859 and, for the country gentleman, the inaugural field trial took place in 1865 in Southall. The formation of the Kennel Club eight years later was initially intended to impose some standards on dog shows and field trials that would encourage fairness and the welfare of the animals taking part. The sport enjoyed an explosive growth, fuelled by the Victorians’ enthusiasm for hobbies and natural science.
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, the same year as the first dog show was held. The book introduced the public to the concepts of evolution and selection which they could observe in their own dogs. In the wild, Darwin argued, the inherent variation existing between individuals was the bedrock of evolution. The better the individual fitted the environment, the more offspring it had and the greater the chance that the genes responsible for the advantage would be passed on and spread in subsequent generations. The ‘environment’ in this case was their natural surroundings, and so Darwin gave his book the full title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The book captured the mood of the time and became an instant bestseller.
Darwin also recognised, however, that selection was not always ‘natural’. It could also be ‘artificial’. Taking the fantastic range of freakish pigeon varieties created by breeders as a working example, Darwin suggested these were mutants (he used the term ‘sports’ to describe them) which stood no chance of surviving in the wild and were only perpetuated by artificial means, in this case by the pigeon fanciers. The Victorian craze for novelty also caused dog breeders to pick out the rare ‘sports’ in their litters and breed from them.
When Lord Tweedmouth was perfecting the Golden Retriever he was selecting naturally occurring rather than freakish variation, but some breeds do have their origins in ‘sports’ that would certainly not survive for long in the wild. The truncated limbs of the Dachshund, the extravagant coat of the Komodoro, the compressed face of the French Bulldog, all came from ‘sports’.
Darwin knew nothing of genes or DNA, whose discovery lay years into the future. Nevertheless, ‘sports’ and natural variation are both ultimately caused by genetic changes. There is no fundamental difference between the two. Only the means of propagation differentiates the ‘sports’ that need humans to help them survive, and naturally occurring variants that do not.
As we have seen, dogs began their evolution toward the extraordinary range of creatures that we see today a very long time ago. First to emerge were dogs bred for guarding or for hunting. These early specialists were certainly the result of selective breeding, although the strict rules of the pedigree dog were not enforced as they are today. Special traits were enhanced by breeding from dogs that displayed them. Breeds were not closed, but neither was breeding an entirely random affair. Thus, for centuries before breeds became officially recognised and standards were set, different breeds, or should I say ‘proto-breeds’, were recognised. Many ‘proto-breeds’ carried the same name as their modern-day pedigrees, though they did not conform to any standard.
It is clear from the archaeological and pictorial evidence from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome that the differentiation between dogs was already apparent in the early historical period. The two most obvious early specialists were large robust dogs, like the Molossian, used for guarding and war, and slim, saluki-like hunting dogs built for speed.
As time went on and dogs, through selective breeding, became more and more specialised for particular roles, a whole range of proto-breeds emerged. Sporting dogs were divided naturally into sight-hounds, like the Greyhound, which search for and pursue their prey using their eyes, and scent-hounds, like the bloodhound, which use their noses. Both these qualities, keen sight and a sensitive nose, are part of the sensory armoury of the wolf and clearly have a genetic basis, without which no amount of selective breeding could enhance these qualities. By breeding from the dogs with either the best sense of smell or the keenest eyesight the proto-scent-hound and proto-sight-hound breeds became differentiated. This was Darwinian evolution in an artificial setting. The naturally occurring variation within dogs was channelled into creating what looked like a new species, but in fact was not. They were still members of the same species and, like all dogs, were still capable of interbreeding but were prevented from doing so by their owners.
An Irish Wolfhound and a Toy Poodle–Chihuahua mix illustrate the remarkable range of physical variation within the species Canis lupus familiaris. (Creative Commons)