Once in a decade it is possible to see at a field trial a bit of work so
good that it is safe to say the doer of it will win the stake—it is
safe, although when the opinion is formed the rest of the entries have
not been seen at work. It would not be safe to say so when acting as
judge, or to act upon any such notion. But the writer has ventured the
opinion on several occasions when others have been judging, and has
always been right. The occasions arise only in those rare circumstances
when the scent is as good as can be, and the dog does things that only
the very best can do in the most favourable circumstances.
Generally it is unsafe to form any opinions except by comparing the work
of one dog with that of another at the same time and place. That is what
field trials enable; and it does not follow that when only moderate work
is done at them that the doers are only ordinary. Field trials are often
held in conditions of scent and weather when the wise shooter would go
home. The competitors at these meetings are always picked dogs at home,
and have generally beaten “good trial horses” before they show in
public. But when shooters go to a trial and unfavourably compare what
they see there to experience at home, they may be right, but whenever
this comparison has given them confidence enough to enter dogs the
latter have invariably been disgraced, unless they happened to be of
field trial winning blood. This really answers the question as to what
use these institutions are.
On the other hand, it is by no means the most experienced field trial
men who have the best chance of victory, provided the canine blood is
the same for all competitors.
What natural selection and the survival of the fittest has done for the
fox and other scent-hunting animals, field trial selection has done for
pointers and setters since the first public trial was held in 1865. It
is not contended that working dogs have improved over the whole of this
period, but the vast superiority of the field trial breeds over others
shows what all would have declined to if it had not been for the
institutions that annually indicate the best.
But during the last half-dozen years there has been a general, and it is
said unaccountable, lack of good brace work at the field trials. The
author has satisfied himself of the reason of this strange lack of the
highest exhibition of breaking at a time when the dogs are higher broken
and more credit is given for breaking than ever before. This appears
paradoxical, but the fact is that the premium on high breaking has led
to the choice of dogs as sires and dams that are easy to break, and this
again to the discounting of courage. Some worthy usurper, who became a
rightful monarch, is said to have watched a spider attempt for nine
times to fasten his web upon a coveted spot and succeed in the end. To
hunt a brace of dogs properly, it is necessary to have material as
persevering as the only spider in history. What is required is that your
dogs should find all the game. In order that this should be done, they
must beat all the ground, and there is always one corner in a field that
nature induces the dogs to leave behind. The corner to right or left of
the spot at which the dogs are started is sure to be slightly down wind
of the starting-place. The natural tendency is to investigate up wind,
and it may be necessary for a breaker to start his dogs ten or twenty
times, and to call them back as often, before he can make them
understand that they are to “sink the wind,” are to drop back, as it
were, behind it, and do the usually neglected corner before pressing
forward and investigating the scent of game that is probably all the
time coming from up-wind of them. But it is only the very
highest-couraged dogs that can be expected to give cheerful obedience
during the constant interference that the teaching of this useful lesson
involves. The point the author wishes to make is, that it is necessary
to breed for courage and break for docility, and that this is exactly
contrary to the breeding for docility that has been done. This process,
which has been intended to improve breaking, has eliminated the best
brace work and the best quartering.
It is not intended to convey the idea that very close quartering is a
good feature. The dog should fully occupy his time, and range to the
capacity of his nose. To say a dog is going too wide may easily be a
great mistake. It is often said that a pointer or setter misses ground,
but although some people think that game cannot be missed if ground is
beaten in geometric figures, with parallel lines near together, it is
often to be observed that those which most obviously leave no ground
behind them are just those that leave birds behind them. If we could
only smell as dogs do for ten minutes, we should understand them much
better. It seems wonderful that these animals can often detect a pair of
little partridges at 150 to 200 yards away, while, even in our own
hands, we men cannot smell the birds at all. The variety in the
olfactory powers of the dog sinks almost at one end to that of the man,
but at the other is entirely beyond his power of thinking. Consequently,
when we set any limitation on the width of ranging, or the width between
the parallels in the range, we are often asking the dogs to beat the
ground twice or three times, which is opposed to the best canine nature.
The author is careless how much ground dogs leave behind provided they
leave no game behind. Consequently, if they start fairly, so as to get
the wind of the near corners, they may be assumed to know the measure of
their own noses, and to beat wide or narrow, and with parallel
quarterings near, or far apart, as necessary. The wider in both cases
the better, provided they leave no game behind. If they commit this
fault, they are only wild, and may be assumed to be scamping their work.
It has often happened that the most capable dogs in a stake have run
great risks of being thrown out for an appearance of scamping their
ground, when, as a matter of fact, they were leaving no game behind, and
knew it. This generally happens when the scent is extra good and the
dogs know that they can take what are regarded as liberties in their
range. But when scent is bad, on hot August days, and the pollen is
flying from the heather bloom, these wide rangers will be narrow enough,
and will be the only dogs that can find at all. Then those that have had
for safety to hunt in narrow parallels in good scent, will be as unable
as a man to smell a grouse. It is for this reason that the writer, when
judging at a field trial, would never condemn wide or forward ranging
unless game was actually proved to be left behind. Quartering is the
means to an end, and not the end itself, and it was far more effectively
done at field trials years ago, before people began to treat it as an
end in itself. Since then brace work has declined, and brace work had
always been that in which it was expected, and happened, that the
winners should find everything on their ground, and neither flush nor
miss anything.
The best natural quarterers (or dogs, for that matter) will invariably
be those that alter their methods to suit the occasion. When game is
scarce, they will hunt wide, because, in the absence of the scent of
game pervading the atmosphere, they can detect the presence of the game
at far greater distances than when the scent is everywhere.
They will hunt wide also in good scent.
Conversely, in bad scent they will hunt closely, and when birds are
plentiful, or scattered and lying close, they will do so also, and to
the author this variation of beat to suit the occasion is by far the
greatest proof of nose and sense.
Everybody likes to see a dog draw nicely and sharply up a good distance,
and point, knowing precisely where the game is; but these appearances
are often deceptive. Nobody knows how far the birds have run, or how
much of the draw was due to the foot scent and how little to the body
scent. These appearances of good nose have to be taken in conjunction
with the manner of beating the ground, before a just estimate of the
olfactory powers can be quickly formed. This is made all the more
difficult, because a dog of poor courage will generally draw to game as
soon as he detects foot scents, whereas the highest-couraged and best
quarterers will often gallop over those scents, recognising but scouting
the temptation, and will only draw up to body scent.
The difference between foot and body scents is not very well understood
by anyone except the dog, and not always by him. Very much nonsense has
been written on the subject. The author has noticed comments in the
Press showing that the writers believed the foot scent to be an
emanation from the feet in contact with the ground. The foot scent is
the path of scent left by an animal that has moved away. The author has
observed it left by a flying grouse, and also by a diving otter. In
neither case could the feet have had anything to do with the matter. But
that does not help us to know how the dog detects the difference between
the volatile matter that comes direct from the game to the dog’s nose,
and the same exudation that first hangs in the air, upon the water,
bubbles up from the water, clings to vegetation, or to earth, before it
reaches the dog’s nose. It is obviously not a question of strength of
scent, for a dog having missed a brace of close-crouched partridges will
instantly find the spot they rose from after they have gone, proving
that, often enough, the foot scent is very much the stronger.
The author has no opinion how it is that some dogs detect the difference
between foot and body scent instantly, and others cannot do it. It
cannot be that one is more the breath of the hunted animal than the
other, because probably the otter evolves no scent except breath when
under water, and his line is as huntable to the swimming pack as that of
the land quarry to the running hounds. Possibly the actual heat of the
volatile exudation may have something to say to the question. Whatever
the difference consists of, it is only some dogs that instantly
recognise it. These may or may not be animals able to detect a scent a
long way off. No great wonder should be occasioned by the inability to
be certain: how often do human beings recognise a picture, or a taste,
without being able to give either a name?
No attempt will be made to prove what canine-detected scent is, except
to this extent. It must be something that our own olfactory nerves work
above, or below. Just as there are noises we cannot hear and colours we
cannot see, so there are doubtless scents of great power that we
nevertheless cannot detect even slightly. A dog will sometimes find and
appear to locate correctly a partridge, or rather a pair of them, at 200
yards. We may take those birds in hand and put them to our noses, and
even then we cannot detect the faintest scent of any kind. Scent is
supposed to spread as the square of the distance, so that 600 feet
squared would represent the difference in degree of the scent of the
bird in hand and that of the bird 600 feet away. That is to say, one
would be 360,000 times as strong as the other, and we cannot detect the
strong, whereas the dog finds the weaker one. Surely this is enough to
show that it is no question of degree at all, but of something else.
Possibly the strong scent of deer and fox that we often do detect is
misleading us into the belief that we can sometimes smell what hounds
run by. On the other hand, the author has noticed that when he can smell
a fox strongest hounds cannot smell him at all, and consequently there
is more confirmation that what the canine race hunts by the human nose
cannot always detect in any degree whatever.
It has often been affirmed that game birds lose their scent during
incubation, and there is no doubt they lose a good deal of it. Hares and
vixens heavy with young are said to have a similar protection from their
enemies. But in all cases there is scent, only it is different, and not
easily recognised by the dogs kept for hunting it. On the other hand,
the nests that the pointer and setter cannot find, the terrier, with a
worse nose, often does discover, much to the gamekeeper’s grief; and the
foxes find great numbers of these nests also, and they do not do it by
sight.
A study of the matter is greatly complicated by the fact that game birds
give out no scent when crouching, fearful, under a falcon, and this hawk
most certainly does not rely upon his nose to help him discover his
prey. To understand why the power of retaining the scent should have
been evolved, by the survival of the fittest, it is necessary to go back
to the wilderness stage of our islands. Probably the first gamekeeper’s
duties were performed by the slayers of wolves, at any rate in historic
times, and we have no occasion to try and take a peep at the cave bear
in his British den. The country was much more wooded than it is now, and
it is clear that those falcons that only kill in the air would go hungry
in woodlands had it not been for the earth-crawling vermin that flushed
game for them.
The falconers are now proud of teaching a hawk to “wait on” in the air
while a pointer is at work, but if falcons ever hunted in a brushwood
country in a state of nature, that is exactly what they would have had
to do for their friends the wolves, since they could not flush for
themselves, and could not kill until a flush had occurred. It is
consequently quite likely that waiting on is a latent instinct in the
long-winged falcons, and equally, therefore, retaining the scent was a
protection against beast and bird alike.
It is a confirmation of this theory, that the birds that in incubation
secure safety by watchfulness, such as the lapwings, retain their scent
neither in incubation nor at any other time, but exude it while they are
hatching.