A Matter of Breeding

by Michael Brandow

  Just how useful was ritual hunting with conspicuously handsome gun dogs? Arkwright himself, perhaps the most vocal critic of dog shows in his day, confessed to placing much stock in the role of physical beauty on a hunt. “I know that some sportsmen nowadays affect total indifference about their dogs’ appearance,” he remarked, as trivial types like Charles Cruft were co-opting the manly world of dogdom, “but if they appreciate the good looks of their wives or their horses, why, in the name of consistency, not their pointers!”9 Arkwright’s question only begs another question: if a wealthy gentleman leisurely hunting quail, partridge, or grouse undisturbed on his vast estate, armed with an absurdly oversized rifle and trailed by an équipage of dogs, drivers, handlers, and reloaders can be considered “sporting,” then why not an overweight woman in a pantsuit huffing and puffing around the ring at Westminster or Crufts with an overcombed hairball whose only duties are to heel, look pretty, and not bite the judge?

  Bird shooting, fox hunting, and other high-class games are rooted in ritual royal sports no less contrived or stilted than dog shows are today. The gap between form and function widens at the memory of Elizabeth I standing rigidly on an elevated stage in a corset and Elizabethan collar (like those worn by Labs and goldens after their hip surgeries) to take in some deer hunting. Solemnly handed a preloaded crossbow by a young girl dressed as a forest nymph, to musical accompaniment she fired at a chorus of royal bucks, which were hard to miss as they were deliberately herded at the appointed time into a narrow passage by a royal pack of specially trained royal greyhounds.10

  Only someone impertinent would have dared diminish the regal hunting talents of James I, also an avid arranger of mass slaughters who established himself as a champion sportsman on the world stage. When James wasn’t hiring impresarios to stage his bull-baiting events, he was leading a band of hounds, horses, and liveried help, all in the appropriate colors with individual tasks to perform, across a scenic English landscape in search of the royal prey of the day. Like the huntress queen, the outdoorsy king was determined to keep this royal passion in the family. He declared that owning a higher class of dog should be the exclusive legal right of the highest class of people. To sport a greyhound or setter, one first had to demonstrate a minimum income or net worth, or be due to inherit some substantial sum. James himself was king and took whatever he fancied, and royal hunts for deer, hare, or bore were gluttonous, wasteful hobbies as destructive to crops and other personal property as fox hunting would be in later years. England’s First Predator was not shy about demanding items that added to his outdoor pleasure. Word was sent out well in advance of a royal hunt. The local gentry and small farmers struggling to live off meager parcels of land borrowed to feed their families were instructed to prepare the stage for His Majesty’s latest upcoming adventure and were forbidden from plowing their fields because uneven surfaces were difficult for horses and dogs to cross in style. Fences came down and hedges were trimmed so the mounted monarch could make a graceful passage in one clean and unbroken line. To further enhance the overall effect, subjects were ordered to provide additional dogs and supplies, free of charge, as requisitioned. By the time this parade retreated and the dust began to clear, the royal extravagance had left some resentment in its wake. Locals about to voice their objections were reminded, by the sheer size of these events, that the prey of the day could have easily been them. Legend has it that during one successful hunt, a prized royal hound appeared with a note attached to his royal collar forged from the finest royal silver. The sender implored the figurehead to stop destroying the livelihood of average Englishmen who could not afford to “entertain” His Majesty on such a grand scale. This did not deter the rugged royal hunter from pursuing the sport of kings that was his birthright. “He virtually lived in the saddle,” writes Carson Ritchie in The British Dog, “partly because on foot he looked supremely ridiculous. He had weak legs which bent under his weight so that he had to lean against someone. . . . James put in all the hunting he could.”11

  A clearer picture emerges of where, exactly, all the pomp and circumstance attending purebred dog ownership got drummed up in the first place. Though the English would one day be considered the original pooch people, many of their hunting rites and the dogs used in these events actually came from froufrou royalty in France, where court and course merged imperceptibly like a high school gym that doubles as a dance floor on prom night. French kings were avid fans of the princely pastimes they pursued with fancy relish. Louis XIII, while still a tender child dauphin, was already using royal lapdogs to chase royal hare in his heavily fortified royal bedroom. Monarchs-to-be were raised with numerous pets, and as adults they sat for fashionable court painters who portrayed them in outdoor settings as rugged but ruffled.12 Choosing the best animals meant consulting Jacques du Fouilloux’s influential fifteenth-century hunting treatise in which quality hounds were ranked by coat color and the caliber of men seen with them.13 Though in later years the English could rightly claim to have invented more minutely specialized hunting breeds than anyone else, French aristocrats strove to distinguish themselves as avid sportsmen who knew a “good” dog from a common cur.

  By the nineteenth century, being a sportsman meant imitating the English. Fads for pointers and retrievers ignited across the Channel, where Parisian men of fashion imported the latest dogs, guns, and sporting ensembles. Once that unsightly business with Napoleon was settled—with the help of the English race and its thoroughbred horses—Charles X returned from exile to restore respect for monarchy. He could not fail. Inexhaustibly supplied with preloaded guns, servants, and caged animals released on cue as easy targets, he might as well have been playing a video game as hunting wild game. “Charles X was a great hunter,” wrote a retired officer from Napoleon’s army. “He killed seven or eight hundred animals a day. Having paraded before his eyes an unbroken procession of partridges, rabbits, pheasant and hare, his only problem was in choosing which ones to shoot.” Sarcasm gave way to anger and off came the gloves. “This is stupidity,” the former officer continued. “Kings do not know the pleasure of hunting because to drink with delight one must first be thirsty. To taste the pleasure of having a full game bag at the end of the day, one must first know what it’s like to return with it empty.” This royal subject was unimpressed. “Fancy court hunting is a promenade, no different from the shows performed at the Opera.”14

  Monarchy’s muckraker was on the mark about sovereign skills, but he missed the point of ritual hunting. The French Revolution gave every man the same hunting rights as a king, but a gentleman’s game has never been about putting food on anyone’s table—that was for the servants to do.15 High-brow hunting was for upholding family pride. Prey was to be hunted “beautifully,” the Duke of Beaufort prescribed, “handsomely found” and then “handsomely killed.”16 Anything less would have been beneath a gentleman because hunting for “sport” demanded patience, reserve, and the proper stance. It meant holding back before an audience as a person of breeding refrained from digging in at the table—that sort of behavior, again, was for the servants. The goal at the end of the day had less to do with health, athleticism, or fresh air, than looking good to others and reaffirming everyone’s proper place in society.

  Various methods were employed to keep the tools of the trade out of the wrong hands. For centuries, English commoners’ curs capable of competing with aristocratic hounds were permanently disabled, their legs and paws cut to prevent them from playing on a level field. In fact, staying within society’s confines and keeping up appearances could be as hard on animals as those formal demands of the show ring. Anyone who believes it should not be a capital crime for a Labrador retriever to be born wearing the wrong coat color might wince at the tradition of punishing animals for acting outside their social stations, against the natural order, or as Caius called such impertinence, with “wantonnes of maners.”17 Bird dogs have been forced to conform to unforgiving standards by devoting their entire lives to exclusive point
ing, setting, or retrieving, and no combination of these. Setters and pointers guide the hunter to his target in their own individual styles but must never touch a downed bird, because this is the retriever’s territory. Prior to shotguns, when crossbows and arrows were used, in case setters were tempted to do more than stop a few feet short of fowl and throw them up into the net, they had metal pegs jammed into their mouths and fastened around their heads with leather straps.

  Dogs have also been punished for not sticking to one species of prey because their masters did not envision them hunting another. The Reverend W. B. Daniel, author of Rural Sports, boasted he’d hanged seventy-two of his best spaniels for having mixed hunting genres. These unruly beasts had killed hare without authorization, because as every sportsman knew, only greyhounds were supposed to course hare, while spaniels were made for rustling up birds.18 Chasing a species without license was a serious affront to the master’s breeding abilities, an insult to his flair for commanding the forces of nature. Acting independently was strictly forbidden, and commoners’ curs that took it upon themselves to hunt on private deer parks were caught and hanged without trials.

  The ultimate aim of ordering nature around has been to keep fellow humans in their proper places. To the present day, English law forbids a tenant from firing upon airborne prey, a privilege reserved for landlords.19 Neither human nor hound can pursue woodland creatures without woods, another commodity that’s been closely guarded. Between the eleventh and the nineteenth centuries, various laws and other forms of discrimination were used by discriminating sportsmen, including the privatization of vast tracts of English land. Long since the dismantling of England’s private, enclosed deer parks, where downing a doe was like shooting fish in a barrel, the enclosure movement—the inspiration behind many of today’s “useful” English dog breeds—continued to show the rich in a favorable light. Backed by government, large landed interests consolidated their holdings, gradually forcing small farmers to move to crowded cities where they labored in factories if they were lucky.20 Lush woodlands provided a buffer from the roar of crowds and machinery, and hunting in controlled environments for animals hiding in manmade coverts enhanced the image of the landed classes.

  Recent issues of Gun Dog Magazine show that even no-frill killers have artistic concerns and strive to find just the right settings for their historical reenactments of aristocratic pursuits. “I have a mind’s eye image of a springer spaniel and a woodcock in the soft light of dawn,” one sporting journalist confesses.21 “The huge golden orb of the rising sun was directly behind our dogs—a picture-perfect tableau,” another inspired gun toter waxes poetic on the day’s carnage.22 Guns are essential to these exquisite moments. In fact, entire breeds of gun dog owe their existence to a late addition to ritual hunting’s stage props, and we have yellow Labs splashing in public fountains and lounging on sofas today because of improvements made to firearms yesterday.

  The more convenient guns were made to carry, load, and shoot in the eighteenth century, the more suited they were as tools of a gentleman’s trade, though there was an initial period of resistance. The very items Freeman Lloyd described as “elaborate equipment and stately ceremonial” that only the well-off could handle properly, were once thought unfair, unsporting, and ungentlemanly.23 Much in the way that today’s critics of deer hunts and ice fishing roll their eyes at the latest gadgets like sonar tracking devices, closed-circuit underwater cameras, bleeping Game Alerts and Digital Trail Monitors—tools that compensate for a hunter’s lack of skill and appeal to his boyish sense of space adventure—fowling with heavy artillery was thought to be in bad form. Henri III of France banned guns and setters among nobles and commoners alike in the sixteenth century. James I did the same.24 Resistance evaporated soon enough, and we can only begin to imagine the exhilarating sense of power and accomplishment that must have come from suddenly being able to down a bird in midflight, a rare event with a crossbow but a distinct possibility with a gun. The sky was the only limit.

  The more convenient hunting became, the more convenient shooters wanted it to be. Ritual hunting was further ritualized, and gun shooting increased in status. “They are unused to the science of shooting and of firearms,” Lloyd mocked one group of commoners seen in a painting daring to play a gentleman’s game. Men of lowly birth were “questionable sportsmen ready and willing to shoot at anything.” Before long, guns were fully absorbed into the gentleman’s repertoire, and the idea of firing in bad form was as offensive to the sensibilities of upper-crust sportsmen as it was frightening to insecure social climbers seeking to emulate their every move by owning all the same accessories, animals included. “Only one of their dogs is other than a mongrel,” Lloyd remarked, denigrating those lowly “Cockneys” for pretending to be gentlemen.25

  Gun dog breeds we know today were created to go with better firearms and then improved to enhance shooting pleasure and provide a bigger buildup to the sportsman’s defining moment. This explains the clunky old Clumber spaniel’s decline in popularity when guns were made to fire faster, leaving the breed a companion to older gentlemen and to a style of shooting no longer fashionable.26 Versatile dogs, good enough for generations of nobility on the Continent, were methodically customized by the English as weapons advanced. Setters crouched before bushes and briar patches, as they had in the days of crossbows and nets, but to indicate where the master should aim and shoot. Flushing dogs threw birds like clay pigeons into the air where they were sitting ducks for the well-armed sportsman. Pointers were simply intensified setters. Quirky, erratic beasts, they literally froze into position and pointed like no-brainer laser beams, making absolutely certain the gunman fired in the right direction and made his mark. Meanwhile, dogs with retrieving tendencies waited at heel for the command to reap as many birds as could be hit.

  That number increased as guns evolved, and as bird hunting grew more popular, gun dogs were bred to be faster and more focused. At some point, sportsmen realized they didn’t really need many of their best dogs anymore because the guns had gotten so much better. Bird hunting was incredibly easy. “At a big modern shoot in England,” wrote one gunman in 1903, “or a small one for that matter, the setter or pointer would be of as much use as a fifteenth century cross-bow.”27 Much like the legendary alaunts, said to have gone extinct after firearms were improved for the battlefield, bird dogs had in some ways outlived their purpose and lost the race with technology, further whetting the hunter’s appetite for mass shootings. As the game accelerated and canines were often cast aside, sportsmen became overstimulated. They lost that calming influence dogs are famous for furnishing. Killing became industrial and addictive.

  By the second half of the nineteenth century, accelerated carnage was becoming costly. Lord de Grey earned the respect of his peers for being one of the premier “big guns” of his day, but he paid a pretty price. On his vast estates and with little help from dogs, in the course of an illustrious firing career, he personally massacred an estimated 250,000 pheasant, 150,000 grouse, and 100,000 partridge, all farm-raised and released on cue by hunting servants who threw these helpless creatures into the air as easy targets. Lord Walsingham’s record-breaking 1,070 grouse kills in a single day were counted in his backlog of defining moments, which eventually forced him to sell his vast estates and abscond abroad.28

  “In retrospect,” recalls David Cannadine in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, “it also seems an ominous foretaste of that even greater slaughter which was soon to come, not in the butts of Norfolk or the grouse moors of Scotland, but on the battlefields of Flanders.”29 Ritual hunting’s practical defense had long been its ostensible use as a warm-up to the theater of war, “that larger and bloodier field of which it is the image,” as the Duke of Beaufort wrote approvingly.30 Blood sport was believed to increase stamina and to sharpen predatory instincts and leadership skills. But the sportsmanship was questionable. England’s First Gentleman, soon to be Edward VII—to whom hunting treatises were dedi
cated in anticipation of the day His Majesty would point his subjects to their deaths on foreign soil—became an avid annihilator of pigeons, which he shot in princely portions. Not far removed from Elizabeth I hurling arrows from her elevated stage at passing deer to musical accompaniment, England’s First Gun fired a rifle from a platform erected at the elite Hurlingham Club in London toward birds time-released in droves from a tower. The monarch sprayed his canon effortlessly into swarms of winged beauties, a pleasure he savored until 1906 when club members voted to ban this sport on humane grounds and told their royal patron, in so many words, to get a grip on himself.31 Edward was forced to retreat to his vast estate of Sandringham, home of the royal kennels, where his staff reared twenty thousand pheasant from eggs each year for use in gratuitous mass-killing sprees.32

  Across the pond, the fowl-shooting fad caught on like wildfire among Anglophile men of means who took trains to Long Island for Westminster’s hunt club events. “HOW THE YOUNG BLOODS OF NEW YORK SATISFY THEIR TASTE FOR GORE,” read one headline in the Herald.33 Like their princely role model—the same man who gave them their tuxedo jackets—Americans continued to use retrievers in their pigeon-shooting rituals, “a fashionable amusement” and “an expensive luxury,” according to one of the how-to manuals published at the time.34 They needed their speedy, four-footed servants, if only to pick up the mountains of bird carcasses when they were finished firing. Timing was essential in these competitions. Faster retrievers earned their owners more silver cups, and an aspiring gentleman could not have too many of those on the mantle. “War was always a better game than hunting,” recalled a writer for Outing, the American upper-class sports magazine, and all this trigger-happiness left something to be desired.35 As more crack shots gained admittance to a gentleman’s game, high society succumbed to an itching sensation that something dear had been lost in the Age of Improvement. Was this what the Duke of Beaufort had in mind when he wrote that prey should be “beautifully” hunted and “handsomely killed,” or had the nobility gone out of ritual hunting?