Canis lupus hominis

I get my information from several books on golden and flat-coated retrievers.

The Golden Retriever by Elma Stonex (1953). This was the first book to debunk the myth that goldens are derived from Russian circus dog or yellow Caucasian sheepdogs. Caucasian sheepdogs do exist, but they are nothing like golden retrievers!

The Complete Golden Retriever by Getrude Fischer (1974– there’s also an updated version called The New Complete Golden Retriever in 1984). This book includes an excerpt of Elma Stonex’s book. It covers the actual origins of the breed. In both of these books, the dogs depicted are generally darker and more lightly built than the goldens currently winning in the show ring. Ten years ago, virtually all goldens in North America were of this type.

The New Golden Retriever by Marcia Schler (1996). This book tries to come out in defense of the dual purpose golden. I think this is a mistake. Unless the breed standard is rewritten to allow for darker, more lightly built dogs with less feathering, the show dogs will never be able to compete with the Labs. The Labrador people already recognize and generally respect the division between show and working lines. Dual purpose is not impossible, but it is unlikley. She does have some of her own sketches in the book, which I find really interesting. Her concept of an ideal golden retriever is very different from the sketches that appear in Fischer’s book. (Fischer’s is closer to my view, BTW). However, the last sketch in the whole book depicts a dark golden with moderate feathering carrying a duck. There is one photograph of an obedience champion in the book that resembles this dog. All of the rest are the heavily built and very coarse show-type goldens. Dogs that will be slowed down in water because of their feahering and very short legs.

Valerie Foss’s  The Ultimate Golden Retriever and its second edition are good at explaining how working-type goldens differ from show-type goldens.  It also has a comparison of the AKC and FCI/KC standards. I disagree with her interpretation that the FCI/KC standard allows for a wider range of color. That standard does not allow for “red” in golden retrievers. Many people use this standard incorrectly to say that dark goldens are not acceptable in the US and Canada, but it is in the UK and the FCI countries that this standard applies. This standard in application actually limits color, not expands it.  All dark goldens are reddish in color. This is because all goldens are recessive yellow to red dogs, even the pale cream dogs that some puppy mill operators call “white.” As one moves toward the dark color spectrum, the dogs appear red in color. Every single one of them. This standard actually eliminates the dark gold color from the standard, which is a big problem. 90 percent of working line goldens are this color. (I don’t know why, perhaps camouflage). This is why working-type goldens are much rarer in Europe than they are in North American, and they aren’t that common here.

Jeffrey Pepper has a good book on golden retrievers (The Golden Retriever: 1984), although it’s much less about origins. He’s a show breeder, and the dog on the front cover is his own brood bitch. Pictures of her in the book depict a dark golden bitch with moderate feathering and moderate bone. I hear that a new book of his is coming in out in which he fully explores the setter ancestry of the golden.

For Flat-coats:

Brenda Phillips’s Flat-coated Retriever (1996) is good. There’s such a paucity of good flat-coat information, and that which exists should be combine and compared with the origins of the golden retriever.  Both descend from the Wavy-coated retriever, and the golden is derived from a very important line of wavy-coat that wound up affecting both golden and flat-coated retriever lines. (See my histories).

You can also check out Dog Breaking: The Most Expeditious, Certain, and Easy Method; whether great excellence or only mediocrity is desired by William Nelson Hutchinson (1848 and 1876). It has a good overview of early retrievers.  It is one of the first humane training books for gun dogs, but the methods are still a wee bit outdated. 

Then there’s “Stonehenge’s” Book of the Dog (1859). This book is a classic for first hand accounts of how all sorts of dogs developed.

On Newfoundlands, check out Mark Derr’s A Dog’s History of America (2004). This book uses accounts of the dogs that remind me more of modern retrievers than the current giant breed that this dog evolved into. This was the first large working breed ever mass produced as a family pet in both Europe and North America. The breed’s heyday was from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century.  He even covers the great arguments that errupted towards the end about what this breed originally looked like.  The blackand white (Landseer) variety was much more popular in the early years, but the black and liver/bronze varieties also existed. The short-haired variety was instrumental in creating the modern Labrador, while it is like that the long-hairs were instrumental in creating the wavy-coats. There is a picture of General Custer with a black and white Newf that resembles a golden retriever in every way except color. This tells me that the giant mastiff Newfoundland is a much more recent creation and was probably created in Europe using the St. John’s Water Dog and the some sort of Mastiff.

For dog training, I use operant conditioning combined with actually socializing the dog. I have several books on this. I don’t use e-collars, unless the dog starts chasing deer habitually. Most retriever books are useless on training these two breeds of retriever, because they are generally more sensitive than Labs and Chesapeakes and can be cowed if trained too harshly. Do NOT use Cesar Millan’s methods on a golden retriever or a flat-coat unless you want a scared shitless dog that won’t do anything but hide from you.