Natural History

I love this little retriever, but I hate its name. When I say its verbose name, most people think I’m making it up. It is a Nova Scotia Duck-Tolling Retriever. I sometimes call it the Toller, the Nova Scotia Decoy Dog, or the Nova Scotia retriever.

It looks a bit like a working-type golden retriever. The first time I saw one in a dog book from Britain, I thought it was more like a golden retriever than the golden retriever depicted in the same chapter.

However, it’s got a bit of a different temperament. These dogs were strictly bred for work until relatively recently, and they are really birdy dogs. They also have a bit of a playful side to them, even more so than golden retrievers. This playful side is actually quite functional, as we shall see.

It is also the youngest of the retriever breeds, developed at the beginning of the twentieth century. It has at its base the flat-coated or wavy-coated retriever, the English red decoy dog (which is now extinct), and either Irish setter and/or golden retriever. It also has some Nova scotia landrace collie in its background, and this is the only retriever to have the genes to produce the collie eye anomaly.

It typically comes in the brown-skinned red to yellow color, usually with some limited white markings, which appear in exactly the same places we find them on some very dark golden retrievers and Irish setters.

Now let me explain some things about this dog. I grew up in West Virginia, where the term “toll” is still used in common parlance. You may know this word from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. In that title, “toll” does not mean ring. It means call in or entice. They get this name because of the decoy dog in their ancestry.

Here’s a description of the decoy dog in The Cornhill Magazine:

If the decoy dog had been known to Caius he would have included it with delight in his list of bird-taking dogs. But though he mentions the ‘subtlety’ of ducks, and that the water- spaniel, of which he gives an accurate description, was used to retrieve them when wounded, he says nothing of the more artful devices of the decoy-man’s dog. He notes that the water-spaniel was especially useful for fetching back arrows which had been shot at water-birds and were floating, and that the dogs were so clever that they often picked up other people’s lost arrows and brought them as well as their masters’ arrows.

It is clear from this that decoys were not known at all as early as that, and that the belief that they were a late introduction from Holland is correct. The decoy dog’s business is to run in and out of the screens which lead to the pipe, and so to induce the ducks to follow him. A mistake or momentary disobedience by the dog might lose the best ‘ take’ of the season, yet so intelligent and well trained are these dogs that they practically never do wrong.

–C.J. Cornish, “Dogs That Earn Their Living” in The Cornhill Magazine (1900).

This dog was developed because hunters had seen foxes hunting ducks in an unusual way. A fox would frolic like mad along the edge of the bank, and because ducks are somewhat curious animals, they would swim to the water’s edge to see what was going on. The fox would continue the game until the foolish ducks got within striking distance. Then the fox would leap at them and try to catch them. The hunters wanted to recreate that behavior to help bring in the ducks.

(A similar behavior is described in wolves in Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf, when the female wolf tries to toll in some ducks.)

The Toller was used in much the same manner, so its curious and playful nature was quite useful in its work.

The piece by Cornish says these dogs were introduced from “Holland,” which is English vernacular for the country we more appropriately call the Netherlands. Their strain of decoy dog still exists. It is known as  the Kooikerhondje.

It is usually a chestnut red and white in color. This breed also comes in a nonstandard tricolor variant, but most are chestnut and white, often with black shadings on the ears. It is about half the size of the Nova Scotia Duck-Tolling Retriever, and the increased size of the Duck Toller probably comes from the fact that it also has larger breeds in its background, like the flat/wavy-coated retriever.

The fact that it also has solid colored dogs in its background explain why the Toller is primarily red in color. The red color also makes them look like foxes, which helps in recreating the fox’s duck hunting trick.

It is true that the Toller looks a lot like a working-bred golden. It is possible that the breed did have some golden crossed in with it at a later stage, because the breed is notorious for its poor genetic diversity.

This dog is not a miniature golden retriever, though. It has not split into show and working forms, and because it is so curious and playful, it is a bit more difficult to regiment than the golden.

So consider the Toller to be another descendant of the wavy-coated landrace. It is one dog breed where a curiosity and coy playfulness are actually part of its functional temperament.

And this is a retriever breed that was developed and perfected in Canada. The Labrador retriever, alas, is not a Canadian breed. It descends from a Canadian breed, the St. John’s water dog,  as do all of the other retrievers. The Labrador as we know it was developed on the Earl of Malmesbury’s estate and on the Duke of Buccleuch’s estate. It was in the latter that the breed was developed into the dog we know today as the Labrador. The Buccleuch estates are in Scotland. Like the golden, the Labrador’s a Scotsman.

The Toller is the real Canadian retriever.