Natural History

In addition to my post on the move to breed out the setter features in the show golden retriever in the 1930’s,  I’m going to show how easy it was to confuse goldens and setters.

Here are some old-fashion Irish red setters. The fact that the dog on the right has white marking does not make it an Irish red and white setter. The dog in the center has shorter ears and a slightly more substantial frame, but many of these dogs could pass for golden retrievers.

Of course, Irish setter were much more common that retrievers of that color, but these setters were often crossed with black flat-coats. The red to yellow color is recessive to the  black coloration, and it is very likely that black flat-coats that carried this recessive setter coloration were bred with retrievers derived from the Tweedmouth strain.

Breeding setters to flat-coats made the flat-coats faster and more agile. It also bred out the extremely wavy coats that existed within that breed (which is why they were called “wavy-coated retrievers.”) The goldens that would result as a byproduct of that improvement would look a lot like these Noranby dogs:

From my understanding, the Culham, Noranby, and Ingestre lines of golden were made up of a lot of lightly-built dogs that were of the dark color. I have seen a black and white photo of the first dual champion golden, Dual Ch. Balcombe Boy. This dog was a Culham dog, bred by Lewis Harcourt (1st Viscount Harcourt, the man who first coined the term “golden retriever.)  Balcombe Boy was of this type and very, very dark in color, what we would now call a mahogany (like this dog).

As noted in the earlier post, the field line dogs have tended to retain some of the setter’s features and coloration, as this dog clearly has.

Now, Irish setters have obviously moved in another direction, but in the working red setter registry, one can run across dogs that look like this dog.

The original Irish setter was red and white in color, and it has since been preserved (by a Presbyterian minister in Northern Ireland) in the breed called the Irish red and and white setter. This dog tends to have a broader skull than one sees in the red dog, and one also sees smaller ears and a somewhat heavier, more retriever-like frame.

If you look really carefully, one can see that Irish setters and golden retrievers do have a lot of features in common. Originally, they were very hard to tell apart.

Now, this is not to say that one can’t find photos and depictions of Tweedmouth strain goldens that are heavier in build. However, I can also find depictions of black wavy-coats that have that type of conformation. As the wavy-coat became the flat-coat, the really heavily build dogs were bred out of the bloodline, simply because they violated the “Power without lumber; raciness without weediness” axiom that made the flat-coat a superior working retriever. If one believes that we should breed for a heavier form in golden retrievers because one can find historical depictions of them, should we not also do the same with flat-coats?

I don’t think any flat-coat person would buy into it.

But in golden retrievers, this is a well-accepted virtue. In goldens this seems to be the main thought process:

Breed away from the setter and the flat-coat at all costs. Make the darker colors a fault within the breed, even though most of the early working gun dog talent in the breed were of these darker colors. The more the dogs resemble polar bears or Kodiak bears, the better.

But the lighter built dogs are more athletic and more efficient movers, so the working retriever people bred for this type.