Willie is the only Jack Russell I have known with such a pronounced retrieving instinct.
He will fetch a ball or a stuffed toy until you are tired of it.
I remember getting into a little bit of trouble when Willie was about six months old. He was wanting to play fetch really bad, and I ran him pretty hard through the mud.
Mostly white JRT’s don’t look so nice when they covered in mud.
You can tell from this beach photo that Willie will chase even a sand-covered tennis ball until the cows come home.
Now, if only I could find another golden retriever like that…
It was known long before Willie, that a terrier, or a terrier mix would make a suberb retriever. For instance, they brought you rats to show their greatness in hunting.
I’ve never seen any text claiming there’s a good dose of the terrier blood in the modern retriever. I bet there is.
Terrier/water spaniel cross, as I do recall, but I cannot recall the souce from the top of my head. It was one of these three: Dalziel, Idstone, or Stonehenge.
In Newfoundland, many Irish fishermen had terriers. I suppose. The coarse coat comes from there.
Having been around JRT’s from several different lines, they are as smart as golden retrievers, but they have some traits that make them really unsuitable as retrievers. One is that they will fight at the drop of a hat. The second is that they are almost always hardmouthed dogs (because they have to be.)
The German created a larger terrier called a Jagdterrier that is required to retrieve game in its working tests: http://www.europuppyusa.com/images/dog_breed_info/76_1.jpg
However, my source on this breed is that it is not suitable to be a retriever:
“A dog able to kill a fox underground will tend to be hard-mouthed, which is exactly the opposite of what you want in a retriever. At the same time a dog large enough to carry a bird through grass or tackle a russian boar will tend to be too big in the chest to easily go to ground in a natural fox den.”
http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2004/11/german-hunt-terriers.html
And yes, it was created by German, Nazi-sympathizing zoologists!
Dachshunds can be used as water dogs and retrievers, despite their short legs:
http://borntotracknews.blogspot.com/2009/07/water-dachshunds-yes-they-can-swim-and.html
The Jagdterrier is about the size of the Jack Russell or a Parson. So it is not a large terrier breed. I know the breed quite well and they ARE terrible beasts!! Even a big male husky is afraid of a small black’n’tan Jagd!
But they retrieve, and they swim after anything you cast for them.
They will go on and on..
I would say, if you’d put together a water spaniel and a terrier, it would turn out to be a good retriever.
The best JRT’s are smaller than the Jagdterriers.
Jadgterriers are used more the way we use the larger working terrier types we call “feists” or “fyces.”
Yeah, may be so. But it is known, that the size of the JRTs varies.
I wouldn’t call a Jagd “a large terrier breed”, when it’s hardly a half of an Irish. And I have worked with the breed.
I want to say again. They are killers. Nice home-dogs, but when you go out – they immediatly start to run & hunt. Kilometers after kilometers. And they’ll bring you every dead rotten crow they find.
I knew one that hunted every other day. She needed one day to rest, and then she’d go all day again. She killed hundreds of groundhogs (“woodchucks”), a type of marmot.
Stonehenge (J.H. Walsh)
Says this on his section on retrievers: “With this exception, the best private retrieving I have ever seen has been with crosses of the terrier and beagle; for with one of these little dogs I never yet lost either fur or feather, though of course he could not carry a hare across a brook or over a gate. Still, we must take the world as we find it, and the world now demands a retriever proper, black by preference, and either wavy-coated or curly.”
I’ve never seen a beagle retrieve.
So u found it.
BTW, I found an old photo of Newfoundlandian fishermen with their “boat dogs”. Their colour is exactly like the St John’s Dog’s, but they are small like the terrier. They could perhaps help to swim the nets in line. In land, an adult hare would be surely too heavy for them.
ps. I have the same problem: I can’t remember which one of those early writes said what!
A jagd-terrier in a badger-cave is surely hard-mouthed. But as I’ve seen, if she retrievers dead animals, she is soft-mouthed as any retriever.
Even thou she’s a nazi-breed -lol-
But you are right in a sense. They are crazies. The one living nearby wants to fight with my lab everytime he’s not been hunting for some time. And he would really kill my lab – tho’ he’s so small and very nice home-dog etc.
They are natural born killers – which the retrievers NEVER are not.
Jack Russels are apparently a favorite “truck dog” of retriever trainers–I know at least two, and there are lots of chat/blog posts about JRTs as truck dogs–fun, feisty, can hold their own against the big dogs, and in a truck that people walk away from but want to have protected, and in which the big dogs are all crated up, they can protect the truck.
What? 15 posts and no one takes exception to me being called a fool? Does
retrieverman1 think he Mr T calling me a fool? I resemble such baseless claims.
For the record, I have been called the beast of the east and am willing to cross on
any breed.
My uncle once went on a quail hunt in Texas where the retrievers were a pair of JRTs. The dogs would jump from the truck when the quail was shot, find it in grass so high the dogs could not be seen and retrieve back to the truck. This was on a professional guided hunt, mind you.
I’ve heard of them being used as bear hounds in West Virginia. It takes 12 to 15 of them to bag a bear.
I know, in Estonia, they use the Russell-like German Jagd Terrier as a boar-hunter too, It takes too terriers: one is hanging in the tail and the other in the head, and they’d die before giving up!
There is a fellow in West Virginia who has 15 JRT’s that he uses to hunt black bears and catch pigs that have been turned out in the forest (in the old pannage way.)
Can really see that!
My Jack Russell, Murphy, has an insane retrieving instinct. He also loves retrieving from the water. It’s gotten to the point where I will stand at the bottom of the stairs and throw his kong up them. He always brings it back down to me, and will chase it until it looks likes he’s ready to drop. I have to call it quits, I’m guessing he’d chase his toys until he keeled over.
Your dog looks a lot like a JRTCA dog I knew that was the most fierce farm terrier I’ve ever seen.
Aw, Willie is awesome!
I have a JRT just like that – a ball fool. But also just about anything you throw will do. She has an extremely strong retrieving instinct. It is her job to go after and bring back what you throw. Out of water, over land…where ever. It came quite naturally to her, and only a little training honed this instinct even more.
My new boy however, does not have this instinct ingrained quite so well….so I will be teaching him how. He likes to possess rather than bring back.
My golden retriever is a golden take-it.
You mean a Golden Teaser?
[…] is another photo of Willie the squirrel- and ball-chasing Jack […]
My terrier loves to retrieve too. It’s really odd: he loves to hunt, but he’s also got a really soft mouth. Because of that he doesn’t catch things often, but when he does they get brought back to me (so he can show off how amazing he is) unharmed. As in shocked, but with not a mark on them and able to run/fly away as soon as he lets go!