Natural History

Rawdon Lee was a bit worried about the field spaniel in 1894. It was becoming too short in the leg and too exaggerated to be of any use in the field:

Of late years so much attention has been given these black spaniels that there are men who have actually attained a degree of celebrity on account of the skill they display in obtaining a perfectly flat coat and a shining one. This a good specimen must have. Then his ears cannot be too long, well clothed with hair and fringed at the tips; his head, too, may be an exaggeration, long, with not the most peculiarly pleasing spaniel expression and eye that one would like to see. Some of our heavier black spaniels have enormous heads, square and untypical, with eyes displaying a haw that would not be out of place in a bloodhound. I need scarcely say that when dogs of this kind are given prizes, the judges who make such awards are wrong.

Length of body, shortness of leg, and enormous bone are again produced to an exaggeration; crooked forelegs have followed, and the black spaniel, once perhaps a useful and active animal, has now fallen into the heavy, slow ranks of the Clumber (but by no means so interesting a creature), and may be taken as a sound example of what can be done in the matter of breeding ” for show points.”

Actually, what was happening to the field spaniels of that day is they were becoming very much like the Sussex spaniel, which today has almost exactly that same conformation. The reason for this similarity was quite simple: Sussex and field spaniels were quite closely related.

I don’t have to tell you that Sussex spaniels are in trouble. It is actually a bit of  myth that they were always short-legged, but the efforts of a breeder in Sussex named Augustus Elliot Fuller established this conformation in the breed. George Stubbs painted one about ten years before Fuller began his program, and the dog clearly has long legs. The original distinction of a Sussex spaniel is they were liver spaniels that just happened to come from the county of Sussex. Most spaniels that were bred in Britain at the time were red and white pieds– that was the fashionable color of the day. The Welsh springers were considered unique because they retained that “old-fashioned” color.

Compared to other British spaniels, the field has a relatively recent history. In the early days of the fancy, there was a great obsession to produce an all-black spaniel strain. The strain that produced the very short-legged field spaniel was a mixture of black cockers that belonged to Sir Francis Burdett, a Sussex spaniel, and an English water spaniel. Breeding Sussex spaniels to fields was a common occurrence, so much so that the main difference between the two was the Sussex was always liver in color, while the fields were selected to be black or roan in coloration. One of these crosses was Ch. Obo, the founder of the modern English cocker spaniel, who produced Ch. Obo II, the founder fo the modern American cocker spaniel. Both dogs were short-legged; Obo II was only ten inches at the shoulder.

So  these short-legged fancy spaniels, although a bit of a curiosity today, did have an influence on other spaniel breeds.

Sussex spaniels and short-legged field spaniels were never as efficient at moving through dense cover as cockers and springers were. In the US, it was decided to breed the short-legged fields to English springers, and that did help them a bit. The modern field spaniel is now a longer legged dog, but the vast majority of them are not black. Although the come in other colors, they are most often liver dogs and look very similar to Stubbs’s depiction of a Sussex spaniel from the eighteenth century. Of course, the breed is still quite uncommon, but it may have never had the big population decrease had it never been bred for that short-legged fad.

Of course, the Sussex spaniel has been established as a short-legged dog since roughly the beginning of the nineteenth century. Because of the relative antiquity of its conformation, no one has suggested that the Sussex might be better served to have longer legs.

And no one particularly cares. Its hunting style is a bit like that of the Clumber. It is slow and methodical, and it bays on the trail of birds, telling us exactly where it got its unusual conformation (from some sort of basset). There are so few Sussex that the Sussex may never stand a chance being revived as an actual functional spaniel that a hunter might choose over a working-type springer or cocker. The Clumber, on the other hand, has evolved a distinct working type which is lighter in build and more functionally built to run with agility and speed. They aren’t working-type English springers, but they aren’t as cumbersome as the show-type Clumbers or the Sussex spaniels are.

The modern Sussex spaniel is an historical artifact that reminds us a time when short-legged spaniels were fad. In many old breed books, the field spaniels that are depicted have much shorter legs than the modern Sussex and very closely rival those of a dachshund.

In the field, these short-legged dogs were just not what sportsmen wanted, and a sort of creative destruction went on.   The spaniel strains that retained longer legs became successful, and the short-legged dogs began to disappear. Fanciers stubbornly held onto the short-legged conformation, but when things got really bad, the field spaniel breeders tried to solve that problem. It may have been too late, but they did change the conformation. Sussex spaniels did not. Field spaniels may yet survive, but the Sussex spaniel is likely doomed.

Most people who want a working spaniel will choose English springers or English cockers from performance-bred lines. A few intrepid souls might take on a Clumber. Some may be open to Welsh springers or fields, but very few will take on the museum piece that is the Sussex spaniel. It is an antique that is best to be looked at as a curiosity.

But what happened to both fields and Sussex spaniels as they were improved should be something we all pay attention to. Different breeds can evolve very non-functional conformation in the show ring, and it is the responsibility of breed clubs to ensure that such inefficiencies are not rewarded in the ring.

Short-legged spaniels were one of those ideas that sounded good at the time– they were supposed to run through the undergrowth better– but in the end, they  proved to be quite inefficient dogs.

Now, I’m sure someone is going to say, “But the French have all of these successful basset hound breeds with short legs. Surely that is a case that short-legs are useful.”

They are useful in the pursuit of rabbits, which don’t cover a lot of ground went startled. However, unless one believes in Wolpertinger, no rabbit can fly. Game birds can fly, and because of this simple fact, they can cover a lot more ground. One needs a dog with good legs and good feet to hunt birds. Rabbits tend to run in circle that don’t cover a great many yards, but a flushed pheasant or grouse, even one that is wounded, will cover a greater distance than a terrestrially-bound rabbit.

That reason alone is why bassets have generally been successful and short-legged spaniels were failures.

Rawdon Lee was right to be concerned about the distortions and exaggerations that were appearing in field spaniels. It is a shame that it took field spaniel fanciers such a long time to recognize these problems. If they had realized it earlier, maybe their dogs would be as common as working-type English springers and cockers are today.