From With Gun and Boat in the Yangtze Valley (1895) by Henling Thomas Wade:
It will be only necessary here to take note of one kind of retriever, the black, flat-coated kind, for the objections that may be raised against him can only be intensified when applied to the curly-coated description.
Admitting to the fullest that a retriever is a wonderfully sagacious dog, and that he is capable of affording lots of sport, yet the following objections may be found to weigh against him and long haired dogs generally.
In the first place, rheumatism is by no means an uncommon complaint in China, and no animal renders itself more liable to this ailment than one that is difficult and troublesome to dry. A dog has to negotiate a lot of “water business” in the course of a day’s shooting in these provinces. He often returns to the boat wet, only to be turned over to the tender mercies of a coolie, who performs the essential duties of drying and grooming in any but a thorough manner; so that the animal not only may be sent to bed wet himself, but be an active cause of discomfort to his kennel companions. Besides, retrievers generally hold so much water in their coats as to render themselves a perfect nuisance when crossing creeks in sampans or dinghies. Further than this, the very nature of their jackets renders them specially liable to collect the grass and other seeds, “fruitful cause of so much woe.” Finally, retrievers from their size and weight constantly find themselves in trouble when working brambly cover; are invariably clumsy in their attempts at extrication from tangled beans and similar crops; and, as a rule, are not only slow in setting to work to bring back a wounded bird, but slower still in returning with the quarry. Such are the more prominent objections to this class of dog.
Still, should a sportsman elect to have a retriever in this country, he might with advantage have regard to the following simple points:—The dog’s coat should be jet black and lie very flat, no curl whatever being admissible. The head should be long, with a squarish, not a pointed muzzle, the ear small, the neck “airy,” and the tail carried below the level of the back. Above all he should stand low ( pg. 34-35).
The description here of the ideal working coat for a retriever in China is totally different from Rawdon Lee’s preference for the wavy-coat in a British working retriever. Lee saw the coat as something that would protect the dog in the thickest brambles, like that of a “German griffon.”
Wade would be using a retriever for more aquatic pursuits than the country gentlemen who made up most of Lee’s contemporaries, and a very flat coat could be useful when most shooting was happening near water.
Of course, I wonder what Wade would have though if he had brought a smooth-coated Labrador along. One of the advantages of the Labrador is that its coat dries very quickly and tends to shed water rather than collect it.
But then any retriever with an open coat– whether wavy or flat-coated– would have been next to useless for water work. An open coat allows the water to easily penetrate the skin– a major fault for any dog working in the water. In wavy-coated dog with an open coat, the curl grows up and away from the body, allow the water a chance to run down the hair follicle to the skin. Curly-coated retrievers are known for producing open coats– something more common then than now. That might explain why many early retriever people avoided them– that, and the dogs developed a reputation for quarrelsomeness with other dogs, which meant they would be passed over for trials that required many different retrievers from many different estates and homes to come together. (Reputations for coat and temperament–whether deserved or not– hurt the curly’s chances. Reputations are very hard for any breed to overcome.)
My guess is that Wade had seen several wavy retrievers with this type
A dog with a proper wavy coat has certain advantages in the water. The waves in the coat tend to shed water very nicely. The waves channel the water away from the body, which works in concert with the oils in the fur to keep the dog dry. And when the dog shakes off the water, most of the water should fall off, allowing the dog to become fully dry without much effort. A dog with a proper coat is comfortable in cold water, and all of these “adaptations” work toward that end.
Wade’s situation may have had his opinions developed through experience in China, where the “coolies” (the indigenous servants) may have had little experience in tending to a gun dog. In which case, they may have let the dogs get a little too cold and wet, allowing the dog to get chilled, allowing rheumatism and probably “cold water tail” to set in. Of course, we now know that being cold does not cause rheumatism, but continually changing from hot to cold conditions could make it worse. Cold water tail, however, is associated with getting the tail too chilled and is a definite concern if the dog is not dried properly.
Dogs with very long coats are at a disadvantage as a retrievers. It doesn’t matter whether they doing water work or working on land with heavy cover. Those really long coats are a disaster. They collect thorns and burrs, and James Lamb Free, along with a litany of other retriever enthusiasts, excoriated the excessive length in golden retriever coats. Free compared using a very long-coated golden in the water to a person going swimming in a coonskin coat. The coat makes too much drag in the water, slowing the dog down as it swims.
So Wade does have a point about a long-coated retriever. That said, I don’t see how requiring that a working retriever in China have very flat-coat solves this problem. The issues are length and whether the coat is open or not. My guess is that Wade wants the flat-coat to be somewhat harder and thicker in texture to prevent the coat from becoming water-logged.
So different conditions, different work, and different countries require a different functional coat in a retriever. And different people have different opinions as to which coat is most functional to which conditions. Those differences exist today, just as they existed in the 1890’s. It is for that reason that one of the wisest things in the golden retriever standard is the allowance for both wavy and flat-coats in the breed. It is the only retriever that has this allowance, although both Tollers and flat-coats can have some wave to their coat. (I always get some flat-coat person who says their dogs are wavy-coated, but I guarantee you they aren’t as wavy as a true wavy-coated golden.)
Wade’s book lays out the utility of each type of working gun dog in Northern China, and in the end, Wade preferred to use a pointer that didn’t mind swimming and retrieving. He says that one of these dogs can be procured from Germany, probably meaning what we would now the German short-haired pointer, which was a much more heavily-built dog at that time than it is today.
Very important to a useful retriever working in cold water is the density and quality of the undercoat. Bart Armstrong wrote of his Golden, Noranby Eventide, retrieving geese from the ice-choked river in Manitoba. Coat quality had much to do with enabling the dog to do that, repeatedly.
And as you say, water just runs off, or is shaken off, from a correct coat. Both Labrador and Golden should have this; only real difference is the Golden’s fringes. There’s also some oiliness to the coat that helps. Chessie has the same qualities, only even more so.
That sort of coat prevents water from penetrating to the skin, even with warm water and shampoo it can be difficult to really get the coat wet through– as I well remember!