This is the dog from the “Wildfowling on Lough Neagh” video that I wrote about earlier.
The dog is “just a mongrel,” but the narrator calls him the “best retrieving dog [he’s] ever seen.”
I would venture to say that this dog is a golden retriever/Labrador cross, but it’s a brown-skinned yellow, something that would be uncommon in European golden retrievers.
It’s just a purpose-bred mongrel or crossbred retriever with a thick golden coat.
Everything about the dog say “I’m a retriever. Don’t ask for my papers. Now, just let me swim out and get you that duck.”
Whatever his pedigree, he is a relic of sorts.
At one time, all the retrievers were like this dog.
They were bred solely for performance.
They weren’t given a lot of fancy training, but they did their job.
The pedigree didn’t matter.
They were retrievers.
No certificate told them what they were.
Only the splash into the cold water and the struggling wounded duck revealed their identity.
That’s the way it is with this retriever.
Whatever he is exactly doesn’t matter; he is a retriever.
And that’s all we need to know.
over in ireland they do a lot of crossing of different breeds to use as gundogs, i very nearly adopted a springer x collie who had been purposly bred to be a gun dog but he was no good. in rescue a lot of crosses come over who were bred for this purpose. they are usually cracking dogs too, i guess that is why in the old days when dogs were here solely to earn there keep as working dogs they were all types rather than breeds. as you say the dogs dont care what breed they are or arent just that they are happy and healthy.
That’s very different from the United States. Virtually all gun dogs belong to registered breeds. Even if they aren’t registered with the AKC, they will be registered to a performance registry.
I have noticed this about Ireland. There are lots of crossbred gun dogs and those with really diverse ancestry.
Newfoundland is similar. They have a lot of Labrador crosses around, some of which may have the old St. John’s water dog in them, and they also have a lot of crossbred setters. The Newfoundland setter is a mixture of all sorts of different strains of setter.
Given that in many areas of the US there are stated mandatory spay/neuter rules that require neuter of any dog that ISN’T registered you will see fewer “landrace” type dogs or even any experimentation. Los Angeles, for example has the following as the exceptions to their mandatory spay/neuter:•Is a breed approved by and registered with a registry or association approved by the Animal Services Commission, and does or will actively show or compete.
•Has earned or is in the process of earning a special title (i.e. agility, herding).
•Is used as or in training to be a guide, signal, or service dog.
•Is a dog trained, or in training, for use in law enforcement, military or rescue activities.
–by the way, LA has more than once argued that the AKC isn’t “approved”.
These things are quite dangerous to genetic diversity in dogs.
I hate mandatory spay-neuter.
And we’ve already seen massive loss of genetic diversity across dog populations– something like a 1/3 of all genetic diversity– since we enacted leash laws and began neutering every dog. And began enforcing a closed registry system.
Dogs have lost more genetic diversity from those laws than they lost when they were domesticated.
Most other domestic animals have clear genetic bottlenecks in their evolutionary past, such that we can actually figure out where and when the domestication happen.
We really don’t know when or where all of this happened with dogs, and we have lots of contradictory findings. Greatest mtDNA diversity in southern China, but dogs sharing more SNP’s with Middle Eastern wolves.