Friday, July 21, 2017

Terriers Not Bred for Cup Hunting



The Reverend John Russell (no one called him Jack) was old, broke, and without dogs when the nascent Kennel Club reached out to him in 1871. Would he judge the terriers at the first big show at the Crystal Palace? Flattered, Russell said yes, but what he saw in the ring created sufficient alarm that he advised others not to register their own dogs, noting of his own working terriers:

True terriers they were, but differing from the present show dogs as the wild eglantine differs from a garden rose.
Gerald Jones (Dan Russell) with the Rev. John Russell's horn and a model of his dog Tip. 

Arthur Heinemann,
who was born after Russell had given up hunting, and who the Kennel Club "Parson Russell Terrier" folks claim as their standard-bearer (and never mind if Heinemann hunted badger, not fox) also had a caution about looking to the Kennel Club for dogs or standards. Heinemann sneered at the "cup hunters" who did not own a shovel and had no ideas what the dogs were actually meant to do. He told Dan Russell (aka Gerald Jones):

We are very much opposed to the modern show terrier and his type. Once you begin to breed it for show type, you lose the working qualities upon which you pride those terriers. I have been, I might say, the protagonist of the terrier bred for sport as against the terrier bred for show. I have no interest in cup hunting.

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