RETRIEVER OR SPANIEL ?
We all know how fashions in dogs change ; but hitherto sportsmen have been more or less free from the dictates of any prevailing mode. It is now complained that the spaniel is being slowly, but surely, ousted by the retriever, and especially the Labrador, so-called. The quite horrible arti- ficiality of much sport has put a premium on the retriever. If you want a dog not to hunt, but to sit at the foot of your shooting stick and when the drive is over pick up quickly and cleanly your score or so of birds, the retriever has no equal. Its gentility and docility are both beyond all cavil. It is clever and faithful, and a pleasant companion beyond most dogs. But rough shooting demands the spaniel, which, incidentally, was a necessary accompaniment of the old hawkers. It has not perhaps a better nose than the retriever, but it uses it more. If anyone any longer desired game to be flushed the spaniel would remain, what it once was, the king of sporting dogs. Anatomists say it has the heaviest brain. Whether or not its intelligence is supreme among dogs I do not know, but I always feel about a spaniel that it wants to understand more than other dogs ; and is really grieved when it fails. It learns well because it desires to learn, as an old Greek motto insists.
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