How far this charge is justified I do not know
in the least ; but my own experience of some other sporting dogs, especially spaniels and red setters, certainly holds up the complaint, very forcibly put by an artist correspondent to The Times, that the show winner is unintelligent, and as artist he can detect the dulness of the intellect in the dulness of the eye. The biggest fool among dogs of my acquaintance is a red setter of the very highest breeding, and personally I have owned only one spaniel that was deficient in sense, and it was the only one that came of a prize-winning stock.
How very rarely it happens that the winner in a field trial
is a winner on the bench ! What we want is research work to discover what external points are correlated with intelli- gence. The bright eye is certainly one.
* *
Previous page
