SPORTING AND GUARD DOGS 



practised than in the North, on account of the idea that birds 

 exercise good geomantic influence over the country. Notices 

 are often posted in Southern villages to the effect that neither 

 birds nor the trees on which they roost are to be destroyed. 



In Chinese fowling the faithful chow, or a close relation, 

 ranks a good second to his master in the operation of capture. 

 Ever distrustful of strangers, he is the faithful guardian of 

 his village, wakeful and noisy at night, sleepy and persecuted 

 during the day. Some claim for him on occasion the qualities 

 of that deadly class of dogs " which bite bitterly before they 

 barcke, for they flye upon a man, without utterance of voyce, 

 snatch at him, and catch him by the throate, and most cruelly 

 byte out collopes of fleasche." * He is brave in the defence of 

 his home, keen of nose, and untiring in the chase, though 

 sorely oppressed by the warmness of his heavy coat, necessary 

 as a protection against the thorns and prickly creepers which 

 tangle his native thickets. His powers of scent are used to-day 

 in the capture of birds for the table, just as, in all probability, 

 before the European bird-dog was invented, they availed the 

 oriental hunter in the capture of antagonists in the favourite 

 Chinese sport of quail-fighting. His staunchness at " point " 

 may be but slight. Sportsmen, however, who know him will 

 agree that the chow or the pointer-cross is best fitted to stand 

 the rigours of the China climate, and that in his native thickets 

 and tangled clearings he will, by his forceful tactics, behind 

 such inveterate runners as the strong-sinewed Mongolian 

 pheasant or the swift-legged francolin of Yunnan, bring birds 

 to the gun, while the staunchness of the foreign pointer dis- 

 tinguished in field-trials, brings seeming mockery from the 

 pursued, and is to the fowler little less than a delusion. 



White, in 1802, writes of the importation of a pair of dogs, 



* Dr. Caius, Abraham Fleming's translation quoted in " Praise of the Dog," Ethel 

 E. Bicknell. 



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