RETRIEVERS AND THEIR BREAKING 187 



on her nest, and carried her half a mile, she was returned to 

 her treasures and sat upon them, none the worse for her 

 involuntary excursion into the next parish. That calls to mind 

 the frequently made statement that it is wrong to give dogs 

 hard things to retrieve. The idea is that it teaches them to bite 

 and to be hard-mouthed. That is an entire mistake, and this 

 dog, like many another, was often made to retrieve stones, and 

 to prove whether he bit them he was occasionally sent back for 

 hen's eggs, but never broke one. 



It is said, too, that the old dogs were lumbering, and so no 

 doubt the Newfoundland type of wavy-coated dogs were, but 

 this hen-and-egg carrier, like his mother, was active enough. 

 He was not steady to heel, but was as sharp as a lurcher, and in 

 cover it was difficult in his presence to miss a rabbit. No 

 wounded one would get to its hole, and a good many that were 

 not wounded were nevertheless retrieved and duly credited to 

 the shooter. Now it is considered a strain on the breaking and 

 a temptation to the mouth of a retriever to trust him with 

 ground game in his first season. Although this particular dog 

 was never broken to stop at heel, such rules, if they existed 

 then, were more honoured by the breach than the keeping, 

 and the dogs were mostly as steady and as soft-mouthed as 

 any now. 



The author has used a retriever often with a team of wild 

 spaniels, and constantly with setters and pointers, without any 

 running in of broken dogs, except in the cases already 

 mentioned, and these are the highest trials of the steadiness of 

 retrievers. In hunting a brace of young setters there is 

 obviously no time to argue with a retriever, not even with a 

 shooting-boot, and the author has had no trouble, as a rule, to 

 make his retrievers conspicuous only by their invisibility behind, 

 until they were called upon for action. 



One great dog man makes his retrievers " back " when his 

 dogs point. But pointing and setting dogs take no notice, and 

 do not break in, when they are in the habit of looking upon the 

 retriever as a part of the gun. It may be, however, that when 

 black pointers are used a backer might mistake a retriever for 



