196 THE COMPLETE SHOT 



suggest hound blood. Besides this fault, they have others 

 from the shooter's point of view. Their ears are too long, 

 and they could not work in the feather they constantly carry. 

 It is strange that the form of these spaniels should have been 

 so grotesquely altered by selection for exhibition, and yet the 

 old formations of clumbers, springers, and cockers have re- 

 mained very much what they always have been. This is the 

 more surprising, having regard to the fact that Sussex, black 

 field, and cocker spaniels are now much of the same blood. 

 The real cockers, which were at one time called King Charles 

 spaniels, have become lap-dogs, and the smaller specimens of 

 the other races have taken their places. And yet some cockers 

 are distinctly the right shape and not too long, whereas the 

 other exhibition races, named above as too long, are less work- 

 men than the cockers although so much bigger. 



The black field spaniels appeal to me as dogs. The 

 refinement of their heads and the beauty of their coats go 

 nearer to a success by man in producing a working race by 

 mental design and physical measurement than specimens of 

 any other show dogs, whereas the short heads of the modern 

 Sussex spaniel look to contain no sense, and the work seen at 

 field trials must have been very disappointing to the owners 

 of both kinds. It has been a puzzle to the author how men 

 who use the gun at all can be satisfied with such work. 

 However, people will often sacrifice sport for a hobby. 



At a period when science assents to the possibility, although 

 not the probability, of raising up a pure breed in spite of the 

 introduction of a cross of blood, and when the Irish wolf- 

 hound has been created out of crosses with the German boar- 

 hound and the Scotch deer-hound, it is not wonderful that a 

 faint trace of Sussex spaniel blood in a pedigree is considered 

 enough to warrant inclusion under that heading in the Stud 

 Book. But really it is not known what the original Sussex 

 spaniels were like. It docs not follow that because all that 

 is known is gathered from Rosehill, that the dogs there were 

 of the old Sussex strain, or that the information given about 

 them was reliable. 



