328 THE VETERINARY DOCTOR. 
few Americans can afford the costly appointments necessary for such 
development as these sports have attained to with the wealthy class of the 
mother country. Then, too, our trespass laws and the rights of land owners 
will prove an insurmountable obstacle to fox hunting proper. No man will, 
stand the rush of a pack over his fields and the trampling of his crops and 
breaking of fences by horsemen. In England the hunt is supported by the 
class that owns the land, those who farm it being tenants. It is, too, a time- 
honored institution which all have been taught to regard with pride as a 
national sport. Here nothing of the kind exists; we have no class distince- 
tions, and the man who owns a single acre is as strongly defended by the 
law as his wealthy neighbor who owns a thousand. It will therefore be 
practically impussible ever to gain popular consent to the establishment of 
a sport which so large a portion of the community will deem prejudicial to 
its interests; and even if in certain localities of the Eastern States hunting 
is followed by a few clubs, it will never become widely spread or generally 
popular. 
The natural sequence of such limitation in sport is that certain varie- 
ties of dogs are either not at all or but little used in this country. We have 
but very few retrievers, because a majority of our sportsmen keep but one 
dog and break that one to retrieve as well as point. On certain parts of the 
coast, and by the great rivers and lakes, men who make a practice of wiid- 
fowl shooting keep dogs for retrieving, as water work when the weather 
is cold is very hard on ordinary field dogs, whose coats are not suited for it; 
but through a great portion of the West even this shooting is had under 
circumstances that admit of the use of field dogs. 
The hound class is also a small one, and made up of few varieties. 
Foxhounds are broken to follow all kinds of furred game, according to the 
section in which such dogs are kept. Deer, foxes, and the hare, commonly 
ealled rabbit, are all killed before dogs of the same breed, and consequently 
there is no demand for those used abroad for each variety of sport. Beagles 
have been brought out of late, and our shows call together some fine speci- 
mens. They are however little used in the field, nor will they probably be 
so long as the larger hound is so generally useful. ; 
The greater part of out sporting is done over setters and pointers. 
These are now bred from the best strains obtainable from crack English 
kennels, and single dogs costing $1,000 or upward have been imported by 
both clubs and private individuals. The setter is best adapted to general 
sporting, as his coat and spaniel-erigin fit him for work which the pointer is 
comparatively ill-suited for, There are three great divisions of the setter 
family, viz.: The English, Irish, and Gordon, each differing materially from 
the others, and each with its warm friends and supporters among sportsmen. 
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