“Make sure the sire and dam
have proven hunting experience. If
possible, try to watch one work in the field.”
How many times have we heard or read that advice pertaining to selecting
a breeder for that new puppy? You hear it frequently and often in this column.
The theory is that we want
to select a puppy from a bloodline of hunters.
If we do that, we increase our chances of bringing home a pup with the
prey drive necessary to become a good hunter.
Is this true? Let’s take a look
at behavior and how it develops.
Since your author has no
training in this area, I’m going to keep this very simple. Animal behavior is shaped by both genetic and
environmental influence. Genetic
behavior is the result of evolutionary responses by previous generations. Nature has also allowed behavioral changes
due to environmental influence. Rather
than taking thousands of years to develop an instinctive or genetic behavior,
an environmental behavior can develop simply in the lifetime of an animal.
For our purpose, we’re
dealing with genetic behavior. All
animals have genetic behavior that has developed over hundreds of
generations. How easy is it to lose
genetic behavior? From breeders of
hunting dogs, I’ve often heard that a sporting breed bloodline that has most
recently been used in the show ring, has most likely had the hunting instinct
“bred out”. A few years ago, a good
non-hunting friend called to tell me that he and his wife had just bought an
English setter puppy. I commented that
he should bring the pup over to the house in a couple of months and let’s run
the little rascal in the fields. His
response: “that won’t work; our breeder told us that there are two distinct
blood lines of English setters…hunting and show ring. Our pup is a from a show ring bloodline.” “Although I remained a gentleman and didn’t
want to embarrass my friend, silently, I said “hog wash.” The prey
drive has not been bred out of this
dog.
I believe it was Delmar
Smith who said that he could teach any dog to point…it’s instinctive and not
that hard to accomplish. Delmar’s point
was that practically all ground predators hesitate before they pounce on their
prey…it’s an evolutionary response passed on from generation to generation that
has become genetic. To “breed out” that
evolutionary response from a pure bred line of sporting dogs would take
hundreds of generations.
Genetic behavior is not
limited to just sporting dogs. Three
times in my life, I’ve watched non-sporting dog breeds grab a snake and shake
it so hard that it split into pieces.
That’s genetic behavior. Each of
those dogs had instinct that told them to kill the snake before it killed
them. That behavior evolved over
thousands of years but may not have been used for several generations.
What’s the conclusion and
how does it affect our breeder and puppy selection? I think that the old advice to select a puppy
from a known hunting bloodline is still valid.
Although it may take a millennium or more to breed-out a pro-hunting
genetic behavior, the stronger those genes are, the better.
Paul Fuller is host of the Bird Dogs Afield TV program. Paul’s website is www.birddogsafield.com.
