Dogs and All about Them

Some of the breeds of terriers seen nowadays in every dog show were equally obscure and unknown a few years back. Thirty-seven years ago the now popular Irish Terrier was practically unknown in England, and the Scottish Terrier was only beginning to be recognised as a distinct breed. The Welsh Terrier is quite a new introduction that a dozen or so years ago was seldom seen outside the Principality; and so recently as 1881 the Airedale was merely a local dog known in Yorkshire as the Waterside or the Bingley Terrier. Yet the breeds just mentioned are all of unimpeachable ancestry, and the circumstance that they were formerly bred within limited neighbourhoods is in itself an argument in favour of their purity. We have seen the process of a sudden leap into recognition enacted during the past few years in connection with the white terrier of the Western Highlands--a dog which was familiarly known in Argyllshire centuries ago, yet which has only lately emerged from the heathery hillsides around Poltalloch to become an attraction on the benches at the Crystal Palace and on the lawns of the Botanical Gardens; and the example suggests the possibility that in another decade or so the neglected Sealyham Terrier, the ignored terrier of the Borders, and the almost forgotten Jack Russell strain, may have claimed a due recompense for their long neglect. There are lovers of the hard-bitten working "earth dogs" who still keep these strains inviolate, and who greatly prefer them to the better-known terriers whose natural activities have been too often atrophied by a system of artificial breeding to show points. Few of these old unregistered breeds would attract the eye of the fancier accustomed to judge a dog parading before him in the show ring. To know their value and to appreciate their sterling good qualities, one needs to watch them at work on badger or when they hit upon the line of an otter. It is then that they display the alertness and the dare-devil courage which have won for the English terriers their name and fame.