Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Nathan Ratchford: Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I'm your host today, Nathan Ratchford. I'm joined in studio today by my co-host, John Gordon, who works right next to me.

John Gordon: Welcome, John. That's right. We've got offices right next to each other, folks, here at DUNHQ, which is pretty cool, too, since Nathan did some editing on some of my freelance writing work before he came to DU. So we knew each other, not in person, but through emails and things like that. So it's pretty cool. And our mutual love of dogs. Nathan is really, while we're sitting here today, I mean, you know, you and I really have an affinity for all the sporting breeds and it's really been a lot of fun. Absolutely, John.

Nathan Ratchford: I, you know, our conversations in between, you know, offices, I always wish there was a, there was a mic somewhere because we, We tend to just go on, so it's good to have you here with me, and we're joined by our special guest, one that we're really, really excited about, folks, Craig Koshyk. He is a dog historian. I followed him for a very long time, and today we are tackling a subject that I think our audience is really gonna love, and that is the history of the Labrador Retriever. So that being said, Craig, welcome. Thank you very much for having me. It's a real honor and a thrill to be here. Great to have you, Craig. You're new to, obviously not new to the dog scene at all, but to the waterfowl audience, this may be one of your first introductions. I'd love if you could give a little bit of background about yourself and what makes you so obsessed about dogs.

Craig Koshyk: Thank you for introducing me as a historian. I'm not a formally trained historian. I have university degrees, but they are in literature and teaching and other fields. My official title is Gun Dog Nerd. Alright, that's sort of how I describe myself. I'm sort of obsessed by all things gundog. My specialty over the last number of years has been really looking into the pointing breeds, the versatile breeds, the, what they call in England, the hunt point and retrieve breeds. But, and I've written two books on those breeds, and I am now writing a third book, and that book is on retrievers, spaniels, and water dogs. And so right now, it's just right in my wheelhouse, this whole idea of the the history of the Labrador, I'm digging fairly deeply into it right now, as well as all of the other gundog breeds or the retrieving breeds and water dogs and spaniels as well. That being said, I should mention that, you know, Ducks Unlimited holds a special place in my heart and in my family history. So my parents, my father's family came from Ukraine after the Russian Revolution, my mother's family came from Iceland. After, you know, a volcano sort of exploded there in the late 1800s, early 1900s, they came to Manitoba and settled at the south end of Lake Winnipeg. And their family farm, while my grandfather was a fisherman on the lake, he also guided. He guided American hunters who came up here to hunt in what's called the Lebo Netley Marsh. I am sure that some of your listeners and, you know, longtime Ducks Unlimited fans will know about the Lebo Netley Marsh. It was A very, very famous place in the day. There were dozens and dozens of hunting lodges on my grandfather's property and my uncles would guide a lot of the hunters. Today I hunt mainly around the Delta Marsh, which is at the south end of Lake Manitoba, which is a very famous place where a lot of Ducks Unlimited research was carried on. In fact, my grandfather and uncles were helped, banned ducks for Ducks Unlimited back in the day. It was a huge thing. I remember as a kid, you know, growing up in the 1970s, seeing my uncle's or my grandfather's hayfield basically filled with cars on opening day. It was just an incredible place to be. And really, it was a place where a lot of Ducks Unlimited members and Ducks Unlimited had a great involvement in that area. So coming and being a guest on this podcast is really kind of cool. I was reading today in one of the books of a duck that my grandfather banded way back when in Manitoba was actually captured. The band was actually turned in in South America. And that's the kind of sort of lore and history and culture that traces way back in my family, and it's thanks to Ducks Unlimited.

Nathan Ratchford: That's awesome, Craig. Thank you for that. That's something that I did not know, and I've known you for a couple of years now. Just seeing the continental impact of our mission and how that impacts families like yourself, that's really awesome. I wanted to back up a little bit, Craig, you mentioned some of the books that you've worked on, continental breeds, one of which I own back home, the one you're working on now. How long do you work on a book like that, and what is your unique approach to both photographing and writing and putting these comprehensive books together? You know, I often say I'm like the world's slowest writer, but that's not true.

Craig Koshyk: I actually don't write particularly slowly. What I do is I tend to get drawn down rabbit holes, and I am very concerned and very, I find it very important to be as authentic as possible in my writings. In other words, basing all of my writings and everything that I say in all of my books and in my articles, they aren't based on me. I've never claimed to be an expert at anything but finding experts. So I'm not a dog expert, but I am an expert at finding dog experts. And so one of the reasons or the main reason that it takes me so long to write my pieces is that I don't just write them from this armchair. I go there. So my first book, I started in 1999. I mean, we're talking, you know, sort of early or pre-internet days. I wanted to discover everything I could about all of the various continental pointing breeds. These are the pointing breeds that were developed in continental Europe. So we're talking German Shorthairs, German Wirehairs, all the different French breeds, Italian, Spanish, Slovak, Czech breeds. But I didn't want to simply, you know, grab a book off a shelf or a magazine article or something I heard from somebody who saw one once and then write it. Because what I realized early on in a lot of books, especially dog history, is rife with authors who have never actually seen those dogs. Or if they have seen them, it's only been in a show ring. They've never actually hunted over them. And they certainly haven't seen them in the country that developed them. So for me, it was super important that if I was going to write about German dogs, I go to Germany. If I was going to write about the Hungarian Vista, I need to go to Hungary. I need to talk to Hungarians or Czech people or Italians that have spent, you know, 40, 50, 60 years, some of these people in those breeds, and then write their story and write the story of these particular dogs. And so it takes me a long time. I started my first book in 1999. I finished it in 2011. My second book, which is a follow-up, which is about the British breeds. So my first book was about all the breeds from Europe. My second book was about pointers and setters, basically the ones that were developed in England and Ireland. And I said to myself, well, the first one took, you know, 12 years. This one's going to take less. And I stuck to it. It took me 11 years. So it was one year less than the original one. But that's mainly the reason. My wife and I, you know, we save our pennies every year so that we have enough to travel to wherever we need to go. to photograph dogs and to interview real experts in those breeds, like really really pick the brains of people who have dedicated their lives to those breeds. And so now the next journey again is the retrieving breeds and the water dogs and the spaniels, so that's going to mean some more travel. Fortunately nowadays we can also quote-unquote travel a little bit easier via the internet like we can here talking together remotely. Nevertheless, we do hop on planes a lot and we do a lot of travel just to go and see these dogs in the places where they were developed. So I guess at some point, now that I'm saying this, I'm thinking to myself, man, I better look up tickets to Newfoundland at some point in time.

Nathan Ratchford: I better get my behind over there at some point, you know? I certainly admire that level of dedication, Craig. And as you mentioned, Newfoundland. Why Newfoundland? Why not Labrador? Let's start into the breed history that brings us all here today, the Labrador Retriever. Can you talk a little bit about where the Labrador itself is from? It's a common mistake, and where does that mistake stem from?

Craig Koshyk: I don't even know if I would call it a mistake because it really depends on where you are in time and what you're talking about. So basically today here in Canada we have 10 provinces and one of those provinces is called Newfoundland and Labrador. They are separated by a strait of water. Newfoundland is an island and Labrador is part of the mainland. but they are sort of joined at the hip as it were. And in fact, in the past, it was that way as well. The original, you know, sort of the first Europeans, I mean, there were First Nations people there, there were original, you know, indigenous people on those, in that area for a thousand years, probably before, you know, some of the first Europeans came there. But when the first Europeans came there, they, sort of saw it as one and the same landmass. In fact, there are some ancient maps, some old, some of the original maps that, you know, they'll show the outline of the coast of Labrador with bits of Newfoundland sticking in there and the coast of Greenland. And that entire area, including Greenland, was called Labrador on some maps. So it was a pretty vague idea at the time that Labrador was just this place that if you go far enough west in your boat, you're going to hit this place. We call that general area Labrador. Eventually, however, it got sort of more and more specific. They dropped the Greenland out of it because Greenland was named its own thing. Labrador and Newfoundland were still sort of mushed together until some Basque sailors or Basque fishermen settled in what is now a part of Newfoundland, and they called it Terra Nova, which just means new found land, a new land. And that's where they sort of got divided. Now, why did, you know, eventually, you know, you fast forward from the 1500s up until the early 1800s, 1830s, when the first written reference to a dog called a Labrador, why did they do that? It's kind of a mystery, and I don't know if it can really be traced back to some sort of a mistake in geography more than it would be, you know, just sort of saying that this is where my dog came from. You know, Chesapeake Bay Retrievers for sure have been documented in Chesapeake Bay, but there were probably Chessies in other areas around there. The Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, you know, could have been named for a couple of towns in which it was developed, but we decided to call it the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever because that's the one that eventually caught on.

Nathan Ratchford: Now what was, talk a little bit about the fishing trade in Newfoundland at this time, Craig, and what dogs were being used during kind of this primitive era?

Craig Koshyk: Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I remember here, so I grew up here in Manitoba, I grew up in Canada, and I was always fascinated by early Canadian history, and I remember, you know, tales, and of course, so I grew up in the English part of Canada, but I lived, and my wife comes from the French part of Canada, so it wasn't until later on that I got sort of two sides of the story, but the first side I got, was the English side obviously and I remember hearing about Jean Cabot coming in and some of his sailors when they were first sort of, I mean these were explorers, they just kind of wanted to see where this new found land was and they wanted to explore the coast and I remember You know, reading in some of our history book stories of their ships were almost slowed down by the amount of fish in the waters. You know what I mean? Like they were sailing but they couldn't make much progress because it was not a very strong wind and there was just so many damn fish in the water that it would actually slow some of the boats. So, these guys came over from an area and they've been fishing around their islands just off the coast of Europe and off the coast of England for, you know, centuries. And of course, they knew, you know, how many fish were there and then they were, you know, taking their catch. And then they came here and it was like a gold rush to them. I mean, it was unbelievable. Not only that, I mean, there was other wildlife, there were seals, there were, you know, seabirds, there were birds on shore, there was all sorts of game for these men. But the fishing trade was huge at that time. And so, you know, people from all over the place came. A lot of them, of course, came over from England and because England eventually won the war against France, that they were, you know, contesting these areas of North America, most of the history was written by the victors. And so that's basically what we get is a lot, and they were, they were the majority of the boats, but there were a lot of Portuguese boats, there were a lot of Spanish boats. Basque, the Basque region is a region in the mountains, the Pyrenees Mountains, which divides France and Spain. And they're sort of an autonomous people, they're a different sort of culture of people that live in that area. They came as well. Vikings came even before then, and there used to be some speculation that, well, maybe the lab traces its roots back to Viking dogs. I've found no supporting documentation or information, just the odd hint here and there. I don't think the Vikings were here long enough, I don't think they had enough dogs or used them in the ways that we do to really contribute anything, so I more or less dismiss that. But yeah, I mean, Newfoundland and Labrador at that time, as well as the entire east coast of the US, was just a gold rush for fish, basically. And men would come over on these boats from the fishing ports on the west coast of England, and from Spain, and from France, and all these different regions to come and fish, and then take their haul back, back home.

Nathan Ratchford: And what type of dogs were seen in Newfoundland and around this part of Canada at this time, Craig? And I put emphasis on type, right? Not necessarily breeds, but what type of dogs were seen commonly and how were they used in the fishing trade? Well, yeah.

Craig Koshyk: I mean, first of all, in North America, there were dogs. Some of the indigenous peoples here had their dogs. These were dogs they used for sledding. These were dogs they used for various things. They were dogs they used for wool. On the west coast of Canada, there were tribes of indigenous people who used a particular type of dog, because it had a woolly coat, and they would use it to make wool. Others used them as a source of food, as did people around the world back in the day. So dogs were here when the first Europeans came. It's not like they were the first ones to ever bring dogs, but they were really the first ones to bring particular types of dogs. These were new dogs. The indigenous people here had dogs, but they were mainly of the spitz type. So if you look at your, and I'm sort of reticent to say things like look at the husky, because we're talking about a breed. The husky is a breed, but I'm talking the sort of ubiquitous sled type dog, you know, the prick-eared sort of. Like as that sort of a spitz dog, but it's got the pointy ears, the pointy and the curling up tail. Yeah, so the first Europeans to come here, they probably would have encountered some indigenous people. Some of those peoples had no dogs, but some did. And if they did, they looked like those types of dogs. The Europeans, on the other hand, they were bringing dogs over that came from mainland of continental Europe and some that were also developed in England. So, when you come over, basically what you're going to find is a shipload of men with dogs. Now, what are those men? Well, they're men from certain port cities in England or port cities in France or Portugal and of a certain type. You can't get on a boat, you know, expecting to spend months if not years and maybe lose your life without having a certain mindset. There's a certain psychology to the type of guy that's going to do that. And not only did they do it willingly, a lot of them did, but some of them did it unwillingly. They were just press ganged onto a boat. If you were young and poor and you were a man, the chances were pretty good if you were in a port city that someone's going to dragoon you onto a boat and say, all right, here, here's how you're going to live and survive. So right there, there's a selection process for the type of human being that's going to be aboard these ships. I know today, I was reading just the other day about submariners. And in the US, you have a great submarine force, you know, and lots of submariners. And there are some severe psychological tests that these guys have to go through. You're going to be in a tube with a bunch of other guys for months and months on end. You better pass X, Y, Z test. Otherwise, you're just not fit for this sort of thing. Well, I don't think they had that sort of quote-unquote test back in the day for the people on board those ships, but they certainly, that's how they ended up, because if you weren't suitable, you went overboard. So right there, there's a selection process for the man. Now, they're going to bring dogs along. Well, what's the selection process for dogs? There's nobody with a clipboard checking off the size of your dog and measuring this and doing these tests and whatever. They were just bringing their dogs and the ones that suited that life. survived, those that didn't suit that life didn't survive. And so there's a selection process over years and years and generations of dogs that basically molded those dogs to the same mold as those men. Creatures that are able to live with each other in very confined circumstances for extended periods of time without freaking out, without fighting each other. So cooperation is there, understanding, empathy is there. Bidability, you're the captain of the ship, you want your men to do what you say they should do and they do it. Well, same thing with their dogs. So right there, there's a massive selection process that says, all right, you need to have these qualities. And then once we get there, the job and the conditions are really, really hard. This is a hard, hard job. You're working probably day and night for days or weeks on end. And even when you do get leave, even when they do put their ship ashore, they row to shore, and then they set up camp on shore, you're living on a rock, you know, where it's really, really cold. And you're surviving on whatever you can catch and, you know, and all the rations that they might have on the boat. And so right there, you have to understand that there was no, nobody sat down with a master plan saying this is the kind of guy or dog we need. It just happened to select itself because those were the conditions and the fit, the ones that were most able to adapt to those conditions were the ones that survived.

Nathan Ratchford: Now, you talked quite a bit there about how essentially the place and the condition shaped these breeds. What else, Craig, were these dogs utilized for in a fishing capacity or in a working capacity that shaped other characteristics such as coat length, webbed feet, things like that? How did that harsh fishing environment shape some of these early ancestors of the Labrador, specifically the St. John's water dog? Well, for sure. I mean, those are the things, right?

Craig Koshyk: Those are the sort of, those are sort of the physical characteristics that we need to see in a dog that's able to do those sorts of things. So I'll talk about the physical characteristics, and then the most important to me is the mental characteristics. So first of all, with the physical characteristics, all right? Yeah, today we look at a Labrador and we realize that it's basically perfectly suited to the type of work we expect it to do. I have dogs, I have pointing dogs that are very versatile and I use them to fetch dogs in the early season. I do not use them to fetch dogs in the later season. Why? Because they're not fit for that. It's not good for them, it's not good for me to see my dog shivering there. When I do go hunting and there's ice on the creek and there's a little bit in the bay that I'm hunting and it's cold, it might even be snowing, I'm out there with my buddy's lab. Why? Because that lab sits there like it's just another day ending and why? There's just zero problem, whereas my dogs, they would do it. but they would really pay a price afterwards and they'd be shivering to do it. So you're in a cold rocky environment that takes a particular type of body size, body shape, tail shape, and all those different characteristics we see in the lab. And one of the things, so yeah, you've got this thick oily coat, right? And not only is that coat super thick, I've never done the study, I should probably look one up, but I bet you if you took a square inch of a lab coat and counted the number of hair follicles in it and compared it to a setter's coat or a pointer's coat, you'd see that there's 10 times more hairs per square inch on that coat than anything else. Same thing with the oil glands, there's probably even more. I found one study It's called the skin histology epidural thickness in dogs it's it's something you could find on research gate basically it's a bunch of scientists to try to figure out you know do different dog breeds have different fins thicknesses of their skin and i've always said that right i've always said to people that. The reason that the lab can sit there and not shiver while my dogs are shivering isn't really the coat. The coat does help, that oily layer does help, but it's that subcutaneous fat layer and above all the thickness of the skin. I remember hunting with my buddy's lab and my dogs and we were in cattails hunting pheasants and I was amazed at how sort of unbothered that dog was. Like my dogs will come out and they'll always have, and most people with blinding dogs will see this, like their dogs around their eyes and around their cheeks, sometimes on the front of their paws. It's sharp, that stuff, and it'll be red and sometimes even bleeding. And those dogs, you could tell they'd been working cattails. Well, that lab came out of there and he didn't at all. And I thought to myself, that dog has a really, really thick skin. And sure enough, there is a study that says they did, they studied 27 different dogs of I think six or seven different layers, six or seven different breeds. And they discovered that among all the breeds they studied, the lab had by far like significantly thicker skin. It had a significant difference in the thickness of the epidermal layers is what they said. The thickest was observed in the Labradors and the thinnest was in poodles. Now, that's the group that they analyzed. I would suggest that, you know, greyhounds and pointers would have super thin skin compared to it. So right there, if you've got a dog that you're telling to go fetch a seal on the ice floe, And you've got a dog that the next day he's got to bust through cattails because there might be some, you know, some birds, some ptarmigan hiding in those willows over there. Yeah, you're automatically going to select for a type of skin, for a type of body shape that is perfectly suited for those conditions. Because any dog that didn't have those, well, that's not going to survive, really.

Nathan Ratchford: And over time, Craig, you know, these dogs, at what point Were they most commonly seen in, you know, at what point did the St. John water dog become kind of standardized, and I say that loosely, around some of these character traits?

Craig Koshyk: Well, yeah, I mean, you would have found them right off the start, really, because they came from England and they came from Europe. They came from, you know, the other side of the ocean, really. And again, right there, just getting on board and surviving on board would have been a selection process in and of itself. Once they get there. Now, that's the question is how did they develop as a land raise? Well, the fact is, back in the day, nobody even thought about controlling the breeding of their dogs. They, yeah, they bred good dogs to other good dogs because most of them were pretty decent. And of course you thought your buddy's dog was pretty good, you thought yours was even better, but those are the ones that you're going to breed. Because again, these are closely knit communities of people who know what they're doing, who are very, you know, fit and agile and cunning hunters who needed fit and agile hunting dogs. And so they would simply breed them to each other. The other thing we have to realize is that there's two things. Pure breeding is a modern concept by saying, look, I'm only going to breed to this kind of dog and I refuse to breed to the other dog. No. Back in the day, the type of dog you bred to was good. That was the qualifying. It needed to be good. Yes, size played a role. It was on a boat. You didn't want a giant dog and you didn't want a lap dog. And yes, you know, the coat and everything, that would have taken care of itself because the ones who didn't have what you wanted just didn't make it. But you also had the fact that you had to sort of, we have to also realize that pure breeding is kind of hard, all right? How many fences do you think were between those tents that would keep a dog, you know what I'm saying? Like people didn't build fences back in the day. They didn't have, you know, chain link kennels. I mean, even to this day, the best breeding kennels in the world every so often have, oops, so-and-so, you know? Little, you know, Fluffy got over the fence last night and bred with the neighbor's dog. Oops! That's today with GPS collars and game cameras on your kennel. Imagine back in the day when you and a thousand other guys are living in tents on a rock. There's no chance in hell that these dogs are not going to breed to each other. And it was really the custom there to let their dogs roam. In fact, you know, in the late or mid-1800s, that's why one of the movements to ban dogs in Newfoundland came about, or to license them and tax them heavily, because they were trying to introduce sheep to that island. And one of the main problems they had with introducing sheep was hordes of roaming dogs. So really, it really is, in my view, the perfect example of a landrace. It's a breed that or a type of dog that kind of developed itself because it was the one that was able to adapt. And it just so happened that it tended to be about a medium-sized dog with a varying coat. Some were said to have a slick or short-ish coat. Some were said to have a curlier coat. Some were said to have a long-ish coat. And that totally makes sense. Genetically speaking, when you mix those types of coats, you're going to have a certain ratio of each type of coat. And nobody said, okay, let's keep the long coats away from the curlies and the curlies away from the short coats. No, they bred them all together. And if you like the short coat, if it worked better for you, that's what you took.

Nathan Ratchford: And that's just how it went. Some of those traits too, Craig, it's pretty interesting. We'll work on, after the fact, getting an image of the St. John's water dog in here. But some of the paintings that I've seen done of it includes a white blaze on its chest. And that's something that, John, have you seen that? Even pops up in Labradors to these days. Same thing in Golden Retrievers. You know, it still does. That's pretty interesting there, seeing some of those traits still come through. Oh, they certainly do.

Craig Koshyk: I mean, like the physical traits we see all the time come through and there's throwbacks and there's… you know every so often you'll get a rare this that'll appear or a rare that those genes are there they don't go anywhere it's just like shuffling a deck of cards every so often you'll get a particular hand that because the cards are still the cards they're still 52 in a deck and it's just a matter of how you how you shuffle them now today of course we have pure breeding and we have pedigrees and we have you know, DNA, you know, that we can follow up in these things with coefficient of inbreeding and all these sorts of science. You know, the guys back in Newfoundland with these dogs would be amazed at what we're doing. They would think that we're like, you know, aliens from another planet with all this high-tech stuff that we're able to do with our dogs. But the same genes are there. I mean, we're still dealing with the same set of genes that they were dealing with. Of course, there were additions over the years. There have been other things mixed in and things mixed without. You know, a lot of people don't realize that if you ever see a black wolf in your territory, I saw one last year as a matter of fact, scared the bejesus out of me. Big ol' black wolf, I thought it was a Great Dane, it was just massive, well, the black pigment, the gene for the black pigment in a wolf's coat is from a dog So, any, like, it was unknown before Europeans brought dogs to North America, there were no black wolves, it came from the dogs So there is a type of dog called a Labrador Husky. Well, what is that? Well, it's Huskies. It was, you know, probably indigenous people's dogs, like, you know, sled dogs that were bred with labs. And so we have Labrador Huskies, which is its own sort of type of dog. To me, however, and I mentioned this earlier, the most important thing and the most fascinating thing for me is the genetic selection for behavior. and psychology of these dogs. I already mentioned that just being on board and the ability to live on board with men selects for dogs that are highly cooperative, that are highly biddable, that are calm. Any dog that's bouncing off walls 24-7 or wants to fight or wants to bite or is difficult to train is just not gonna make it. And we see that in spades with the Lab. I mean, it is the most biddable dog I've ever met. In fact, you know, some of the best and easiest trained dogs I've ever met are labs. They almost train themselves in a lot of ways. But here's what I want listeners to think about when we talk about Labradors and retrievers in general in the overall scheme of hunting dogs. If we look at any canine creature, all right, so we go back to the wolf and we go back to the coyote because We have to understand that dogs are completely synthetic creatures. Dogs, domestic dogs, just that word domestic means built by man. It's a synthetic creature. They are basically, I've said this over and over in my books and on podcasts, a dog breed or even a type of dog is an idea with four legs. Basically, it's an idea shared by a group of people that has four legs and that's what it is. It's an idea made flesh by man. So if we look at the primitive canines, the ones that aren't made by man, the natural ones, we see all of their behaviors in our dogs, but the ratios of those various behaviors differ from type to type. So here's the example I give. I want you to imagine a wolf or a coyote. It basically does Five things. It's got a sequence of five events. It's got a grumbling in its stomach, it's hungry. Okay, so what does it do? Right? So the five things that it does is the first of all, it seeks, it looks around. So the wolf gets out of its den, the coyote's hungry. What do they do? They look around. They do it by walking or trotting or running, but they're looking. Finally, they locate the game. They use their nose, they use their eyes, they use whatever they can to locate the game. Oh, there's that rabbit. Next step, they stalk it or they chase it, right? They creep up on it or they point it briefly, stalk it, the thing runs, it chases. What's the next thing? They seize it, all right? So I'm looking around, I find one, I stalk, I chase it, I seize it, then they kill it. The next thing they do is they consume it, or they store some of it, or, this is the important part for the retrievers, they share it, all right? So here's that wolf, it's seeking game, it locates it, it stalks it, it chases it, it seizes it, it grabs that little rabbit, it kills it, and then it eats a little bit because it's hungry, but you know what else it does? It might bury a little bit for later, and it takes the rest of it back to its den in its mouth. It carries it back to its den in its mouth. So now let's take a look at the various types of dogs we have. A setter and pointer is mainly on the seek spectrum. Mainly, that's all pointers and setters do. I know lots of pointers and pointing dogs of all breeds, that's all they do. A 12-week-old setter puppy, you put it on the ground, it gallops like its ass is on fire. No clue why. It's just looking for something. That's all it does. When it finds it, it doesn't seize it. It just points it. And then maybe the hunter shoots it or you get it. A lot of them won't even pick it up. They don't kill it, they don't eat it, they don't share it, they just seek it. They're a game-seeking missile a lot of the times. What about hounds? You know, you got a coonhound. What's it doing? Well, it's seeking, it locates. What does it do once it locates? It barks, it alerts. It doesn't kill it necessarily, it doesn't eat it, it doesn't share it. But sighthounds might. You take a greyhound, a saluki. We locate the game for it mainly, and as soon as it sees it, it chases it, it seizes it, it kills it, and then it brings it back. It shares it with us most of the time. That's generally what we want it to do. How about a terrier? Well, a terrier sees a rat. What does it do? It chases it, of course. It seizes it, and everybody can imagine it killing it. I mean, everybody's seen their own dog when it takes that little, you know, fluffy toy you give it. It gives it that magic. It kills it. Well, that's what terriers are. They're little kill buzz saws. Um, but they don't share it. They just discard it. You watch these barn hunts and these rat hunts with terriers, they're out there just like slaughtering these rats. And the minute it's dead, they just leave it. Now, let's go back to the retrievers now. Let's take a look. Yeah, there's a little bit of seek in a retriever, sometimes a lot. We use our retrievers. We say, hey, go get those birds out of those cattails. So we use them as a flushing dog. Fine. It's got plenty of that bird desire. There's some seize. You wound a dog, you wound a goose, and it's swimming away. That dog, that lab is going to track it down or it's going to swim after it. It's going to seize it. but it doesn't eat it, it doesn't bury it, it shares it. That's its main drive in life is to bring it, it wants to share it with you. And that is what really differentiates the retrieving breeds from everything else. Every type of dog, every breed of dog really has been designed to have an excess of one or more of those traits. And the excess that the retrievers have and labs have it in spade is the share. They shared their life. They shared their being with men on ships. And what do they do? They get lowered over the side of a ship on a special harness back in the day because a fish got off the hook. What do they do? They go down into this cold water on a harness and they grab that fish and they don't kill it. They don't, I mean, they seize it obviously in their mouth, but they don't eat it. They bring it back to share. And so, I mean, you could make an argument. It's not even a Labrador Retriever. It's a Labrador Sharer.

Nathan Ratchford: Well, having two labs myself, I can attest to this character trait because I come in the door after a long day at work and the first thing they want to do is grab the closest toy. and present it. They want to wiggle around and show it off and share that value item. Well, thanks for that, Craig. I really like that idea with the legs analogy in particular. I think that's a good place to take a break. Join us next week as we cover part two of this special series on the history of the Labrador. We're going to be covering its development in England. Thanks again for joining us here today, Craig. I'd like to also thank my co-host, John Gordon, our producers, Chris Isaac and Rachel Jarrett, and you, the viewer. Stay tuned for next week.