Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Nathan Ratchford: Welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. We have Craig Koshyk here talking about the history of the Labrador Retriever. I'm joined in studio with John Gordon, my co-host and co-worker. And we just finished up talking about kind of the primitive era of development and labs history. We wanted to move forward into sort of its development stage, Craig, when it went back to England to be refined as a retriever, as a gundog. But let's talk a little bit about what exactly Englishmen and aristocrats were seeing from some of these dogs in North America when they were How exactly did that work? Was it the fishing trade that connected that? And John, feel free to chime in here. What were they seeing that made them want to bring them over?

Craig Koshyk: Well, like I said, from what my research showed, the British fleets had a very different fishing style than the Portuguese and Spanish fishermen over there. So they were shore fishermen, right? So a lot of times there were two mandoris they were using off the coast and they were incorporating the dogs into retrieving fish that, because of the use of barbless hooks, would struggle to the surface and get off the hook. And if there was a dog there immediately to retrieve that fish, they could bring it into the boat. So, Craig, cover that for a little bit for us about how that style really developed the lab as a water dog.

John Gordon: Well, yeah, as I mentioned, you know, there was pretty well every ship would have had some dogs on board. And you have to understand that you know, there was also rats on board. So some of these were ratting dogs. Some of the dogs, and this is sort of part of the history that nobody likes because it's unpleasant, but sometimes they would even take dogs to be, you know, to work on board the ship, but also if things got tough, they would eat them. So they didn't take them necessarily as food, but I mean, it was a reality. This was a very, very difficult time and a very different time than we have today. So there were different types of dogs on board and there was one sometimes you see references to a thing called a trawler spaniel or a shipping spaniel and basically it was a spaniel simply meant as a small dog with a long haired coat basically and they were on board for exactly that they were just there as a useful dog catch a couple of rats, do this, that, the other thing. And again, being lowered on a harness down into the water to pick up a fish that, you know, struggled off of its hook. So these dogs obviously contributed to the genetic makeup of what eventually became the St. John's dog. Back in the day, men didn't swim. It just wasn't a thing. First of all, it wasn't seen as a healthy thing on, you know, in freshwater. When you were back home in England, most people never ever learned how to swim. Simply because of the dangers of the waters there. I mean, that's where they didn't have sewers back then. Basically, their rivers and creeks were that. And so it wasn't a good idea to swim. There are lots of diseases being transmitted by it. And then once you were on a ship, especially in the North Atlantic, you didn't even want to swim. If you went overboard, it was best not to swim because all you're doing is prolonging the agony. To this day, there are lots of fishing nations or seafaring nations in the North Sea that never, you know, that people just don't learn to swim because it's not a good thing. So having a dog that could do that for you, even if it's lowered by a harness from a big ship or from a little rowboat, you know, just being put into the water is a great thing. And again, it wasn't just fish, it was seals in the water and it was ducks and it was, you know, sea ducks and things like that, that they would actually shoot and have them fetch. So it was a really, really valuable trait in these dogs to have that. So when you combine their ability, their willingness to go in water, with their amazing ability to work cooperatively with men, you come up with fascinating techniques with these dogs. And the most fascinating one for me, and one for which one of the retrieving breeds is named, is Tolling, the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. Now, it comes from the same sort of root stock as the Labrador does. All of the retrieving breeds do. They all trace back to the St. John's water duck. But the Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever did what's called tolling. Now, I've done on my own podcast a whole episode on that. I've written articles, so I won't go into too much detail. But it is a really, really cool thing. And I've actually interviewed people who still to this day toll ducks. It's spelled T-O-L-L. And there may be some listeners here who have done it, or if you haven't done it, I would try it. I really do want to try it. Only two years ago, I was out on a bay and it was late. It was probably the last day of the season. And it was one of those days, and I'm sure a lot of the listeners have been there, you know, you're on shore, and out there was a massive, and I'm talking massive, probably five, six, eight hundred canvas backs. And they were 250 yards from shore. And it was a nice day and it wasn't a much wind and they weren't flying. We could see them, but there's no way to get close to them. Well, if I had a tolling dog, I could have done something about it. And that's what these fellows in Newfoundland, Labrador, all along the East Coast, I have, there are written stories of Chesapeake Bay retrievers doing this and of labs doing this. Basically what you do is you hide. The hunter hides behind a piece of driftwood or in a bush. And long, long time ago, probably some of the First Nations people realized that for some reason, ducks and geese are curious animals. Somebody, the story goes, somebody years and years ago saw foxes playing along the shore. And one would run up and down the shoreline, run up and down the shoreline, while the other one just sort of lay in the long grass. And over time, these ducks and geese would get curious and they would start swimming closer and closer and saying, hey, what's that fox doing? What's it doing? They would get so close that the one that was lying in the grass had a chance to, as I mentioned, chase, seize, kill, and share. And so that's what they did. And so somebody along the lines saw this. And I have documentation that goes all the way back to France. And it seems that the French were the first ones to do this and brought it to North America. But in Nova Scotia, it became a thing. So you as a hunter, hide. You've got a dog. And now, the Nova Scotia duck tolling interior, guess what? It's red. Kind of looks like a fox. In France, in the early days, they would actually paint some of their dogs if they weren't red. They would actually put ochre on them and they would cover them in a powder to make them look more fox-like. So you hide, and again, this works with dogs of every color, I'd imagine. You hide and you take a tennis ball, take a stick, but you're hidden and you're throwing it out there for that dog. And guess what? A lab or any material would be perfect. He's just going to go all day long and fetch that stick. Well, guess what? Those ducks that are way out there, they're looking at this dog going, what the heck is that dog doing? There must be something interesting. So they start slowly swimming towards shore and swimming closer and closer and closer and closer to get a better look at this crazy dog playing on the shore, this crazy fox-like thing that's on the shore. And when they're within range, you stand up, the bird's flush, boom. They fall, and guess what? Your toller now becomes a retriever. It goes out, grabs that game, and shares it with you. And so when those dogs started going back to England, you've got the most hardy, cunning, cooperative, biddable, smart dog you could ever imagine. It comes to England where there are, let's face it, some good dogs, but they weren't honed in this blast furnace of conditions of Newfoundland. They weren't put through the wringer of having to survive every day and doing other things, hauling fish for ships, hauling lumber in sleds, fetching seals on ice flows. So you've got selection process happening in England, in Britain. But then there comes this dog back from America, like a Marine from bootcamp, you know, compared to the local guy at the gym. It's just a whole other ball game. And so when they saw these dogs, they thought, oh boy, this is something special. And they just happened to arrive at a time when hunting, when they call shooting in England was undergoing a massive transformation.

Nathan Ratchford: Yeah, that was my next question, Craig, was what exactly was the need for a type of dog like this, and what were they primarily used for in England?

John Gordon: All right, so we're talking the early 1800s, right? And this is a time of great change. This is the industrial revolution is gearing up and things are really changing. Firearms are becoming lighter and easier to carry. We now have break-open, breach-loading guns. We've got cartridges or shells, like what we call shotgun shells. Prior to that, it was all black powder and muzzle-loading and stuff like that. Slowly but surely, we're getting to the modern era. We're getting to an era of wing shooting. people actually shooting birds on the wing, which was at first seen like a circus act. Anybody who could shoot a bird on the wing was like a local celebrity. People would look at him like a magician. It was just like a juggler, like, oh my god, this is unbelievable. How could you actually do that? Prior to that, almost all waterfowl was shot on the ground, on the water. In fact, at first they were shot with bolts from crossbows and arrows, and there were dogs, spaniels, and various water dogs. That was their job. That fetch and bring back and share instinct was already being honed there, right? So they had that. They had water spaniels, Irish water spaniel and various different spaniels in that area. ubiquitous, they just called them land spaniels and water spaniels, that already had a fairly strong retrieving instinct and were already fairly decent water dogs. But for some reason on the continent and in England, this idea that a water dog always had a curly coat or had to have a curly coat, so you think of the old poodles, you think of the Barbies, the Barbots, and you think of the Spanish and Portuguese water dogs, these are curly-haired dogs that they would trim the hips, and you know, you got that fancy cut of hair on these dogs to help them glide through the water. They had those dogs, and they were fairly decent for what they were being used for. But things were changing. You have lighter arms, you've got more wing shooting, and the biggest change of all was a thing called a driven shoot. Now prior to about the mid-1800s, Excuse me, I got an itchy butt. Prior to about the mid-1800s, the style of shooting was called walked-up shooting. You would shoot over pointers and setters. You would have a dog out there seeking, pointing. You would walk up close to the dog. The dog would advance. Bird's up. You shoot. Great. Now, one of your spaniels is going to go fetch those birds. Your pointers and setters didn't fetch them. You had a spaniel. Or dogs were expensive in that day. You were obviously a rich person. Poor people didn't hunt. This is rich people. So, you know, one of my favorite authors, Derry Argue, says in his book about pointers and setters, most of the time they didn't have a spaniel to retrieve, they had a man to retrieve. Dogs were more expensive than men back in the day. So, yeah, you were a rich dude, you're with your other rich dude friends, you're out there shooting over pointers and setters, you shoot some grouse, well, you know, jives or jeeves, I guess the servant or the butler goes and picks them up for you. So that was what it was until about the late mid to early late 1800s. Now we have Queen Victoria on the throne and her husband is Prince Albert. Both of them are German. People don't realize this. If you walked into Buckingham Palace back in the day or where they were living, you would hear Queen Victoria talking to her husband in German. In fact, his second language was English. The first language she learned was German, but then perfected English. And this is the Queen and King or the Prince Consort of England. So he brings over this tradition from Germany and from the continent, they did it in France, called the driven shoot. Basically, you had keepers raising vast numbers of pheasants or whatever game you want, ducks and hares, and you were standing there waiting for them to fly over or run past and you would shoot them in these big shooting parties. And Prince Albert thought this was great because that's where he learned it back in his own country and he brought it to England. And at first, the British were absolutely shocked. It was just, no, no, no, no. That's not sporting. That's not fair. That's not how we do things. But it was the prince. He was the husband of the queen. His son, Edward, even made it a bigger deal. And eventually, it caught on, because this is what the royals do. This is what the nobles do. And it became a sport of its own. You went from castle to castle with shooting party of shooting party. And you would go from one place to the other, had these extravagant weeks of shooting. And the shooting consisted of you standing there, while beaters and picker-up would beat the bush for you in the hillside, and dozens, hundreds, thousands of pheasants would be flushed. And you would shoot them with your fancy new purdy. or two of them, a matched pair of birdies. You have a loader on one side, he's loading that gun and you're shooting as fast as you possibly can. And you're recording bags of hundreds, maybe even thousands in a day, shot by just a few people. And what do you need? You need a dog that's going to sit there and it's going to go fetch those birds for you. And so it's mainly on land that you were doing this, and it's mainly upland game birds, and there was a little bit of what you call walked up shooting where the dog would flush the bird, you'd shoot and it would fetch, but that's really what was happening. Pointers and setters almost went extinct in Britain at that time, to this day. There are tens of thousands of Labrador retrievers bred every year in England. There are maybe in a good year, 300 English setters born in England. The change from walked up shooting over pointing dogs to this driven shoot completely changed the entire culture of shooting in Britain. And it's never changed back. So here you've got these, again, rich people, with this new type of sport, with this new style of shooting, this new culture around it. And they've got dogs, they've got long-haired, they've got flat coat retrievers and wavy coat retrievers, they've got spaniels, they've got dogs that are fairly good at this. And they were mainly dogs adapted from spaniel backgrounds with some setting dog in them. They were developed from various sorts of things. And then comes the Labrador. All of a sudden these sailors that you sent over there are bringing dogs back because they realize now laws are changing. It's a little bit more accessible to the average guy to go out hunting. He also wants a dog. They realize that there's a market for it. So they're bringing dogs back over like crazy. And among the people who see some of these dogs are two really rich dudes. One of them's up in Scotland, and he's doing that driven shooting thing. He's one of the first to start one of the massive kennels, I'm sorry, pheasant rearing operations in Scotland. And then the other guy is in the south, and he just happens to live on one of the best places in the entire UK for duck shooting.

Nathan Ratchford: Yeah, and those were the two figures that we've always heard associated with, famously associated with the development of the Labrador over there. And it's my understanding that one of those gentlemen actually registered the first Labrador. I know we'll get to that later, but talk a little bit about those two figures, Craig, and how important they were. and the development of the breed.

John Gordon: Sure, so you got two guys. You got the Earl of Malmesbury, right? He was one of the first to import dogs that were directly from Newfoundland. He called them St. John's dogs when he first got them. And he was the guy, he lived in a place called Heron Court. It's a massive estate in Dorset, England. And it had some of the best duck shooting in the nation. And, you know, he'd been shooting there and I believe his father, anyway, he comes from a long sort of line of shooters or hunters that we would call them. And he heard about these dogs, like he didn't see one right away, but people coming, you know, across the ocean or people who had had them in the area, you know, told him about these unbelievable abilities of these dogs, of the St. John's water dog. And so he imported some. He just basically sent a boatload of cash and said, bring me some in the early 1830s. And over the next 50 or so years, he and his descendants and people in his area, you know, started breeding them, basically. Meanwhile, there was another guy north of him in Scotland, near the port of Greenock. Well, that's where he got his first dogs from, a port near him. And this is the Duke of Bucklew, actually, it's pronounced Bucklew. And he, unbeknownst to the guy, to Maldsbury, they didn't know each other were breeding Labradors at the beginning, they just sort of, Both of them got on to this sort of St. John's water dog and did what they wanted to do with it. In the south, in Devon, there's the Earl of Malmesbury, and he's really focused on duck shooting as well as upland shooting, but he sees these dogs as ideal for it. Meanwhile, in Scotland, the Duke up there, him and his brother were sort of one of the early pioneers of pheasant rearing for this continental style of what they called batu, or driven chutes. And so two of these guys sort of in parallel started developing their own lines of Labradors. And then years later, I'm just gonna quote from an article that I wrote. I wrote, in 1882, while the sixth Duke of Bucklew and his cousin Charles, the 12th Earl of Holme, were visiting a sick aunt, on the south coast of England, they accepted an invitation of the Earl of Malmesbury to join them for a duck shoot. And when the cousins saw the Earl's dogs, they were amazed by their abilities, especially in the water. The Earl must have been equally impressed by his cousin's shooting skills and admiration for his dogs, because they both ended up giving each other dogs. to take back to their place or to use in their own process. And so those are the two guys, basically, that really got the ball rolling. Now, there were other people with St. John's Water Dogs that were coming over. Because again, those sailors who were there realized they had a pretty good market for these dogs. Any dog they could bring over, they could sell. Eventually, the English government started taxing them on that. But the Duke and the Earl had the wherewithal to develop a strain. Now, it's not a breed. They didn't have a breed club or a breed name or a standard or anything at that time, but because they were rich and because they could afford a fence, as I mentioned, because they could afford to sort of, you know, let's breed, you know, this one to that one and let's sort of take care and keep them quote unquote pure, not pure in the way that we think of today, but at least related. and not mixed with a ton of other things just happening to be rowing around. Those were the two that really started the first strains that eventually went in to produce what we know today as the Labrador.

Nathan Ratchford: At what point, Craig, did this breeding amount to a standardization? At what point was Labrador, when was the first Labrador? And who of these gentlemen is credited to that original registration?

John Gordon: So yeah, so there's a difference between registration and the purity and the name. So let's go back, first of all, to the name. The first use of the name is in the early 1800s. And one of the first ones is around 1830, I can't remember the exact. date of it, but Edwin Lancier, who was a famous painter, painted a picture, and you can see it on the internet now, and it's called Cora, a Labrador bitch. And it's a beautiful looking dog, slightly longer coat than we would, you know, expect on a lab today, but you can kind of see the resemblance there. And that was the first sort of use of the word, and then it was used again, I believe by Malmesbury and others, that they started using the word or the term Labrador. And just to clarify, I think personally Labrador is the exact perfect word or name for this breed. It comes from a Portuguese word, Lavrador, and I think the V in Portuguese is probably pronounced as a B like it is in Spanish, so that's where we get Labrador. It comes from a term in Portuguese, which means basically farmer or laborer, because it comes from the Latin term labor, that we use labor. So in other words, it's a worker. And Labrador, to me, that's exactly what it is. It's a working dog. It loves to work. It wants to work. It needs to work. And so I'm glad that they coined it that. And I'm glad they didn't keep calling it the Newfoundland dog. I have a friend who breeds Newfoundlands. You know, those big ones you could put a saddle on and ride home. They're beautiful, wonderful dogs. But they're not necessarily my idea of a working dog, as it were. Whereas a Labrador, it's just all work and for the love of work. And so I think that's a great name. And so that's where we start seeing it. But back in the day, we need to look at this term pure. So when Malmesbury or Bucklew was saying that their strain was pure, they didn't mean pure in the way we do today. When we say pure, we mean undiluted by anything else. What we mean is there's no other thing in there. It's just one ingredient as it were. My Labrador has only Labradors in its pedigree. That's pure. It's got a pedigree, it's got an official breed club, it's got a standard, it's got a name. Back in the day, Malmesbury and Buckley, when they used the word pure, they meant able to reproduce itself in a similar way. Now, a little bit of context here. You're in 1830. You sit down for supper. You're at a supper table. You've got a dish in front of you. You've got a fork. You've got a knife. You've got a glass in front of you. And so do all of your dinner compatriots. They're all there. Everybody's got a plate, a cup, a dish, a fork, a chair. And all of those items are different from each other. There aren't two forks. The forks kind of look the same, but they're not identical. The plate isn't identical. The chairs aren't identical. Why? Because they're all handmade. The Industrial Revolution, one of the main things of the Industrial Revolution was the fact that now I've got a machine stamping those forks. I've got somebody making those chairs out of a pattern. out of a mold, and they're identical. To people living in the 1830s and 40s and 50s, the first time they saw things that were identical, when they could take a set of knives and each one was indistinguishable from the other, that was an amazing thing for them. Today, we see that as run of the mill. We expect everything to be the same. Every car, every, you know, whatever, Chevy, you know, Ford 150, looks like the other Ford 150, they're identical. They come off on an assembly line, but they didn't back in the day. So it was an amazing thing for them to see products come out as being identical one to the other. Then it starts happening with dogs. Oh my goodness. I'm able to do this with livestock. Every one of my cows looks identical, almost like clones. I'm able to breed dogs that look identical to their parents. And I can assure any buyer who wants a dog from me, yeah. All those pups are gonna be black. They're all gonna be about this size. They're all gonna look like their mom and dad. That was revolutionary and that was pure. To them, the ability to produce dogs that generation after generation, that was their idea of pure. So they would say that if a dog had the dogs that look just like them, they were quote unquote pure, even though their pedigree might not be pure, even though there might be six different breeds in there, if they all came out looking like each other and did that generation after generation, no matter what the mix was, they were quote unquote pure. So when we hear about Malmesbury and Bucklew having pure strains, they were pure in their, point of view. In our point of view, probably not, because they may not have been able to trace their pedigree back, and there may have been slightly other ingredients in there. But to their eyes, if they all came out looking the same, and acting the same, and being the same, they were quote-unquote pure.

Nathan Ratchford: And it's my understanding, Craig, that the Duke of Bucklew, he was the first one to move pass that stage of purity and actually register the first Labrador, is that right?

John Gordon: Back in the day, the idea of pedigree first started taking hold around the mid-1800s, and so the Duke of Bucklew may have been among the first with Labrador retreaters to actually record the names. Now, stud books existed for horses. It was a horse thing. The horses out at stud and the Jockey Club and various organizations had their own stud books because it was important for horse breeders. For dog breeders, it wasn't important until around that time in the mid-1800s. And then pedigrees started to become more and more important. But they were private pedigrees. They were handwritten, you know, private records so-and-so would have in their kennel. And some kept them and some didn't. I mean, one of the most famous is Edward Laverick, you know, the founder of the English setter, really. he had a very detailed pedigree that nobody believed and we still to this day can't quite believe it because he basically claimed that every single dog he ever bred went back to basically two dogs and that they were all interbred the entire time without any effects of inbreeding so it's probably not real but he did popularize the idea of pedigrees So yeah, the Duke of Buckley and Malmesbury, perhaps as well, probably had those private records written down. Somebody has them. And I'm sure some of the famous researchers out there have done their research. And I, in the research for my book, I'm going to overturn a lot of stones looking for certain things like that. When we talk about registration, we need a body to register with. So it wasn't until the Kennel Club was established that people could even register a dog or have their stud book approved and standards for the breeds written, published, and then approved. So, you know, it wasn't until about, I think, 1903 that, I'm sorry, 1913 that the Kennel Club, like, officially said, okay, look, this is a breed, it's called the Labrador Retriever, this is what it's supposed to look like, this is what, you know, the standard is, etc., and they move on from there. Up till then, the breed wasn't really well known. Sure, the Duke of Buckley had great ones in Malmesbury and they were around, but among the doggy people, in other words, the canine establishment, they weren't really well known. Flatcoats were the retrieving breed, you know, there were various Spaniels and others that were really, really well known.

Nathan Ratchford: So Craig, how did, you know, the first retriever trials in England, how did they shape the Labrador's influence and exposure in the sporting community?

John Gordon: You know, in my most recent book, which is on the pointing breeds of England, I open the, there's a chapter on competition and I open it up by saying, you know, I bet you the very first dog competition happened when two cavemen said, you know, started arguing who had the better dog. I mean, it's just been going on forever. There's always been my dog is better than your dog, you know, competitions or that idea forever. But it really didn't get codified. It really didn't turn into quote-unquote sport or into an organized event until the late 1800s in England. It started with pointers and setters and then it moved on. It moved on to spaniels and onto retrievers. And with the retrieving breeds, really it was around 1899, the late 1800s, late 1890s. when that idea of my retrieving dog is better than your retrieving dog started to take hold officially. And clubs and various organizations started to hold field trials. And at the beginning, there were no labs in it. I mean, the flatcoats really sort of dominated it. You know, you would find flatcoats, and I think there might even have been a Chessie or two in some of the earliest ones. I'm not really sure. You would have found mixed breeds. You know, they would have called it, you know, in this category are the flatcoats, in that category are the curlycoats. And here we have the mixed breeds. But that was in the late 1890s. But pretty soon, I mean, 1903 was sort of a turning point for Labradors in England. Croxton Smith, who was a great canine historian, wrote, quote, the year 1903 was memorable in the history of Labradors, which had hitherto been little known except among a few select sporting families. I must admit that before 1903, I had never even seen one, and the majority of doggy people had to confess to similar ignorance. Then, in that year, a class was provided for them at the Kennel Club show at the Crystal Palace, and in looking up the old catalogue, I find that there were 14 exhibits. So 14 labs were exhibited in 1903. And so, but then, so the first place was that you had to show them. And at that time, there was a lot of people who went to the shows and the Crystal Palace was a huge place in London. And so they started, okay, what is this dog? You know, what is this breed? And then in 1916, King George V started taking labs into shows. And that's when the popularity among the show crowd really started taking off. But in field trials, it was, you know, 1905, 1906, 1908, for example. So 1899, you got like a small handful of retrievers in a field trial. By 1908, 10 years later, there were 106 dogs entered in retrieved field trials. And even though there were twice as many flatcoats entered into these trials, as labs, the labs won the vast majority of the stakes. And then in 1911, 1913, and years after that, it just kept getting greater and greater and greater a difference. They just sort of blew everything else out of the water. The main reasons they state for that is that the Labrador was way more obedient and way more easy to handle. It was quicker to go on a line and quicker to take and a better marker. And it also was smarter. They had this thing called pottering. In other words, you see a dog or you see a bird down, the dog doesn't see exactly where it is. It goes and tries to find it. Well, one of the problems with the flatcoats apparently at the time was they would potter. In other words, they would go to maybe where they figured it fell or where it fell and it ran off and they would potter around the initial landing site of it. They wouldn't get on and track it and find it right away. And the labs just ended up being much better at that. They were able to find the game and bring it back faster than some of the flatcoats. And so they were easier to handle. I think that they also developed a lot earlier. So they were easier to train at a younger age. And they just, yeah, within, you know, a decade, they went from nothing to dominance in English field trials.

Nathan Ratchford: It's interesting how these early trials over in England, they were the foundation for our trials here, right? So let's talk about how those trials and the methodology around them changed specifically In 1911, Craig, with Captain Archie Butter, who handled Peter of Fasculi, I believe, the famous Labrador. What innovations and handling happened during that period of time that made Labradors particularly appealing for that style of handling and training? Um, and how did that, you know, you know, again, lay the foundation for, you know, our next chapter in field trials and Labradors in America.

John Gordon: You know, I mentioned earlier that if the guys from Newfoundland back in the day could come, you know, and see what we're doing today, um, with retrievers and especially in retriever trials, they would just be blown away. They would certainly recognize their dogs. They would recognize all the qualities that they valued in their dogs, in the dogs we have today, but they would be blown away at the precision and at the, the demands that we place on these dogs. But it's equally true that if we could go back then, like to the early days of the field trials, like wouldn't it be great to hop in a time machine to 1903 or 1911 or you know 1913 and watch this dog, Peter of Fasculi, being quote-unquote handled in the field. Or even to the early American field trials when they would use sticks and stones. I mean it was literally They would, you know, if the dog went off its line or something, it wasn't illegal to throw a stick out there. You know, there are reports from early trials of the dog bringing the stick back to the shame and horror of its handler. But I mean, things were vastly different back in the day in terms of that, and also even the way that they were reported. So yeah, I mean, the Butter family, you know, they owned Peter of Fasculi. And he was the only retriever in 1910, he was the only retriever to win two open stakes in one season. And in 1911, won the first championship in a class entirely of Labradors. So by 1911, there was a championship stake, championship class, and only dogs in it were Labradors.

Nathan Ratchford: That's amazing seeing that short window of time, right? 1903. You had a report that you just read, virtually unheard of. Yeah. 1911, every single dog run in this library. It's taken over. I mean, that's pretty impressive.

John Gordon: And then Peter O'Fascoli, so I've always said that a good dog, Peter O'Fascoli was a good dog. He won all those things. But what made him a great dog is that his progeny, a lot of his offspring went on to just as great things. I mean, he was prepotent. And that's what we always look for in dogs, is are you able to take your greatness and share it with your progeny? And that's what he did. I mean, he had lots and lots of his puppies. I think 30, more than 30 of his puppies became champions, which is huge, right? And the best thing I love about this is how, when you go into the old archives. Now, I have lots of books and there's lots of really good books. I mean, Walter's book on the history of the Labrador is fantastic. And there's lots of other ones. Today, with the power of the internet, there are so many libraries and so many archives from newspapers that we can access online now. So iAccessOne, it's the archives of British newspapers and magazines. And you can find every issue of every magazine and things all the way back to the late 1700s and read them online. It's fantastic, and I love reading about them. So like, so I have one from the 1912, the Kennel Gazette, talking about Peter of Fasculi, right? And to your point of him being the first to ever be handled, right? We would say, okay, he was handled. He used a whistle or hand signals. The way that they described it, it was fantastic. Listen to this, quote, I have no hesitation in describing Mr. A.E. Butters, Peter of Fasculi, as the most notable performer of the year. Peter, to my mind, combines the perfection of all the qualities that are claimed for Labradors. Great speed, excellent nose, and absolutely tender mouth, and while splendidly endowed with initiative, he is not above taking a hint from his master. I absolutely love that. Not above taking a hint from his master. Right? It's so polite. It's so English because it must have shocked them that, okay, his master is telling him to do this or do that. Like handling was new. Maybe a whistle was new. And what did they say? Oh, he's taking a hint from his master. So, to my mind, that just sort of encapsulates the whole period of the British involvement with the Labradors. It went from nothing to just world beater. And it did so not because of harsh handling, not because this guy was hacking that dog, the handler was giving him hints.

Nathan Ratchford: John, you mentioned, where did that, based on your research, where did some of that handling come from?

Craig Koshyk: Well, it's the, it's the sheepdog handlers of the time. They started using whistles and hand signals when they were working the dogs with the, with the herds. And, uh, that's, that's where it came from. That is fascinating.

Nathan Ratchford: Well, that concludes part two of this special series on the history of the Labrador. Join us next week while we cover the final part with its modern era in North America. Thanks again for joining us here today, Craig. I'd also like to thank my cohost, John Gordon, our producers, Chris Isaac and Rachel Jarrett, and you, the viewer. See you next week.