Story of the Lab, Part 1

Behold the Labrador retriever. He is the dog for all seasons and for all reasons. Stout of build, strong of heart, keen of senses. The definitive retriever, he is the yardstick by which the ability to find and fetch is measured. He is the dominant player in the retriever field trial game and the waterfowl dog nonpareil, by far the breed most likely to be found in duck and goose blinds throughout North America and beyond. An accomplished upland hunter as well, the Lab is especially prized for his willingness to breast heavy cover, put skulking rooster pheasants to wing, and track down lightly hit “runners” that many dogs wouldn’t have a prayer of recovering.

A sportsman of enormous experience once told me, “If I needed a pheasant to feed my family, the dog I’d want would be a Labrador retriever.” Then there’s this, from perhaps the most results-obsessed hunter I’ve ever known: “Any retriever other than a Lab is a compromise.”

But that’s just page one of the Lab’s remarkable CV. His unique blend of qualities, both physical (size, stamina, athleticism) and psychological (intelligence, trainability, level temperament), make him superbly equipped for a host of duties beyond the scope of his original brief. Guide dog for the visually impaired? Check. Assistance dog for the disabled? Check. Bomb and booby-trap detection dog for the military? Check. Contraband detection dog for law enforcement? Check. Search-and-rescue and cadaver dog for emergency services agencies? Check. Therapy dog for people who, whatever their circumstances, need cheering up? Check and double-check.

About the only role for which the Lab is poorly suited is that of the traditional police dog, meaning a dog that will, on command, take down a fleeing or hostile suspect. Not that a Lab won’t get his hackles up if he senses that the people he cares about are in danger; it’s just that, as a rule, Labs are lovers, not fighters (although there are exceptions). Their personality profile is low fear/low aggression. That’s why they’ll crash through ice to bring back a duck or risk their neck to save the platoon but generally greet other dogs and people, even those they don’t know, with a friendly wag of the tail. It takes a lot to rile them up. In the eyes of the typical Lab, you’re OK until proven otherwise. Whether you’re human or canine, a Lab will usually give you the benefit of the doubt.

This happy, non-reactive disposition, along with what the writer Robert F. Jones called “an unquenchable spirit of playfulness,” are among the main reasons that the Lab, on top of everything else, is such a wonderful family dog. For more than three decades running it was the number-one breed in terms of AKC registrations. Hunters contributed to that statistic, but you can bet your last shotgun shell that what really drove it were children who wanted a pet and parents who did their homework. I firmly believe that the sporting breeds make the finest family companions because they’ve been bred for many generations expressly to partner with people. And I offer the Lab as Exhibit A.

In this one package, then, you have the consummate specialist in retrieving, the behavior that defines him. You also have the closest thing in the canine kingdom to a do-it-all dog—with the proper training, a dog that can fulfill a dizzying variety of roles unrelated (or at best distantly related) to the purposes for which he was originally intended.

Where did this marvel come from, and how did he become what he is?

Let’s start with this: Before the invention of the flintlock fowling piece in the 17th century and the beginnings of what was then called “shooting flying,” there was no particular need for a specialized retrieving dog. Game birds were hunted in one of two basic fashions: with falcons or other raptors, usually in tandem with some kind of flushing or pointing dogs; or with nets, either deployed in front of pointing dogs (the idea being that the birds would flush into the nets and be captured) or cast over flocks of molting waterfowl that had been driven toward the netters.

The development of the shotgun changed the rules. When it became possible to stand here and knock birds down there, a niche was created for a dog that could aid in their recovery, especially when those birds were wounded or had fallen in a place—water being the obvious example—where it was inconvenient or impossible for the fowler to go.

Still, it was some time before dogs specifically bred to retrieve had any appreciable presence on the sporting scene. While a large, rough-coated “water dog” native to France is mentioned in the early literature (it may have been a precursor to the poodle), it never became widely popular and eventually died out.

There was, however, a dog native to the Ardennes of southern Belgium, not far from the border with France, whose reputation as a superb all-purpose hunter was known throughout Europe. Called the St. Hubert hound, it originally came from the Abbey of Saint-Hubert—coincidentally or not, the patron saint of hunters. The St. Hubert hound was well established in England by the mid-16th century; a woodcut in George Turbervile’s The Booke of Hunting, published in 1576, depicts a well-proportioned all-black dog that, other than having a long, ropy tail and an odd sheeplike muzzle, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Labrador retriever as we know it today.

The outstanding qualities possessed by the St. Hubert hound, as cited in texts from that period, are also consistent with those we associate with the Lab: a high degree of cold tolerance, no fear of water, tremendous scenting ability, and exceptional tenacity and courage when pursuing wounded game. And while the all-black individuals were said to be “especially good,” some were described as “white”—a clue that Richard Wolters, the great historian of the Lab, took as evidence of a recessive yellow gene.

Adding it all up, Wolters argued persuasively that the St. Hubert hound is the earliest identifiable ancestor of the Labrador retriever, and that it is the direct progenitor of the St. John’s dog, a breed developed during the 17th and 18th centuries by the dory crews from southern England who worked the fishing banks off Newfoundland. Although this dog served in a variety of capacities (sound familiar?) he was most renowned for his prowess in the water, where his duties included leaping into the icy waters of the North Atlantic to retrieve cod that had flopped free of the hook.

(Footnote to history: A few St. John’s dogs persisted on the remote Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland until the late 1970s, when Wolters asked an old-timer there what caused the breed to disappear. He received this pithily clipped reply: “Better hooks.”)

Not surprisingly, over the years a smattering of St. John’s dogs returned to England with their masters. Also not surprisingly, their ability as retrievers attracted the attention of sportsmen—who, in a confusing twist, began calling them “Labrador dogs.” To put it another way: The very first dogs to be called “Labradors” were simply St. John’s dogs by a different name.

The first mention of the Labrador in print was in Lt. Col. Peter Hawker’s 1814 book Instructions to Young Sportsmen, in which Hawker declared that the Lab was “by far the best for every kind of shooting.” He went on to say, “Their sense of smelling is scarcely to be credited. Their discrimination of scent, in following a wounded pheasant through a whole covert full of game, or a pinioned wild fowl through a furze brake [a bramble thicket], or warren of rabbits, appears almost impossible. . . . For finding wounded game, of every description, there is not his equal in the canine race; and he is a sine qua non in the general pursuit of wildfowl.”

A few years later, in 1823, the artist Edwin Landseer, later a great favorite of Queen Victoria but at the time in the very early stages of his career, painted the first portrait of a dog identified as a Labrador. Titled Cora, A Labrador Bitch, it depicts a mostly black dog that, seen through 21st-century eyes, bears at best a remote resemblance to today’s Labs. The high-eared, sharp-muzzled head looks more like a fox than a Lab, and the long, wavy coat displays a shockingly large proportion of white.

Be that as it may, Landseer’s painting helped cement the name “Labrador” in the vocabulary of British sportsmen, although as late as 1840 there were still contemporary references to the St. John’s dog.

Were it not for a happy accident in the 1880s, the Lab might have vanished almost before it truly took shape. Despite the praise heaped upon the Lab by Hawker and others, the breed was never especially abundant. Then, as the Newfoundland fishing industry changed, and restrictions were placed on dog ownership there in an effort to promote sheep farming, the supply of St. John’s dogs coming from Newfoundland to Great Britain dried up. By the middle of the 19th century, there were only three places where “the Labrador dog” was being bred and perpetuated in any kind of organized fashion: at the Scottish estates of the Fifth Duke of Buccleuch and the 10th Earl of Home, and at Heron Court, the estate of the Second Earl of Malmesbury in the south of England.

According to Wolters’s research, the Second Earl of Malmesbury began breeding Labs in 1801, roughly 30 years before his Scottish counterparts followed suit. Malmesbury was also the first to make explicit mention, in correspondence, of two of the prized attributes that have come to be synonymous with the Labrador retriever: “a close coat which turns the water off like oil” and “a tail like an otter.” This tells us that even before those British peers began directing the Lab’s breeding, the anonymous dory fishermen of Newfoundland used their best working stock to produce the desirable qualities that ultimately made the Lab the Lab. In a very real sense, they laid the genetic foundation for everything the Lab would become—and they gave those Earls and Dukes plenty to work with.

Around 1850, the Third Earl of Malmesbury posed for a daguerreotype with a gray-muzzled dog resting its lovely head on the Earl’s thigh. It is unmistakably a Lab. How fitting that the first-ever photographic image of a Labrador retriever depicts a behavior so utterly characteristic of the breed.

By 1880, however, for reasons that have never come to light, the Buccleuch kennels were severely depleted. And while Lord Home still had a few Labs at the time, he seems to have been doing little if any breeding. The kennels at Heron Court were still going strong, though, and at some point in the early 1880s the Sixth Duke of Buccleuch and the 12th Earl of Home traveled there for a spot of duck shooting. Some writers have claimed that the trip was made on the pretext of visiting Home’s sick aunt, but whether there’s any truth to that is ultimately immaterial.

When Buccleuch and Home arrived at Heron Court, they were astonished to find Labradors identical in virtually every way to their own. They had no idea that another kennel of Labs existed; nor was Malmesbury aware of the existence of their dogs or breeding programs. The conversations that ensued must have been long and lively, and they led to Malmesbury, who was getting up in age, gifting six of his dogs to Buccleuch for the purpose of revitalizing his line.

It is not overstating the case to say that without that gift, there is every chance in the world that the Labrador retriever would have quietly passed from the scene, the only traces of its existence a few enthusiastic mentions in 19th-century books and letters and a handful of pictorial representations. The Third Earl of Malmesbury, you see, died in 1889, and within five years the kennels at Heron Court were disbanded.

The dogs he gifted to Buccleuch, though, became the nucleus of a renaissance. In Wolters’s words, “The six dogs the Buccleuch kennel received from Malmesbury are the foundation stock for the dogs that made it into the present century [meaning the 20th]. From the beginning of the St. John’s dog, as Hawker knew it, from the Malmesbury kennels to the Buccleuch kennels, the modern Labrador comes down to us.”

But if the Malmesbury gift put the Lab’s future on sound footing, the dogs remained little-known beyond their small aristocratic orbit. The Kennel Club of Great Britain was founded in 1874, but it wasn’t until 1903—not so very long ago, really—that the club officially recognized the Lab as a breed and gave it the name, Labrador retriever, that we all know it by.

The phenomenon that, more than anything else, served to bring the Lab out of the shadows and into the sporting limelight was the driven shoot. These elaborately choreographed events, which required vast acreages and deep pockets to stage (and were thus the exclusive province of the aristocracy), started to become popular around 1860 and reached their zenith in the Edwardian era that preceded World War I.

The way it works, basically, is that teams of “beaters” thrash around in the cover and flush the birds, either red grouse or pheasants, toward shooters waiting at pre-assigned posts called “pegs.” A typical driven day consists of several drives, each of which results in a large number of birds, sometimes a staggeringly large number of birds, that need to be retrieved. No dog proved better suited to serve in that capacity than the Lab.

By dint of his trainability and his calm, unflappable personality, a Lab would sit quietly while, all around him, guns were blazing and birds were falling. If the conditions were cool and wet, as they often are in Great Britain during the shooting season, the Lab, with his water-repellent outer coat, dense undercoat, and insulating layer of subcutaneous fat, not only welcomed them but reveled in them. And when the gamekeeper in charge of his training and handling released him to retrieve, he would discharge his duties with happy and professional aplomb, his tireless searching impelled by that rare alloy of instinct, desire, and athleticism with which, from the beginning, the “Labrador dog” has been endowed.

How could any British sportsman worth his salt (or his whisky) fail to be impressed by such an animal—and to be willing to move heaven and earth to obtain some of the same for his own kennels? The answer, of course, is that he couldn’t.

And when a cadre of uber-wealthy American sportsmen with names like Field, Harriman, Guggenheim, and Carlisle began visiting Great Britain to shoot following the end of the Great War, how could they, witnessing these marvelous dogs at work for the first time, not have the same reaction?

In Part Two, we’ll explore the Lab’s formative years in North America, including the rediscovery of the breed’s prowess in the water and the Gatsbyesque flavor of early retriever field trials. We’ll also trace the evolution of the “American” Lab vis-à-vis its British counterpart, and why the Lab has truly become the gundog of everyman.