Printed with permission

Long ago and far away the dog writers of America started beating the drums for the "grey ghost", the marvellous German all purpose hunting dog that could do everything. It was interesting reading in the late 50s and early 60s but gradually the hype faded as more interesting new dog types came to the fore. The Weimaraner became popular, not because of interest in the dog but because of the sporting dog writers. Everyone was advertising in the magazines, Weimaraner pups, the German wonder dogs and so on. When I first began to encounter these "marvellous" animals they were primarily show/house pet breedings that had been several generations removed from breeding for hunting.

These mutts were skinny, small boned, hare footed dogs that had a universal temperament problem. In the early years of versatile dog testing in the US you could always tell a Weimaraner... when the owner said "fetch" you could hear the bird's bones cracking from fifty meters. Weims were then the classic retrievers with bird guts dangling from both sides of their mouth. After encountering a hundred or so of these dogs I had a pretty firm opinion of what a Weimaraner was, and wasn't, and it certainly wasn't anything like what I had read in Outdoor Life or Field & Stream a few years before.

Then one day at a test I encountered a truly strange dog that looked nothing like an American Weimaraner, it searched, pointed, retrieved without crunching... it was robust and sturdy and it was the first real Weimaraner I had ever encountered. The owner was a young serviceman who had returned from Germany where he had bought the dog... Only then did I understand what the original Weimaraner fanciers had told the dog writers. Of course the dog writers became rapidly familiar with their creations, the American popular Weim... and they stopped extolling them. Interestingly the original writers knew nothing about the dogs but made them popular by second hand writing after conversations with people who knew of the original dogs.

There has been slow but irregular progress with Weimaraners, and with Vizsla for that matter, in returning them to the virtues that brought them to the US in the first place. The progress hasn't been made by dog writers but by a few dedicated individuals who realized exactly what they were missing and started working to recover it. The writers created the popularity and then ignorance took over in the breeding of both Weims and Vizsla in America...

Unfortunately for everyone concerned the American dog writers looked at these locally produced mutts and didn't recognize what they were seeing... plain crap. They kept on writing about the dogs that they had read about in their own magazines but were so ignorant of dogs that they couldn't tell the difference between their word visions and the actual domestic garbage that they were promoting.

These same writers used their gross ignorance on dozens of other versatile breeds and popularized them with half truths and simple ignorance. When the Germans said they wanted their dogs to hunt to the gun (cooperative with the gunner) the American dog writers literally translated that as close-working. This ignorance was widely propagandized in the popular dog literature of the 60s and 70s and the "continentals" were reputed to be close working underfoot gun dogs by writers who had never hunted with, or even seen, good working examples of the breeds that they described. With writing came popularity and Americans started breeding versatiles in bulk.. these weren't hunting people. they were dog venders, and the close working fable became true as the breeders took advantage of the hype and produced timid garbage sold to the ignorant for inflated prices.

When we started with NAVHDA we knew what versatiles were about because we were all hunters and real versatile dog enthusiasts. When we started running into the versatiles bred in America and those from more closely held European imported lines we discovered that there were two of each breed, the original working gun dogs and the far more numerous garbage produced in bulk by the American breeders-for-bucks.

Two things happened on the way to now, the Americans began to realize that we were looking at two or more different kinds of dogs with the same name.. and NAVHDA, the organized promoters of versatility, found that they couldn't handle the diversity of these real gun dogs and so they assumed, for ease of judgment, that all the versatiles operated to the same standard. And indeed NAVHDA started producing standard models for each of these quite unique and interesting breeds.

Writers who didn't know anything about dogs started it. More writers who were ignorant of history and reality kept popularizing versatiles. An organization believed what the writers said and started building the new American versatiles from the old, and very confusingly different, imports. Now for each of the versatile breeds we have three, or in some cases four or five, different kinds of versatiles... original, show, pet, American hunting and field trial varieties.

I gave up reading dog writers twenty years ago, about a decade after I stopped reading fishing writers who also wrote extensively from ignorance.

Writing is a discipline, knowledge is a discipline, these two can be practiced with complete independence. It is understandable, in America it was once mandatory to know what you taught before they would let you teach.

Then it became more acceptable to know how to teach than to know about the subjects taught and the American educational system was born. American writers follow in the same school of thought, how to write is more important than what to write. We live in an age of instant information, what we don't realize is that much of the available information in some areas isn't reality but fantasy. Check out the doggie knitting circles on the internet.. are these people living in the real world? How would they recognize the real world if it retrieved a dead bird and gave it to them?

Ignorance is easy for the amateur and the social climber but a disaster in a writer, our problem is that the ignorant don't know they are ignorant and keep writing about it... Take a walk through any popular book store... there are as many dog training books as there are diet books and they share a common characteristic, they are all research/writing projects cribbed from others who wrote with equal ignorance and fervour. The writers are to blame for many, if not most, popular idiocies and it is sad that we want our information condensed and force fed to us by a system that ignores ignorance and concentrates on things apparently impressive.

Return to Main Page