So this week’s rabbit hole took me all the way across the Atlantic to a “vast stone pile with castellated wings” about a 1 mile north east of Fochabers near the river Spey. I was drawn down the hole by Nathanial Parker Willis, a famous American writer and close friend of Edgar Allen Poe. In 1827 Willis travelled to London, hung out with Charles Dickens, then travelled to Scotland to visit a famous Duke who just happened to love dogs. Among the Duke’s dogs were greyhounds, bloodhounds and a specific string of black and tan setters that would become famous around the world when they were named after the Duke and his Castle. Today, we call those dogs and others related to them Gordon Setters.
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Pour commencer, la mauvaise nouvelle : il y a une tempête à l'horizon et nous ne sommes pas suffisamment prêts pour l’affronter. Et la bonne nouvelle? : Nous avons déjà traversé une tempête similaire et non seulement y avons-nous survécu, mais cette tempête a donné naissance à nos chiens d'arrêt modernes.
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I've been leading a lead-free hunting life for a couple of years now using only bismuth in my Darnes, steel shot in my duck guns and copper in my 30-06. But I am still struggling to go plastic free. You see, every time I pull the trigger on my shotgun I send a plastic wad into the environment where it can remains for centuries. And that fact really hit home last fall when my nephew and I decided to hunt a well-known spot in the Delta Marsh here in Manitoba.
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In Home and Away Part One I described some of the rabbit holes I’ve gone down while looking into the history of British and Irish pointing breeds. In this post, I’d like to share a few articles I’ve discovered about field trials in Manitoba, a nearly-forgotten chapter in my home province’s rich history.
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Trust me, once you start digging into the history of British and Irish pointing breeds it’s easy to get drawn into one fascinating rabbit hole after another. So instead actually putting words to paper, I end up spending way too much time looking into things on things only vaguely related to what I should be concentrating on. Last week for example, I spent an entire day watching Youtube videos about how Illuminated manuscripts are made. Sometimes though, going down a rabbit hole can actually pay off. In fact, two different subjects I’ve been researching — the history of North American field trials and the evolution of the English Setter’s coat and conformation — lead me somewhere unexpected. My hometown.
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No one can imagine what a Field Trial is like until they have seen one, and followed the dogs from early morn until the last order of "take your dogs up, gentlemen" is given.
While researching and writing about the advent of field trials in the UK and America, I came across the following report from a field trial held in Tennessee at the Belle Meade Plantation in 1877. It offers fascinating view of an era in which American sportsmen were struggling to figure out just how to adapt field trials to their own native terrain, game and hunting styles.
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