Fashion has made the Irish setter a red dog, whereas there used to be many more index dogs of Erin red-and-white than red. Fashion in this case has been the dog show, but if that had been all the result of its influence the author would have been content. It is the Irishmen who are most concerned, and the fact that the Irish setter is the worst colour in the world to see in a Scotch mist can be well understood not to matter in Irish atmosphere and manners of thinking. Between 1870 and 1880 the dog shows had attracted most of the handsomest dogs in Ireland, and many of these were very good workers.

From time to time an Irish setter has been good enough to compete with success at English field trials, and although on occasion such an animal has carried all before it in its stake, neither in England nor America has one of the breed ever won a Champion Stake, so that probably it will be considered fair to say that poor competition has brought the Irish to the front when by chance they have come out first at field trials. The author has seen and shot over many charming red setters, but he has never seen a really great dog of that breed—that is, not a dog in the same class with the pointers Drake and Romp’s Baby.

The best Irish setter the writer ever shot over had the peculiar luck of always finding birds when, by the manners of other dogs, there appeared to be none about. Many a time has a bad day been redeemed by letting off this beautiful red dog, a son of the field trial winner Plunket. To some good judges of dog’s work the field trials appeared to be at the mercy of this setter; but he had a peculiarity often to be found in those of his race—he would only hunt for blood, and consequently out of the shooting season he was as useless as an ill-broken, careless puppy. He would run up birds without appearing to smell them before they rose, or to see them afterwards. Instead of waiting on your every wish, as he did in the shooting season, he took no interest whatever in the proceedings, and you could not cheat him into believing business was meant by the use of blank or any other cartridges. It is easy to defend such a characteristic in individual or race on the ground that it shows their sense. So it does, no doubt, but it also shows that the questing instinct is weak in them, and there are good reasons for preferring it to be very strong. The breaking season is the spring, and a dog that will not hunt for all it is worth then cannot be broken. As a matter of fact, only few Irish setters ever are highly finished. More than half of those that have come to field trials have been unsafe in the abode of a hare. At the same time, those that are taken to spring field trials hunt well enough, but of course these are a very small proportion.

In popular opinion the greatest fault is that the race carry low heads; at the same time, this carriage does not invariably mean bad “noses.” The writer has seen an Irish setter turn a complete somersault over its own nose, which it ran against a stiff furrow of a fallow field; but this one had a good nose, although not the very best. The author was judging one year at the National Field Trials with Mr. George Davies, of Retriever fame, when Colonel Cotes’ fast and good pointer Carl was sent off against an Irish setter belonging to Mr. Cheetham. The latter never lifted his nose in hunting or in drawing to game more than would miss the buttercups, but nevertheless, from behind, he again and again found partridges that the other dog, much nearer, had failed to detect. Carl was very fast and the Irish setter very slow, but the former was beaten pointless.

There is a fiction that Irish setters are faster than other dogs, but this is not the case. It is much more usual to see them out-paced, as in the above-named instance. It may be that they generally have so merry a stern action that they look to be bustling, when in fact their actual getting over the ground is not fast. Their low noses cause them to take very narrow parallels when they are careful, so that if they are judged by the ground they actually cover or beat they are usually of less capacity than their only moderate speed suggests. They ought to last well at the pace they go, but although stamina is said to be another of their strong points over English setters, the author has known many of the latter breed that could do more work than any Irish setter he has seen. These have included some of the best Irish setter winners at field trials. But years ago there were Irish dogs that could go a good pace and stay well. They were bigger dogs than those which win at shows now, and looked more like workmen. It is to be feared that breeding for show points has evolved a bustling and busy rather than a business-like race. They are now smaller, shorter, especially in the quarters, and more upright in the shoulder, than the best of the old sort. There is not now anything at all like Palmerston and Kate, winners at Birmingham about the same time. The last-named was probably as well made and as setter-like as any dog could be, and to compare the present show setters with her is like comparing a polo pony with a Derby winner. At the spring field trials of 1906 only one Irish setter was entered, and that one was far from being even moderate in its work.

There may be dogs of the old type hidden away in Ireland, and if so they are much more worthy of attention than those which for so long have been bred for show points. The best Irish setters the author has seen for the last ten years are those of Mr. Cheetham. This gentleman kept them for grouse shooting in the Lews, and as his shooting was late in the year, when the heat had departed, they were admirably suited for the purpose.

The opinions given are of course based upon comparisons of the breed with the very best of other races of setters and pointers. There is one point, however, in which the Irish setters seem to be the inferiors of all others—namely, the large proportion of inferior animals bred, compared with the small number up to a fair English setter working standard. This remark has reference to the natural ability, and not at all to the difficulty of breaking the breed. The latter charge against them is true also, but only because their excitement is greater than their love of questing. Mostly they would rather chase a hare than point a bird. It has been said of them that they want breaking afresh every year, but that has not been the experience of the author, who has invariably found that a thoroughly broken dog is broken for life, of whatever breed it may happen to be.

Irish breaking, however, has not always been very thorough.

It has sometimes been said of the old dogs of Ireland that they required half a day’s work before they were steady. In that case, they would require similar renewal of breaking every day, and the author has made the observation that such dogs are too wild all the morning and too tired all the afternoon to be a pleasure to shoot over.

But they are not all hard to break; some of those which are not too excitable are very collie-like in their intuition of your wishes and their anxiety to obey them.

It is noteworthy that the Irish have always held their field trials in the autumn.

An old writer says that the English claim theirs as the true English spaniel, whereas the Irish claim theirs to be the real true English spaniel. This is not very informative. The dogs alluded to were of course both setters, but of what colour we are not told in respect of the Irish dog.

The author shot over the celebrated field trial winner Plunket for several seasons and ran him at field trials, but after he had turned two years he was little use in the spring, whereas he won well in the autumn, when game was shot to his points. In this he was similar to a much better dog, his own son, already referred to. Plunket was a fast dog, and his boldness and beauty in going up to game was quite remarkable, as he would draw up to birds at racing speed, as if he meant catching them, but stopped suddenly and in time. Then, when they ran away from his point, the moment he was ordered to draw on he would again dash forward, and again locate his game with equally sudden points. But the majority of good English setters at that time could out-stay him, and particularly the Laverack setters Countess and Nellie, with which he often worked, could have killed him. Mr. O’Callaghan’s setters were rarely good enough to go to field trials, and although two of them won there, they were very lucky to do so. Perhaps these dogs deteriorated less than any other breed that were bred for show, or perhaps it would be safer to say they declined in work slower than others, but there is no doubt that they were on the down grade, not only in work but in true setter appearance. That they were as pretty as any dogs could be at one time is freely admitted, but they had lost three-parts of the scope of Palmerston and Kate, and their character of work was spaniel-like rather than setter-like—in fact, just what their looks led one to expect they would prove to be.

Unfortunately, the author has never seen the Irish field trials: the reason is that the English pointers have usually proved better than the Irish setters, so that there seemed to be nothing novel to see by going. But it is very difficult to believe that the show Irish setters that usually represent the breed at English trials are the best workers of the race. The character of the breed when the author first saw it at work in the sixties was distinctly setter-like, and not spaniel-like.

There has been a great deal of controversy upon how the dark-red colour arose. Mr. John King, who knew more of Irish setters than any other man known to the author, affirmed that red-and-white was the original colour, and the general opinion was that those of the last-named markings were the most easy to break. All the most setter-like Irish that have come before the author have had more or less white upon them, and as colour certainly denotes blood or origin, and the manner of hunting of the whole-red dogs is spaniel-like, it does not seem to be unlikely that the springer spaniel, the colour of a blood bay horse without a white hair spoken of by a Suffolk parson in the middle of the eighteenth century, may have had a good deal to do with the origin of the red Irish setter. At any rate, no other setters or spaniels of the colour can be traced in the early history of what was then the English spaniel, or the setter.

The same writer says that the English spaniels (setters) were of two colours, “black-and-tan” and “red-and-white,” so that there is another possible origin of the whole-coloured red dogs. Black-and-tan setters often produced a red dog, but not the Irish dark rich red. This red puppy in the litter might have arisen from an Irish cross, but, on the other hand, it might have been a blend with the lemon-and-white coloured English setters, or the result of puppies following the markings of one ancestor and the colour of another. Those that the author bred from black-and-tan parents had no dark hairs to suggest their origin, but neither had they the rich chestnut of the Irish setter. The writer’s experience of breeding dogs inclines him to the belief that the spaniel-like tendency of the breed, now that it is selected for all-red colour, is proof not only of its spaniel but probably of a springer origin. Their excitement, their merry low-carried sterns, and their noses on the ground, speak like an open book to one who has bred and watched the breeding of all races of setters for forty years, and has assured himself that selection for colour is the automatic selection of character usually found with that colour.

The late Mr. Laverack was of opinion that crossing his black-and-whites with the lemon-and-whites of the same litter was in fact equivalent to cross breeding. However, he lived to introduce red dogs in his breed, so that the former kind of crossing does not do everything. There is no doubt that size and fertility suffer by this method, but however often the incestuous breeding is repeated such a thing as a blend of the two colours was almost unknown—that is to say, when a liver-and-white one did, very rarely, make its appearance, Mr. Laverack himself traced it to a former cross with the Edmund Castle breed of liver-and-white setters. There was always a difference other than colour between the lemon-and-white and the black-and-white brothers and sisters—a difference which suggested two distinct sources of origin of not at all related breeds. Consequently, if the red-and-white has not been entirely eliminated from the Irish setter, and if they sometimes do revert, the author would expect the reversions to be more setter-like and less spaniel-like than the present show Irish setters, and to be more like Dr. Stone’s Dash and the Kate and Palmerston already mentioned.

Since writing the above, the author remembers that on one occasion he bred from an Irish dog and a black-and-tan bitch, with the result that the puppies were liver-coloured. Yet when two black-and-tans were bred together thirty-five years ago, there were usually a couple of red puppies in the litter showing neither liver, black, or black tinge, or even dark-red colours. This does not support the theory of a black-and-tan origin of the whole colour.

The collie-like sense of the Irish setter has been referred to, and a case of the kind may be of interest. In 1873 the author was shooting along the shores of a loch in Inverness-shire, hunting a brace of setters, one of which was a red Irish puppy. A grouse was killed that fell out into the lake, there about a mile wide and several miles long. The dogs dropped to shot, and there lay while the party waited to make sure that the wind would not bring in the grouse, for we had no retriever or any setter that had ever retrieved. It became evident at the end of a few minutes that the grouse was slowly drifting away, and the order was given to continue the beat, leaving the bird to its fate. But the young red setter was no sooner on its legs than it darted straight to the lake, jumped in, swam to the grouse, brought it to land and there dropped it, shook itself, and started to hunt for more live birds.

That was the first and also the last bird it ever retrieved, although it was constantly encouraged to make further attempts. Of course this looks like reason, but that is questionable. At any rate, it was startlingly smart, and about as unexpected a canine performance as could be conceived.

Another of the breed was so smart in finding wounded game that he ended as a retriever in Yorkshire grouse driving, and was said to be better than several retrievers, although he never lifted a bird, but merely put a foot on the grouse and waited to be relieved, when he would go quickly and straight to the next wounded bird, and so on until all were found.

It is probable that even wild grouse do not often fly from a dog unless they associate him with the presence of man. When using a parti-coloured team of black-white-and-tan setters with some lemon-and-white dogs, the author has noticed that wild grouse soon got to expect the man when they saw the dogs, and he has found that by using a red dog then, the birds behave differently, probably mistaking the Irish setter for a Scotch fox. At any rate, when they ought to have been very wild according to locality and season, grouse have been noticed to treat a red dog with a certain amount of resentment and walk away from him, flicking their tails as they move, plainly expecting the rush, and unwilling to fly before it came. What they obviously did not expect was that there was a man with a gun.