Shooting Times & Country Magazine
THE SEEDS OF DISCOMFORT
Grass seeds can easily become lodged in a dog’s ears or paws
As the hay fever season fades away, so the grass-seed season takes over. The first affects me (though not as much as it used to), while the second is a concern for the dogs. All dogs are vulnerable to grass seeds, especially spaniels with hairy ears and hairy feet.
Grass seeds have evolved over millions of years to stick to fur, as it is a great way to ensure that the seeds are dispersed far and wide. Look at certain seeds under a magnifying glass and you will see that they resemble miniature arrowheads, so that they will only go in one direction.
Should one of these seeds lodge in your dog’s ear, or perhaps manage to pierce the edge of a nail, it’s not going to come out easily. It’s a busy season for vets as they remove errant seeds from dogs.
If your dog comes back from a walk and starts pawing its ears, shaking its head or gnawing at its foot, then the chances are that there’s a grass seed somewhere. If it’s not removed, it is likely to result in extreme pain, an abscess or other infection, possibly lameness. Doing nothing and hoping that the seed will disappear seldom works. Vets are well practised at seed removal but difficult cases may require the dog to be sedated.
I have been lucky with seeds. Only once have I had to take a springer to the vet for a seed to be removed (from a paw). To be honest, it was my wife, Jan, who took the dog. I sat in the car outside. Thirty minutes later, the two reappeared with the spaniel lacking her usual bounce and Jan looking pale. It transpired that Jan had fainted when the vet cut into the paw. She’s not usually 9th Earl of Lincoln and 2nd Duke of Newcastle-under-lyme, had a kennel of these spaniels that had been given to him by the French Duc de Noailles.
Curiously, there are no historic records of spaniels of this type in France, so nothing is known about the breed’s history or origins. The first record we have of the breed in England is a picture painted in 1788 by Francis Wheatley, called The Return from Shooting. It shows the Duke seated on his shooting pony, accompanied by three Clumber spaniels.
Though quite clearly Clumbers, these spaniels are a little longer in the leg and muzzle than the modern working Clumber and rather darker in their markings. What the Duke would the fainting type but the vet reassured her that such incidents are not uncommon.
Preventing seeds getting into ears is difficult. My neighbour’s springer, Mabel, now wears ear protectors, having suffered from seeds in her ears. The protectors look funny but I’m assured they are effective. have made of the giant white spaniels that until recently masqueraded as Clumbers would be interesting to learn, but I have no doubt that he would approve of the efforts to restore the Clumber as a proper working spaniel.
I was always led to believe that the word spaniel was derived from the word Spain, the country of origin of these dogs, but did our original spaniels really come from Spain?
Spanish blood
Col Claude Cane, writing more than a century ago in his book The Sporting Spaniel, reckoned that they did, adding that we are probably indebted to Spain for much of the blood in many of our sporting dogs today.
Many later authors have, understandably, expressed the same view but canine historian David Hancock reckons this could be a case of lazy thinking, pointing out in his book, Gundogs: Their Past, Their Performance and Their Prospects, that “there are many references to spaniels being imported into Spain in early times, but not much on their export”.
I’ve been lucky enough to travel throughout Spain and, apart from the odd pet cocker, have rarely seen any dog resembling a spaniel. But if spaniels didn’t come from Spain, where did they come from? It’s a mystery we are unlikely to solve.
considered myself a good partridge man, though my hand-rearing experiences have been limited to a few coops of English partridges, though more of red-legged. I always found the red-legged easier to rear, it being more enterprising, lively and independent. On our downlands we had plenty of ant heaps, and partridge coops were usually sited outside a sunny southern-facing covert and yards out on the pasture rich with ant and other insect life.
extinct on formerly good partridge land. I cannot find any. It is possible to buy ant eggs to feed goldfish, etc. My suggestion is that every game farm in the country sets up an ant breeding establishment, so when cold springs occur one can ring up for a polythene pack of instant ant.”
Overshadowed
I would like to add to the foregoing remarks that, from my own observations, so much undergrowth and rubbish has grown up and spread on the edges of gorse clumps, etc, where ant heaps were once plentiful that this scrub has overshadowed any such heaps and no longer, owing to lack of sunshine, will one see ant eggs lying on the surface.
Exactly how essential ant eggs are may be gauged by the following remarks from my own experience and from experienced partridge keepers at that time when partridges have started alarmingly to decline and the Country Life Committee of Enquiry into the Disease of Partridges was set up during the season 1931 and 1932, the full report of which was edited by Major M Portal and Dr Walter E Collinge. Somewhere about that period I recall the suggestion being made and experimented with, fairly successfully if memory serves, that shredded suet proves an excellent stand-by for lack of ants’ eggs and I remember feeding it to several coops of birds for a trial.
Many the time I have dug up half a sackful and carried it on my back up to the coops, only to get badly bitten for my good turn. The partridge chicks went mad as they hastily pecked up eggs and ants, shaking and scratching their heads as ants ran over them.