Versatile dogs: 'Hogging all the game
by Michael Globetti

A few years back I made a French connection for importing one of the Spinone Italiano’s cousins, the griffon Nivernais. In appearance, this chien de chasse is the spitting image of the Spinone, similar in size though often carrying a coat wolf-grey in color. The Nivernais also differs in that it is not a pointing dog but a hound, and a big-game hound at that, battling the wild boars of the French countryside.

Though I’d visualized laying waste the local fox population as a public service and forays into the West Virginia hills for country ham on the hoof, I was inevitably waylaid by French bureaucracy and parochialism (as in keeping their own breed on their own terre). No Nivernais has yet made its bon voyage to America--except in the paintings of the great animal artist, Rosa Bonheur. But when it comes to hunting if not big game, then certainly fur, I’ve learned that the Spinone does its own double-duty. This has been graphically underscored by mounting anthropological evidence left at my backdoor by Panettone, my six-year-old Spinone.

This "season" --as in growing season-- she’s dispatched six groundhogs and two possums (not to mention rabbits and RIPing a couple of feline interlopers). All this happened within a fenced 60 x 70 foot suburban back yard. A typical yard, really, though it could be considered "salted" for Pane’s pursuit, what with five rows of sweet corn among the dahlias, blueberry bushes, peach and pear trees.

Unlike the French griffon, Pane doesn’t immediately pounce and dispatch. She’s a pointing dog, after all, and a (usually) steady one. Once, in a mock NAVHDA utility test, the judges were ready to mark her for a false point when one of them whispered to the others, "Walk away from that tree very slowly, or you may find yourself wearing a Dan’l Boone hat made of a live marten." Not a ferocious pine marten, as it turned out, but a young groundhog that had taken flight in a cedar bough--where Pane pointed it from 10 feet below.

As there’s a scarcity of wild birds here in Delaware--bobwhite quail now gone as did pheasants years ago, far from ruffed grouse range, and duck-hunting leases likely to exact a pledge of a first- and second-born--it’s a good thing that she’s made her own game of fur. It was either that or, in our circumstances, become a game-playing (as in hunt tests) birddog.

Maybe those tests ought to be rejiggered for four-legged game, because it seems to me that a versatile hunting dog’s enthusiasm for fur may be fired even beyond what it has for finding birds. A friend whose German shorthair earned a NAVHDA versatile champion title last year raises hundreds of quail, chukkar and pigeons--that is, when his flight pens withstand Delaware’s infestation of foxes--and estimates that between all the birds planted for her and time away from his job as a stone mason for training his dog, it cost him upwards of $25,000 to get her VC title. But now, for all that, he’s got to admit that birds, at least pen-raised birds, are secondary to fur for her. When she and Pane are braced and get out of our sight, my friend and I have a commiserative shrug after coming upon them backing each other over a ground hog hole. Then we’re reminded that a versatile dog is only living up to its name.

Citation:
Globetti, Michael. "Versatile Dogs: Hogging All the Game." Heartbeats, vol. 5, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2001/2002, pp 1, 3.

Other articles by Michael:
Globetti, Michael. "A Citified Spinone." Heartbeats, vol. 3, no. 1, Summer 1997, pp 1-2.

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