Understanding the Scottish Deerhound Standard
Courtesy of Sighthound Review Vol. 3 Issue 1, Spring 2012 pp. 140-143 www.sighthoundreview.com and Sight and Scent October 2013 pp. 126, 129-132. www.sightandscentmagazine.com
TheTitan • Peogh & Glen. Crealock 1873
Preface
T
he preface to the Scottish Deerhound Club of America breed standard and the Australian National Kennel Coun- cil breed standard reminds the fancy (if you look hard) of the historic function of the Deerhound. Brief mention is made of “coping with large Scottish deer (often weighing 250 pounds)” and much is made of the mythology of the “Royal dogs” owned by earls and noble lords*. More on function would have been helpful in interpreting the Standard, in particular helping to grade the severity of “faults”, “undesirables” and other deviations noted in the standard by assisting the reader in understanding to what extent the deviation affects the original purpose of the breed. Two key elements are instrumental in understanding Deerhound conformation: (a) its quarry, the Red deer (Cervus elaphus (scoticus)) and (b) the terrain over which this breed coursed. Red deer are smaller than an elk, but larger than a white-tailed deer. The Scottish Red deer, smaller than the Western European Red deer thanks to the inhospitable windswept hills of its habitat, weighed 225 to 300 pounds with a shoulder height of about 40 to 47 inches. The terrain is extraordinarily rough: peat bogs, stony hills covered with coarse heather, rocky crags and rushing burns. Watching Deerhounds work in their home terrain illuminates how this breed needs to be constructed and the Standard is the breed experts’ attempt to describe this.
* Fortunately the revised AKC The Complete Dog Book has a new introduction to the standard correcting this historically inaccurate romanticism encouraged by that great Deerhound fancier Sir Walter Scott. tish Deerhound have an interesting and rather chequered history. Early in the 1800s Archibald MacNeill of Colon- say revived the sport of coursing Red deer with the “High- land deer-hound” or “rough Scotch greyhound” on the islands of Colonsay and Jura. He describes a day of deer coursing (August 11, 1835) on the Island of Jura that saw six T hose few paragraphs adopted as the Scottish Deerhound breed Standard in 1935 by the AKC and subsequently immortalised by the show fancy as the “ideal” Scot-
sportsmen, a piper and a deer-stalker watch two deerhounds, Buskar and Bran take down a 308 pound stag that was 3 ft 11 ¼ inches at the shoulder. Buskar, his “best in field” dog, was painted by Sir Edwin Landseer, carefully measured and an ac- count of this event was published in William Scrope’s TheArt of Deerstalking (1838). There was no Sight and Scent Hound Magazine or Sighthound Review in those days! This descrip- tion became an important benchmark in understanding the working Deerhound.
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