Heyer question

[truepenny]

I'm rereading The Reluctant Widow and am wondering: does anyone have a good photo-reference for Bouncer? I know roughly what a Mastiff looks like, and by lurcher, I imagine Heyer most probably means a Greyhound-Collie cross, but I'm having a rather difficult time imagining how the three would go together. Aside from the part where Bouncer is clearly a Very Large Dog.

Since it seems unlikely that anyone out there actually has a Greyhound/Collie/Mastiff cross and has put pictures of same on the internet (although this is the internet and one never knows), speculation is also welcome!

Comments

[karenmiller.livejournal.com]

A lurcher is a cross between a greyhound and an Irish wolfhound, which is what gives them the sparsely shaggy coat. They are, or were, used primarily for hare coursing.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Not in the UK. A lurcher is a first or second generation cross between a sight hound of any kind and a sheepdog. I am told the ideal mix is three-quarters sight-hound and one quarter sheepdog.

Irish Wolfhounds are sight hounds and can be (but are very rarely) used for breeding lurchers. They are lazy beasts and would not make a good poacher's dog, which is what the lurcher actually was bred for. The collie was added for brains, with which sighthounds are not heavily endowed.

[karenmiller.livejournal.com]

Well, the lurcher I lived with in Buckingham was a greyhound/Irish wolfhound cross, so I guess mileage varies.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Yes, it may well have been, though a Deerhound cross would have been more usual than a Wolfhound and a Greyhound or Whippet cross more usual than either - I've also see Lurchers who were Saluki crosses. A lurcher isn't a breed (even a non-pedigree breed like the Working Sheepdog) or even a standard cross like a Labradoodle - it is the name given to a type of dog that is an intermixture of sighthound and herding dog. A cross between two sighthounds (say a Greyhound and an Irish Wolfhound) is not a lurcher but a "longdog".

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I only know what the internet tells me, but I've seen a couple of sources claim that the Wolfhound was the original cross for a lurcher. And wikipedia claims that a lurcher is any sighthound+non-sighthound cross, which seems to square with the usage I'm seeing at UK dog adoption sites, so I wonder if the usage may be a bit looser, depending.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Nowadays, when lurchers have become fashionable, any sighhound cross is sold as a lurcher. I seriously doubt that Heyer thought about lurchers in that way.

However, in my youth (and that is 50 years ago), lurchers were travellers' dogs, and associated with poachers poaching. They were bred for brains and trainability, hence the collie/sheepdog incross - and that is where the rough coat comes from. Another reason - Irish Wolfhounds were very rare dogs until recently, and they are still reasonably uncommon. This is not true of greyhounds, whippets or working sheepdogs, the animals usually used. I did a lot of reading about British country practices in those days, as well as watching Jack Hargreaves, who knew all there was to know about such things.

Incidentally, Robin McKinley, who has longdogs, gets very, very cross indeed if they are referred to as lurchers.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Try this
http://www.lurchers.org.uk/brief%20history%20part%20one.htm

this

http://members.tripod.com/M_F_A/lurcher.htm

and this

http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/lurcher.htm