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

[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.