Full Cry Column
November 2001

Clint Stubbe (Northern Working Airedale Terrier Association correspondent)

 Kevin apologizes for missing last month but family matters took precedence over writing the column.

 As I write this I am sitting in a sunny opening on a beautiful fall morning in a pine forest a good drive and a decent hike from the nearest human habitation.  I’ve taken this moment to pencil some thoughts into my field book while my partner and I take a short break from work and grab a bite from a sandwich and a drink of water collected from a clear mountain stream on the hike in.  The only sounds that reach us here are the breeze in the trees, the buzz of insects and the calls of birds and squirrels as they go about their daily business and Lulu’s rustling in the underbrush as she searches for something to scare up.  It is particularly quiet and peaceful this morning because the stillness of nature is unbroken by even the sound of an airplane passing overhead.  They have all been grounded.  Far from here insanity reigns and human nature has run amok.  Airplanes loaded with innocent people have been used as weapons to be crashed into buildings and the earth.  I dread returning to the hotel room at the end of the day where the television will reveal the stark details of chaos and the accompanying death tolls.  Where this will end I don’t know but surely nothing good can come from such an act. 

Talking of dogs at such a time seems trivial to say the least but hopefully by the time this reaches print some measure of relief that time brings will have been gained.

I'll start this column off with a letter I received from Odon Corr of Wessington Springs South Dakota the other day.

"I hope everything is going well in Western Canada.  We are in a dry spell here in South Dakota.  Been too hot to do much with the Airedales.  I did take a few coon out of a neighbours sweet corn field for a few nights.  Nell is getting a little on the heavy side, so the runs were good for her.

I recently got the Sept. issue of "Full Cry" magazine.  I had to do a double take when I saw the pictures of some slick coated Airedales.  In my 37 years of hunting and raising Airedales I have never seen anything like this in any of my dogs or anyone else's for that matter.  If something like the dogs in the picture (heaven forbid) ever turned up in my line they would go under the knife, spay or neuter.  I feel if someone wants to produce a line of dogs just so their coats don't pick up burrs or ice balls please don't bastardize the beautiful Airedale.  I raise dogs for hunting, size and temperament.  Coat would be the last but they better sure look like Airedales if they want to live on this ranch and pass on their genes.  I hear about the old line Airedales.  I've been around Airedales for many years and can't recall ever seeing a slick coated Airedale.  Some of the early pictures of the tens and twenties showed a somewhat harder, tighter coat but nothing like the slick dogs.  Many of the Terrier breeds are of the wire coat and for a good reason.  They are a contact breed and that hair on the face legs and even under belly has saved many from being ripped open.  I have had some outstanding Airedales over the years.  One of their common methods when working alone is to get right down on their prey.  Bobcat and even coyote would have opened them up if it had not been for the dense covering.  Just wanted to let the readers know there is still a great hunting strain of Airedales out there and they are not slicks."

Nell & Buster (deceased) owned by Odon Corr of South Dakota

Thanks for the letter Odon I appreciate your thoughts and the time you took to send a note along.  I'll tell you when I read Odon's letter I got a good chuckle.  Not because I don't respect his opinion but because I sent a very similar letter to Henry a couple of years back.  It was about that time he gave me the nickname "The cold wind from the North".   I shared Odon's misgivings and let Henry know my thoughts on more then one occasion.  Well that was then and this is now.  A slick coated Airedale is a little too severe a look for me personally but if I lived in the very Southern States I think it might suit me just fine and I begrudge no one if that is their preference.  I live where the climate is much harsher and aesthetically and practically am looking for a certain type of coat.  One that will say “Airedale” but a coat that works for me and more importantly for the dog. 

Odon said coat would be the last thing he would consider but I would guess it would rank higher based on his reaction and that of other people myself included.  It takes awhile if you are used to a typical Airedale look but once you get past to seeing the dog and not his hair you can see that these slick Airedales are good looking practical dogs.  Personally I think it is a step in the right direction just a step too far but it is a big world and there is plenty of room for Airedales of all kinds from the softest hairballs to the slickest.  If you are happy with something and it is working for you stick with it, if you see the need for change or improvement in some area then work towards that end.    I envy hound breeders because coat, except for colour is not even a consideration but for Airedalers it can be an issue.  So what is important in a hunting dog?  Brains, drive, nose, feet, speed, stamina.  The list could be longer but that is enough to ponder.  Coat surely fits in there somewhere but where I guess depends on personal preference as much as anything.  The nice thing is that there are choices.  I’ve owned enough hounds to know that they do suffer more then an Airedale in the winter when it gets bitter but by the same token they are more comfortable in the heat of the summer so I have chosen the middle ground in terms of coat.  I have kept back two pups from Lulu’s last litter.  “Grizz” will have a nice hard, what Henry Johnson would call a third quadrant type coat and “Red” will definitely be a redline type.  I hope he develops enough coat to please me but if he doesn’t that’s okay because handsome is as handsome does and I will keep one or both depending on how they turn out regardless of what kind of coat they have.

Odon asked about the term Redline so I wrote to Henry Johnson who coined the term and asked him to elaborate.

“You ask about the origins of the term "Redline Airedale."  I started using "redline" probably about 8 or 9 years ago as a descriptive term for Airedales with distinctive relatively short, hard coats; sparse to very sparse beards and leg furnishings; dark colored saddles; and deep reddish colored heads and under parts.  The first one of these that caught my attention was Stuart Mauney's Digger (The Iowa Digger Dog, RB187777).  Lawrence Alexander bred his Sunny (Southern Aire Summer Morning, pure show stock from David Noe) to Digger and got Minne.  Stuart bred Digger to a bitch called Copperhill's Cycadia Song and gave a female pup to Lawrence and he named her Hilltop's Baby Doll.  In time Lawrence bred his Alexander Burtwell to Baby Doll and got Hilltop's Boss Man.  Boss Man was bred to Minne and produced Cajun (who is now with Matt Thom in Flagstaff, Arizona).  All these dogs were the distinctive redline type.  I was impressed with how strong the redline genes were, almost prepotent.  This suggested to me a very focused gene pool.  You might think strong inbreeding.  I got a five generation pedigree on Digger and was surprised.  I couldn't see any evidence of inbreeding.  In fact he was an outcross product of a long line of country dogs on the dam side and an almost unbroken line of show champions going back to England on the sire side.  It is not uncommon for show people and some veterinarians (who usually don't know much about Airedales) to say that the redline type Airedale is not purebred and must have resulted from some kind of hound cross.  That doesn't hold up at all.  There is no evidence of hound anywhere in their physical appearance, their teeth, or their temperaments.  At least not any more than there is in any Airedale.  They were all crossbred dogs in the beginning and all of them have some hound in them as well as bull terrier, sheep dog, and bird dog, and who knows what.  Also there is no oral or written record or tradition of any kind to indicate any outcross breeding to a hound or any other breed to produce the redline type Airedale.  And humans being humans, there would definitely be bragging or finger pointing if such a thing had occurred.

Looking at prints and photographs of the early Airedale show champions in England from a few years before and around 1900 you will see dogs that obvously are very short coated and have minimal beards and leg furnishings, some of them being quite slick coated.  I can come to no other conclusion but that the "redline" type we have today represents a throwback to an early version of the Airedale, before the influence of the conformation show ring became dominant.  I can't remember the source, but in one of my Full Cry columns several years back I quoted a past president of the Airedale Terrier Club of Canada who commented that the short coated Airedale was the rule until longer, softer coats began to come into show dogs shortly after 1900.  He was wondering how that had happened and speculated on some possible cross breeding to some longer, softer coated dog, possibly some sheep dog type.  I really don't think any outcross was necessary.  There was already sheepdog in them and all you have to do is select your breeding stock to emphasize whatever traits and physical characteristics you want and over a few generations you will change the breed.  The show people and  professional groomers and handlers much prefer the longer softer coats because they can then groom them to hide flaws and can starch and dye them to produce the colors and effects they want, even though it is illegal to doctor the dogs up this way.  One thing about this cosmetic doctoring up of the dogs that is common in the show world is that these cosmetic changes do not breed true.  You breed to what you think is the perfect Airedale because he is a big show winner and when you see the pups you wonder if some dumpster dog didn't jump the fence and get to the bitch behind your back.

Take a look at the "redline" coat a minute.  Here's what the Airedale Standard says about coats:  "Should be hard, dense and wiry, lying straight and close, covering the dog well over the body and legs.  Some of the hardest are crinkling or just slightly waved.  At the base of the hard very stiff hair should be a shorter growth of softer hair termed the undercoat." That's all it says.  Not a word about long flowing beards and pillow-like fluffed-out leg furnishings.  In my mind there is no question about it.  The "redline" type Airedale has a coat much closer to the Airedale Standard than the modern show line dog does.  Sure, some show line dogs have excellent coats.  But a lot of what looks like a good coat on the modern show dog is just the product of cosmetic doctoring and if you breed to that dog there is a good chance you will not get a good natural Airedale coat.

How short or long can the "redline" coat be?  Well, you will see types like Cajun or my Old Jack or Eddy Boatwright's Country Slicker that are slick coated on the head and have almost no beard or leg furnishings at all, but even those so-called slick coated ones have good harsh coats of an inch or an inch and a half long over most of the rest of the body.  They are not really slick coated all over, just on the heads and maybe on the forelegs.  And then you will see quite a few "redline" type Airedales that have somewhat longer coats and relatively short but fairly decent beards and leg furnishings.  There is a gradation here from the so-called slick types back through a much more coated dog.

As I said, it is fairly common for show people to reject the "redline" type Airedale and say they are not pure specimens.  Pure bred or not, they don't want them in the show ring and such specimens will not win in conformation against the dogs with long fluffy beards and leg furnishings.  Hunters on the other hand see it quite the opposite and as a general rule prefer the shorter coated dog because they have low maintenance, self-keeping coats that do not mat up with burrs and weed seeds or ice or ball up with packing snow.  At first I thought maybe the "redline" type Airedale was coming just from a very restricted line, mainly from Digger and his descendents.  But over time I have seen the same type produced from several other lines, and Barbara Burns tells me it was not uncommon to have such short haired reddish colored

pups appear in Airedale litters in the Northeast twenty or thirty years or more ago and that the show people would cull them or sell them without papers because they wanted more beards and leg furnishings.

All this indicates to me that the "redline" type Airedale is not due to any cross breeding but is a throwback to some of the early dogs and that the "redline" characteristics are still there, hidden in the gene pool, in most if not all of the modern Airedales.  When "redline" pups appear, if you selectively keep and line breed them you will eventually begin to get litters with a high percentage of "redline" types.  Matt Thom in Flagstaff, Arizona, is the foremost "redline" Airedale breeder I know these days, and Eddie Boatwright of Collinwood, Tennessee, may be a close second.

Now you also asked me about this quadrant system I sometimes speak of.  That hasn't been used much and may not be very useful.  I just laid out a straight line across the page in front of me and put the modern, long coated show line type Airedale at the left end of the line (left being socially progressive, liberal, and politically correct) and the extreme, shorter coated "redline" type Airedale at the right end of the line (right being conservative).  I then drew lines from the two end points down to a central point to make an inverted pyramid and put old Airedale Jerry at that point (they all come from him, you know).  Then I divided the horizontal line into four equal parts and connected the dividing points to the center point at the bottom.  That gave me four quadrants, with the modern, longer coated dog being in the 1st quadrant and the classic "redline" type Airedale being in the 4th quadrant.  There are all possible variations between the two extremes.  I don't use this classification much and don't really know how practical it is, but my own breeding goal was and is the third quadrant dog.  By the way, I also used to say that the modern show line dog of the 1^st quadrant type has been "much improved" over old Airedale Jerry, whereas the 4th quadrant dog is the same conservative, old "unimproved" type that Airedale Jerry was.  Some people say that the "redline" type dog has more natural hunting drive than the 1st and 2nd quadrant Airedales do.  I can't prove it myself but am inclined to believe that is true more often than not.  I see on the message boards that Al Kranbuhl ("Airedale from New York") thinks that is the case, and I know Al has had a lifetime of experience with English Hounds and hunting Airedales.  However, there is no doubt plenty of room for controversy there.

Grip

Hope this answers your questions.  It's about all I can contribute on the subject.  Somebody else will have to take it further if you want to continue the discussion or investigation into what the "redline" type Airedale represents.  Whatever they are and wherever they came from I can tell you they are damn good dogs.”

Thanks Henry.  I have to agree

I talked to Gary Strader recently and he is looking for a home for his Henryetta (Grit/Fergie) preferably to an area that is porcupine free.

He wrote

“I don't know if you heard or not but I took over the government predator control job for Richland, McCone and Dawson Counties here in Montana so I've been plenty enough busy.

If you know of anyone looking for a real good coyote dog, I'm selling

Henryetta. She is a real good dog but she can't leave the porcupines alone, the last episode cost me $190.00 and that was the 8th time and the last time. If you know anyone looking for a good dog in a non-porcupine occupied area let me know.

I used a shock collar on her and it did no good. I caught porcupines in traps and let her out of the truck and when she got to the porcupine I'd zap her full strength and it would lift her right of the ground and she would run right back to the truck, I did this 3 times. I thought she was cured.  The other night a porcupine wanders into the yard and she tears right into it. The vet says there is no curing them once they develop such a hatred that they just want revenge so bad that they don't care or think about the quills.”

Well Gary I hope you can get her to someplace where she won’t get into prickle pigs.  I have to think that she would be a great dog if that hatred could be focused in a different direction.  If anyone is interested drop me a line and I can put you in touch with Gary.

Red - a nice little redline pup

I got this from the web.

Winnipeg Sun

Thursday, September 6, 2001

Monster bruin hit 'World's largest wild black bear' run down

By DOUG LUNNEY,

STAFF REPORTER POWERVIEW –

When the massive beast began to lift the front end of Steven Fontaine's car, he knew the animal he hit wasn't your average bear.  At about 7-foot-9 in length and an estimated live weight of 886.5 pounds, Manitoba Conservation officials believe it's the world's largest wild black bear.

"He looked pretty big, but I didn't think it would be this world-record monster bear," Fontaine said yesterday, standing in front of his crumpled 1986 Mazda 626 in Powerview.  Yesterday, about 9:30 p.m., Fontaine was driving five kilometres east of the junctions of Highways 11 and 59, about 110 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, heading toward Victoria Beach to meet some buddies.  He had just rounded a curve when the male bear climbed out of a ditch and walked into the path of his car, which was doing about 100 km-h.  "When I hit the bear it flipped in the air and landed, then I dragged it about 20 feet," said Fontaine, 18. "Then you could feel the car rocking  "It lifted up my car to get out from underneath. I was, like, 'Oh!' I was getting pretty paranoid there. I thought the bear was going to attack the car or something.  "There was no yelping or squealing, nothing. Then he dragged himself into the ditch. He was dragging his back legs."  Fontaine and his passengers were all wearing seat-belts and only suffered some whiplash.  A passing motorist used his cell phone to call police, who contacted Manitoba Conservation officers in Grand Beach. One of the officers who arrived shot and killed the suffering bear.  Officers had to call a tow truck to hoist the bear into the back of a half-ton truck.  "Although further investigation will occur, it is believed that this represents a world-record weight for a free-ranging black bear," said Doug Schindler, Manitoba Conservation's wildlife biologist in Lac du Bonnet.  The length of the bear was 92.5 inches and it had a heart girth of 77 inches. The world record was held by an 880-pound black bear that was shot in North Carolina in 1998. After it was weighed in Lac du Bonnet yesterday, the bear was taken to a taxidermist to be skinned.  While Fontaine's car is certain to be written off, the bear showed very little exterior damage, officers said.  It may end up on display at the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature, Schindler said.  "He's being preserved for scientific and educational purposes," Schindler said. "We haven't really decided where yet, but I'm sure he'll go on display somewhere."  Black bears can live 25 or 30 years, Schindler said, adding experts will determine the bear's age this week. He could only say it was a "very mature bear."  Powerview is about 110 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg. It's believed the bear was on its way across the highway to the Traverse Bay dump.  It's "fairly uncommon" for bears to be hit by vehicles, Schindler said.  "They're not like deer. They seem to avoid roads to some degree."

The quote of the month is “The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.” E. M Cioran

Well that’s it.  As the events of September 11^th 2001 have now wound down and no doubt made their way into infamy let us hope such an act of terror perpetrated on innocent people will never be repeated.

As Henry S. Johnson Jr. Always said: “ Until next month, let me hear from you Airedale people and don’t forget to put your arms around those black and tan dogs with the beards and the moustaches and talk to them. They are people dogs and family members.

Respectfully submitted, Clint Stubbe, Northern Corresponding Secretary for the Working Airedale Terrier Association. No rules, regulations, officers, dues or formal affiliations. It’s more a state of mind.