The cover of the February 1998 Greyhound Review featured 1997 national win champ EK Maedarling (Ion Fast Trax x Win D Puff). She won 55 races at Pensacola including 16-straight to close out the year.
Oshkosh Slammer (Oshkosh Racey x Oshkosh Video) won the 1998 Derby Lane Inaugural in the quick time of 30.45 and Flying Hades (Flying Gunman x Willowrun Mom) captured the Derby Lane Puppy Preview.
At Tri-State, Jimbo Okie (Star Chariot* x Little Portion) won the $50,000 Holiday Distance Classic over a field that included Fortified Power and Ole Harry. Jimbo Okie also won the 1998 Tri-State $50,000 Sprint and was from a remarkable litter that included 1997 New Hamphire Lottery Stake winner Jimbo Scotty and 1998 St. Pete Derby winner Jimbo’s Chelsie.
Ballots for the 1997 Rural Rube and Flashy Sir awards featured Beams Full Moon, Bean Brewer, Bomb Threat, brothers Galilee and Lord Dempsey, Grace Land Blaze, Leo’s Midas, ML Dusty Trail, My Thane, SC’s Mask Rider, and Scott Free among the sprinters; and Cee Bar Snow, Granny, Hey Father John, Kiowa Bet Dutch, Slatex Shell, and Winsome Doe for the routers.
Southland’s Phoebe Ann (Great Son x Skitch) won the 1997 American Derby at Lincoln over Wake Up Alarm and Slatex Shell and Okie Kail won the Fred Cairone Memorial Countdown.
Kiowa Chippewa (My Rooster x Kiowa Day War) kicked off a terrific career with a win in the Hollywood Futurity.
Among the interesting whelpings reported was the Fortress* - Greys Julianna cross that produced 2000 All American Greys Free Bird, a repeat breeding of a December 1995 litter that featured Greys Flamebeau.
Has it really been 10 years?
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Everything You Know Is Wrong
In the 1970s, an American comedy troupe comparable to Monty Python was the Firesign Theater. They never reached the superstar status of their English counterparts, but their albums were popular on college campuses across the country. The title of one of them, Everything You Know is Wrong, has become a personal motto of mine—it seems that almost daily new discoveries in science and exploration make us reassess what we once held to be true.
The same can be said for Greyhounds. A long-held belief, published as fact in dozens of books and repeated on hundreds of web sites, is that the breed is of Egyptian or Middle-Eastern origin. The assertion is puzzling because there are no Greyhound breeds presently residing in the Middle East. The Saluki, Sloughi, and Afghan Hound are clearly of a different type than modern Greyhounds, and it’s hard to imagine that they descend from a common ancestor. On the other hand, Greyhounds and Greyhound-type dogs are common in central Europe, Spain and the British Isles. As early as 1853, John Henry Walsh, writing under the pseudonym "Stonehenge," made a clear case for a Celtic origin for the breed in his book The Greyhound, but not too many authors since him seem to have been able to make the same connection.
From the beginning of the first millenium B.C., the Greeks were seafarers and traders and regularly visited ports all along the southeastern Mediterranean in what is now Egypt and the Middle East. Much of what we know of that area in those times was recorded by Greek historians and there is no mention of Greyhounds. The breed was completely unknown to them prior to 200 B.C., the time of their first encounters with the Keltoi, as they called them, a tribal culture from the north. In 300 B.C., Xenophon made no mention of Greyhounds in his discussion of dog breeds in his treatise On Hunting. Two centuries later, the poet Grattius wrote of the Celts’ dogs that, "...swifter than thought or a winged bird it runs, pressing hard on beasts it has found." Arrian, another Greek, but who wrote in Latin, clearly identified the Vertragus, the predecessor of the modern Greyhound.
The Celtic culture flourished from what is now Austria, west to northern Spain, and north to the farthest reaches of the British Isles and Ireland. Everywhere they went they took their dogs with them and left offshoots of the Vertragus. In Spain it was the Galgo; in the British Isles, it was a bewildering array of sighthounds in a wide variety of sizes and coats, from giant dogs we now call Wolfhounds to "Tumblers," by contemporary accounts a Whippet-sized dog. The Celts made no distinction among their sighthound varieties. To add to the confusion, English writers up until the 16th century called all the larger Celtic dogs "Greyhounds," and the dog we call the Greyhound today, the "Coursing dog." Irish Wolfhounds in those days were prized in Europe for hunting Boar, and the demand for the largest Greyhounds "of the Irish type" was great and they fetched tremendous prices.
The present Greyhounds, the ones we love, are the result of the coursing craze after the death of the Forest Laws in the 17th century which prevented commoners from coursing or even owning Greyhounds. The coursing rules of the day dictated a very specific range of performance and traits, and those are the ones we see in our dogs today. Almost all the other varieties of Celtic sighthounds disappeared. Even the Irish Wolfhound is a re-creation of a breed that had all but gone extinct.
Two recent landmark genetic studies have confirmed Walsh to be correct. The first, "Multiple and Ancient Origins of the Domestic Dog" (1997), traced the mitochondrial DNA from ancient times to the present day Greyhound. Interestingly, three other breeds derive from the same strain, the St. Bernard, Miniature Schnauzer, and the Irish Setter, which suggests male-line introductions of other breeds to Greyhound-line females who were the foundations of those breeds. All three originate in areas where Celtic culture flourished.
The second, and more definitive study, "Genetic Structure of the Purebred Domestic Dog" (2004), used Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), clumps of identical DNA strings that appear in groups of breeds, but often not in others. The study clearly showed that Salukis and Afghan Hounds were part of an "Asian" group along with the Chow, Akita, and Shar-pei. Predictably, the Greyhound appeared in what I’ll call the "Celtic" group along with the Irish Wolfhound, but also as a progenitor of more recent breeds including the Whippet, Borzoi, Belgian Sheepdog, Belgian Tervuren, Collie, Shetland Sheepdog, and the St. Bernard. A glance at a map clearly shows that all those breeds originate within the influence of Celtic culture in Europe.
It’s time the Celts got their due as the caretakers of the breed, not Egyptian Pharoahs or Mesopotamian kings who never saw a Greyhound.
The same can be said for Greyhounds. A long-held belief, published as fact in dozens of books and repeated on hundreds of web sites, is that the breed is of Egyptian or Middle-Eastern origin. The assertion is puzzling because there are no Greyhound breeds presently residing in the Middle East. The Saluki, Sloughi, and Afghan Hound are clearly of a different type than modern Greyhounds, and it’s hard to imagine that they descend from a common ancestor. On the other hand, Greyhounds and Greyhound-type dogs are common in central Europe, Spain and the British Isles. As early as 1853, John Henry Walsh, writing under the pseudonym "Stonehenge," made a clear case for a Celtic origin for the breed in his book The Greyhound, but not too many authors since him seem to have been able to make the same connection.
From the beginning of the first millenium B.C., the Greeks were seafarers and traders and regularly visited ports all along the southeastern Mediterranean in what is now Egypt and the Middle East. Much of what we know of that area in those times was recorded by Greek historians and there is no mention of Greyhounds. The breed was completely unknown to them prior to 200 B.C., the time of their first encounters with the Keltoi, as they called them, a tribal culture from the north. In 300 B.C., Xenophon made no mention of Greyhounds in his discussion of dog breeds in his treatise On Hunting. Two centuries later, the poet Grattius wrote of the Celts’ dogs that, "...swifter than thought or a winged bird it runs, pressing hard on beasts it has found." Arrian, another Greek, but who wrote in Latin, clearly identified the Vertragus, the predecessor of the modern Greyhound.
The Celtic culture flourished from what is now Austria, west to northern Spain, and north to the farthest reaches of the British Isles and Ireland. Everywhere they went they took their dogs with them and left offshoots of the Vertragus. In Spain it was the Galgo; in the British Isles, it was a bewildering array of sighthounds in a wide variety of sizes and coats, from giant dogs we now call Wolfhounds to "Tumblers," by contemporary accounts a Whippet-sized dog. The Celts made no distinction among their sighthound varieties. To add to the confusion, English writers up until the 16th century called all the larger Celtic dogs "Greyhounds," and the dog we call the Greyhound today, the "Coursing dog." Irish Wolfhounds in those days were prized in Europe for hunting Boar, and the demand for the largest Greyhounds "of the Irish type" was great and they fetched tremendous prices.
The present Greyhounds, the ones we love, are the result of the coursing craze after the death of the Forest Laws in the 17th century which prevented commoners from coursing or even owning Greyhounds. The coursing rules of the day dictated a very specific range of performance and traits, and those are the ones we see in our dogs today. Almost all the other varieties of Celtic sighthounds disappeared. Even the Irish Wolfhound is a re-creation of a breed that had all but gone extinct.
Two recent landmark genetic studies have confirmed Walsh to be correct. The first, "Multiple and Ancient Origins of the Domestic Dog" (1997), traced the mitochondrial DNA from ancient times to the present day Greyhound. Interestingly, three other breeds derive from the same strain, the St. Bernard, Miniature Schnauzer, and the Irish Setter, which suggests male-line introductions of other breeds to Greyhound-line females who were the foundations of those breeds. All three originate in areas where Celtic culture flourished.
The second, and more definitive study, "Genetic Structure of the Purebred Domestic Dog" (2004), used Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), clumps of identical DNA strings that appear in groups of breeds, but often not in others. The study clearly showed that Salukis and Afghan Hounds were part of an "Asian" group along with the Chow, Akita, and Shar-pei. Predictably, the Greyhound appeared in what I’ll call the "Celtic" group along with the Irish Wolfhound, but also as a progenitor of more recent breeds including the Whippet, Borzoi, Belgian Sheepdog, Belgian Tervuren, Collie, Shetland Sheepdog, and the St. Bernard. A glance at a map clearly shows that all those breeds originate within the influence of Celtic culture in Europe.
It’s time the Celts got their due as the caretakers of the breed, not Egyptian Pharoahs or Mesopotamian kings who never saw a Greyhound.
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