Everything You Know Is Wrong, Part II

Back in February, I penned an article that called into question the often repeated assertion that Greyhounds were of Middle Eastern or even Egyptian origin. The evidence to support it simply doesn't exist, yet it is a story that has been repeated often enough that it is widely believed.

Another common belief is that key ancestors of the breed descend from a cross to the Bulldog, an experiment conducted by the eccentric Lord Orford in the 1770s. In their article "Bulldog: Legend or Mythology?" Greyhound-data.com contributors James McCormick and Susan Burley point out inconsistencies in the stories told by people associated with Orford, as well as implausible events, such as the great bitch Czarina whelping her first litter at age 13.

By the time John Henry Walsh ("Stonehenge") retells the story in the first edition of The Greyhound in 1853, almost eight decades had passed since Orford's experimental breedings and no one was alive who could corroborate any of it. Greyhound writers ever since, without further research of any kind, have simply repeated the story to the point it has become a part of Greyhound lore.

There is no doubt that Orford and others experimented with Bulldog crosses, but contemporary accounts clearly state that the resulting dogs were hideously slow and useless for coursing. Similar attempts persisted throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. In 1911, for instance, Captain W.C. Ellis crossed Greyhounds with Afghans to similar effect, and unlike Bulldogs who possess no speed whatsoever, the Afghan is a coursing breed. As any Greyhound breeder can attest, it's hard enough to get fast Greyhounds by breeding one great Greyhound family to another. The idea that a superior dog can be improved by a cross to slower breeds appears to be completely illogical.

To make an analogy to Thoroughbreds, the legendary breeder Federico Tesio wrote that if one bred a Thoroughbred to a Standardbred as an outcross, it would take 20 generations to breed the speed back in to make the progeny competitive. Any "gameness" Orford had hoped to gain by crossing to Bulldogs would have been long lost generations later when enough speed had been bred back in to counter that lost in the first generation.

The explanation that Bulldog crosses of the late 1700s are responsible for the introduction of the brindle coat in Greyhounds is also a myth. A number of Renaissance paintings from up to two centuries prior to Orford clearly show Greyhounds with brindled and white and brindled coats. See Wild Boar Hunt, by Frans Snyders (1579-1657), particularly the white & brindle dog in the right foreground; and two paintings by Jan Fyt (1611-1661), Diana with her Hunting Dogs Beside Kill, note the dark brindle & white dog directly in front of her, and Diana's Hunt, the red brindle & white dog at the far right.

The Bulldog story persists despite a complete lack of evidence that any of its issue was ever successful on the coursing field. By the time King Cob became the first Greyhound to stand at public stud in the 1840s, Orford's experiment was already 60 years past. There were no Stud Books and would not be any in England until the 1880s. All pedigrees published before the first English Stud Book were pieced together from a variety of sources, often on the thinnest of evidence.

It is certainly possible that there is some trace of Bulldog blood in contemporary greyhounds, but I consider it highly unlikely and counterintuitive. I think it's time to place the Bulldog story alongside that of Greyhounds hunting with pharoahs as dubious elements of the history of the breed.