Janet Menzies - The Cocker Spaniel: Care and Training for Home and Sport

Working cockers are a distinct strain, but just as beautiful as their show cocker cousins

New owners, imagining that trendy working cockers are no different from show cockers, can find themselves with more of a handful than they expected. This book aims to prepare you for having a working cocker, and help you out if you already have one that is challenging you.

Many of the new fans of the working cocker like his versatility. They hope he will be a pet on Friday and a gundog out shooting on Saturday. Working cockers can certainly adapt to these two different roles, but they need to be shown how to do that.

As you are discovering, cockers are different! They can be different good, and they can be different bad this book will make sure your cocker is different good.

The story of your working cocker, whizzing about wagging his tail as you read this, is very recent. Todays modern working cocker didnt really develop until the 1960s, when a handful of gundog trainers in England, Wales and Scotland thought the little spaniels were worth taking seriously.

Until that time, cocker spaniels were just smaller springer spaniels. In the early 1900s, the Kennel Club randomly assigned a minimum weight of 25 lb to springer spaniels. Any spaniel weighing less than 25 lb, by default became a cocker spaniel.

Even nowadays, the breed inevitably has a lot of springer spaniel DNA in it. However, springer spaniels themselves have DNA from pointers, setters and all manner of seventeeth and eighteenth century European hunting dogs. Until 1893, all spaniels were simply known as land spaniels, and the different breeds and strains only began to differentiate when people started forming specific breed clubs in order to show or compete in gundog trials.

As a member of the spaniel tribe, the cocker goes back to the earliest dogs used for hunting game. Historians think spaniels may have arrived in England during the Roman occupation of northern Europe around fifty years BC, possibly being brought across the Channel from Spain. The name spaniel probably derives from Hispania, meaning Spain, and there is some support for this in the French term chien de lEspagnol the dog of Spain.

By the sixteenth century, spaniels were being used all over Europe to flush game from dense cover but not necessarily for guns as we assume today. Very often the aim would be to push the game forward into nets or snares. The springe spaniel (the origin of our springer spaniel) was prized for its ability to spring or flush birds into the sky where they could be hunted by falcons. Another common use would be for the setting spaniel (which we now identify as the setter) to set hares off so they could be coursed by greyhounds.

The next century brought flintlock shotguns into use, and the spaniels role evolved again. Now it needed not just to flush game for the gun to shoot but, crucially, it had to stop and wait while the gun was re-loaded a tedious process which could easily take up to a minute. Today, the need for this steadiness to the gun is still at the heart of spaniel training. The word hup is used to ask the dog to sit, and it is thought this derives from the seventeenth-century shout, Guns up or Guns hup, ready for re-loading.