| "FROM MEAT WINNER TO MEET WINNER" |
| by Tony Lewis |
I believe that the Whippet is almost entirely the product of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. The Industrial Revolution was the signal for huge numbers of agricultural workers to leave the land and move into centers of industrial development, coal mining, iron works and brick and pottery kilns etc. These workers, rural in origin, took their country sports with them. The most popular sports included, bear, bull and badger baiting, dog fighting and rat pits. The British as a nation have always been renowned for their skill in livestock breeding and dog breeding was near the the top of the list. They bred what ever breed or mixture of breeds was required to get the job done, what ever that occupation might be, from the many sporting applications, to the drovers dog or the lady of the house's toy. Most of the dog sports were accompanied by gambling at all levels of the society as many of them are still today. With the advent of the Victorian era many of these barbaric sports were made illegal. One of the lesser barbaric sports was the rabbit, snapdog competition. These took place on any open space large enough to hold them and I doubt if there were any hard and fast rules. One of the farm workers we had when I was a kid told me he remembered such competitions before the first world war taking place on a "Pit Bonk", the soil heap left over from the mines. This was many years after snap dog competitions had been made illegal. Snapdog competitions followed the following general pattern. A set number of rabbits (European rabbit not hares), would be caught, usually with the aid of nets and ferrets. A wager would be laid between two dogs over a set number of rabbits. A fenced area was used for the competition. Within this fenced area a circle was drawn usually 25-30yds radius and a rabbit would be held on the center spot. At a given signal the rabbit would be released and the dog would also be released from a spot ten yards from the center. This would be repeated for each dog. The dog that killed the most rabbits within the circle was pronounced the winner. Matches could be over any number of rabbits. Twenty five each being normal. These poor rabbits, taken from the wild, disoriented and confused had no chance to escape. Rules could be varied. dogs held further from the center, shortest time to kill the alloted number etc. I can imagine that as with lurcher breeders in Britain today, it would not take the old time Snapdog breeders long to calculate what the best mixture of dogs would be, to give the best results. They needed the speed of the Greyhound, the lightning reaction and gameness of the rat pit Terrier and the toughness and "Do or Die" qualities of the old fighting Bulldog. They put them all into the melting pot and out came "The Whippet". It should be remembered that the Snapdog or Whippet at the time of its' developement was much smaller than the Whippets of today, particularly those found in post 1920's North America. The size difference is due to the simple fact that the early pillars of the breed in the U.S. show world liked larger Whippets and wrote the American Standard accordingly. Eventually this so called sport of Snapdog, Rabbit coursing was made illegal. The dogs that had been produced were programmed to chase anything that moved with lightning speed, and latch onto the quarry like grim death. Wave a rag and the new breed, "The Whippet", knew what to do. Stand fifty to a hundred yards away and the Whippet homed in on the rag with fanatical determination. Whippet racing and the breed were born. The Whippet as we know it has never been the dog of choice for the poacher. The Whippet's thin coat, makes it unsuitable for work during the average English winter. A tendency to give tongue when in pursuit of game all go against the Whippet as a poachers dog. A highly visible white dog was very undesirable. Whippet hare coursing is a relatively recent sport in both the U.S.A. and the U.K. dating from the 1960's. Certainly the early Whippet was used to put meat on the table, but not by catching it, but by winning it. |