THE WEST HIGHLAND WHITE TERRIER

Man, being a hunting animal, kills the otter for his skin, and the badger also; the fox he kills because the animal likes lamb and game to eat.  Man, being unable to deal in the course of a morning with the rocks under and between which his quarry harbours, makes use of the small dog which will go underground, to which the French name terrier has been attached.

Towards the end of the reign of James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland, we find him writing to Edinburgh to have half a dozen “earth dogges or terrieres” sent carefully to France as a present, and he directs that they be got from Argyll, and sent over in two or more ships lest they should get harm by the way.  That was roughly three hundred years ago, and the King most probably would not have so highly valued a newly-invented strain as he evidently did value the “terrieres” from Argyll.  We may take it then that in 1600 the Argyllshire terriers were considered to be the best in Scotland, and likely enough too, seeing the almost boundless opportunities the county gives for the work of the “earth dogges.”

But men kept their dogs in the evil pre-show days for work and not for points, and mighty indifferent were they whether an ear cocked up or lay flat to the cheek, whether the tail was exactly of fancy length, or how high to a hair’s breadth it stood.  These things are sine qua non on the modern show bench, but were not thought of in the cruel, hard fighting days of old.

In those days two things—­and two things only—­were imperatively necessary:  pluck and capacity to get at the quarry.  This entailed that the body in which the pluck was enshrined must be small and most active, to get at the innermost recesses of the lair, and that the body must be protected by the best possible teeth and jaws for fighting, on a strong and rather long neck and directed by a most capable brain.  It is held that feet turned out a little are better for scrambling up rocks than perfectly straight Fox-terrier like feet.  In addition, it was useful to have your dog of a colour easy to see when in motion, though no great weight was laid upon that point, as in the days before newspapers and trains men’s eyes were good, as a rule.  Still, the quantity of white in the existing terriers all through the west coast of Scotland shows that it must have been rather a favoured colour.

White West Highland Terriers were kept at Poltalloch sixty years ago, and so they were first shown as Poltalloch Terriers.  Yet although they were kept in their purest strain in Argyllshire, they are still to be found all along the west coast of Scotland, good specimens belonging to Ross-shire, to Skye, and at Ballachulish on Loch Leven, so that it is a breed with a long pedigree and not an invented breed of the present day.  Emphatically, they are not simply white coloured Scottish Terriers, and it is an error to judge them on Scottish