Celebrating canines

From chintz sofas to rolling hills, certain hounds reign supreme in the Cotswolds. Adam Edwards explains why these aren’t just pets…they're a way of life.

If there is a single creature that personifies the Cotswolds it is not, as one might expect a sheep but rather the tail-wagging buffoon that is the Labrador. The dog belongs to these hills as much as it does to the chintz sofa it hogs. And while it may be as dim as a night light it is more important to life in Gloucestershire than life itself.

I’m not quite sure why the Cotswolds has embraced the Lab with such enthusiasm. 
Perhaps it is because Gloucestershire is known as `Sloane Ranger’ country and the Lab is the `Hooray Henry’ of dogs but for whatever the reason the wet-nosed, tail-wagging soppy date is the dog of choice for the county’s gentry. The AGA, 4x4, Wellington boot and spouse pale by comparison. As Douglas Sutherland remarked in his book on The English Gentleman: `The worship of the Labrador reaches its apotheosis when it is so old and cantankerous so deaf, blind and smelling of blocked drains that it enjoys the best chair in the drawing room.’

The incorrigible mutt should by rights have disappeared some time ago or at least faded like a hereditary peer for there is little modern call for its original role of carrying ropes between fishing boats and retrieving fishing nets. But when it arrived in this country from Canada, in the late 18th Century, the English were besotted. They moulded it and refined it into a roly-poly beast that looks and moves like a well-filled pair of Cavalry Twills. 

This can be trying.  A Lab, for example, will greet all visitors by either jumping up on them or by bumping and barging. It sniffs and swaggers through the house and is a non-stop eating machine, a food rustler with bad breath that passes wind for the Olympics and practices doing so while lying as awkwardly as possible in the square yard in front of the fire.

All this might be forgiven if, when outside, it behaved like a boomerang. But it doesn’t. It chases anything in fur and feather and takes an uncommon interest in all animal droppings, paying special attention to those of a fox, which it enjoys rolling in.  When it is called it ignores whistles and monikers until the pleading owner is purple with fury. Those not au fait with the world of the Labrador in the sporting field might reasonably assume that every one of the critters is called `bloody dog’.   

There are of course other dogs acceptable in the Cotswolds. The Jack Russell is the short, bundle of muscle that is frequently the `second’ dog. Owners of these creatures include our local King Charles and Queen Camilla. Then there is the cocker spaniel, a soppy dog depicted in a series of drawings by the pre-war cartoonist Pont as the reason the British ‘tend to become doggy’. The cocker is a continuous running machine. It runs, for no apparent reason, in circles. And yet this odd behaviour does not in any way dent its popularity. Walt Disney knew the dog was lovable when he cast a cocker as the lady in `Lady and the Tramp’ while the Duchess of Cambridge decided upon a cocker called Lupo.

There is a score of other dog breeds to be seen occasionally rambling around the Cotswolds, from Great Danes to Chihuahuas, but in truth there is only one breed that is socially acceptable in this poshest of shires. The opening shot to the TV drama Downton Abbey, which was filmed in the Cotswolds village of Bampton, features Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, accompanied by his dog Pharaoh. And just as the show’s cook had to be plump and the footman had to smoke Woodbine cigarettes, so Lord Crawley’s Pharaoh had to be a Lab.  For even the least informed television producer knows that members of the well-bred Cotswold gentry do not have Poodles at their heel – they have a Labrador.