For the love of working English Cocker Spaniels
(6)
10312 CR 12
Morrill, NE
69358
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We got our first English Cocker in 1980. I had grown up with pointers but living in a parsonage, in town, with a very small yard, the large, very active dogs weren’t right for our situation. I researched to discover what breed might meet our needs. Since I hunted mainly upland birds and ducks, the English Cocker seemed worth a try. Our first was a show bred, a lovely thing; she hunted, but had some deficiencies, which had me looking for one bred to the gun. As we searched out the availability of the sort of pup which would fit the bill, we found the breed here was in a bit of a slump. Field trials for cockers had not been held since 1964. Many of the old hunting lines had disappeared. There were a few scattered individuals working heroically to revive the working cocker in the U.S. But it was hard to find field bred pups here. I contacted the secretary of the English Cocker Spaniel Club of America. Kate Romanski told me of a man not too far from us who had imported a bitch in whelp from the UK. We bought one of those pups. Then when we lost him we bought another from the same litter. Soon hooked on the real, field bred EC, we later imported more. But the breed needed more friends. Few people in the U.S. had any idea that there was such of thing as a hunting cocker. I wrote letters to the Gundog editors of Field and Stream and Outdoor Life. I evidently piqued their interest because they both interviewed me and wrote articles about our dogs. Field and Stream’s Bill Tarrant in December of 1987 and Outdoor Life’s Larry Mueller in March of 1990. Bill also gave us some space in a couple of his dog training books. The articles sparked tremendous interest. More people got pups. More people imported good dogs. In 1993 the first Cocker field trial in nealy 30 years was held near ft. Collins CO. And the beat, as the song says, goes on, because these little wonders meet a real need. And admittedly, because they are cute and fun.
