The spaniel that had to fit in the boat
This week's outreach worked through American breed and stud-book directories, including Little Brownies Kennel's American Water Spaniels in Michigan — a breed most people outside the Midwest have never heard of, built in the 1800s by Wisconsin duck hunters who needed a dog small enough to ride in a skiff.
This week's outreach worked through American breed and stud-book directories — among them Little Brownies Kennel's American Water Spaniels in Michigan. It's a breed most people outside the Midwest have never heard of, which is slightly strange, because it is one of only a handful of sporting breeds the United States can claim as its own. Reading up on it before writing turned up a history that's worth more than the one line a listing has room for.
Built to fit in the boat
The American Water Spaniel was developed in the 1800s along the Fox River and its tributary the Wolf River, in Wisconsin, by market hunters working the Great Lakes region. The job set the specification. A dog had to retrieve waterfowl out of cold water, work scrub and marsh on land, and — this is the part that actually shaped the breed — be small enough to ride in a hunter's skiff or punt alongside the gear and the gun. Nobody was breeding for a show ring. They were breeding a tool that had to fit in the boat, tolerate the water, and not take up space a hunter needed for something else.
Where exactly it came from is less settled. The likeliest account has settlers crossing Curly-Coated Retrievers with the old English Water Spaniel, with Irish Water Spaniel blood later added for coat and condition. A Field Spaniel contribution, aimed at improving the nose, gets mentioned in some accounts and dismissed as an old rumour in others. What's not disputed is that for decades nobody kept a formal studbook at all — the breed was pack-bred, hunter to hunter, which is usually a recipe for a breed to drift apart rather than hold together. In this one case it seems to have done the opposite: breeders here point to that long unregistered period as one reason inherited conditions common in more tightly bred sporting breeds stayed comparatively rare in this one. It's not the lesson we'd draw from a closed studbook generally, and it isn't one, but it's a useful reminder that genetic diversity and formal pedigree-keeping aren't the same question.
One man, a kennel, and twenty-five-dollar puppies
The breed owes its survival as a recognised, distinct type to one person: Dr Fred Pfeifer, a vet in New London, Wisconsin, who around 1906 began breeding the local "little brown spaniels" deliberately rather than letting them simply exist as a regional type. He founded Wolf River Kennels, built it up to as many as 132 dogs, and advertised nationally — males at $25, females at $20, a price that tells you plainly this wasn't yet a breed anyone could charge a premium for. His own dog, Curly Pfeifer, became the first American Water Spaniel registered with the United Kennel Club in 1920. The Field Dog Stud Book followed in 1938, and the American Kennel Club recognised the breed in 1940, after John Scofield and Thomas Brogdan picked up the campaign through the newly formed American Water Spaniel Club. In 1985, after what the breed's own club describes as a genuinely long political fight, Wisconsin named it the state dog.
Still rare, and getting rarer
None of that history has translated into numbers. The breed's own club estimates roughly 3,000 American Water Spaniels exist at any given time, nearly all of them in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and the states around them. The AKC registered 233 puppies in 1998; by 2010 the breed ranked 143rd out of 167 recognised breeds for US popularity, down from 125th just a decade earlier. That's a breed moving in the wrong direction, not a stable rare one — closer to the trajectory we've described in breeds like the Otterhound than to a breed that's merely always been a minority taste.
What a buyer should actually ask about
The breed's comparatively unstructured breeding history shows up in its health picture, and mostly in the breed's favour. Hip dysplasia has been recorded at around 8.3 per cent in Orthopedic Foundation for Animals surveys spanning 1974 to 1999 — well below many other sporting breeds, and worth asking a breeder to confirm with the same OFA or equivalent scoring we've described in what a hip score actually tells you.
Two conditions are worth asking about directly. Cataracts turn up with suspected heritability and, more unusually, an average onset age under one year — young enough that a breeder's own line history matters more than a one-off vet check on the puppy you're looking at. Progressive retinal atrophy is also seen, with inheritance suspected there too. The other is a hair-loss pattern that typically starts around six months old, affecting the neck, thighs and tail, linked to glandular disorders; the breed club's own work is credited with reducing how often it shows up, which is itself worth asking a breeder about — not whether their line has ever had it, but whether they test or screen for it at all, in the spirit of what we've set out generally in what a DNA health panel actually tests for. Hypothyroidism, allergies, epilepsy and diabetes are also recorded in the breed, none of them unique to it, all of them worth the same question. Set against all of that: a working lifespan of ten to thirteen years, unremarkable in the best sense — a dog built to last, the way it was built to do everything else asked of it.
Why we wrote this week
We asked Little Brownies Kennel for almost nothing — whether a listing built from what's publicly available might be worth having, sent for a yes or a no before anything goes live, no form and no cost either way. The same offer behind every email this week, to American Water Spaniel breeders and everyone else on this week's list.
But a breed this specifically American, this precisely purpose-built, and this quietly short of numbers was worth a piece of its own. If you breed American Water Spaniels, know the directories we should be working from, or would simply rather we heard the current picture from you than reconstructed it from a breed club history page, the address is info@genovaq.co.uk.
Sources
- "American Water Spaniel", Wikipedia
- "American Water Spaniel History", American Water Spaniel Club
- "American Water Spaniel History", American Kennel Club
— Rene
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The GenoVaq journal publishes long-form pieces for breeders and buyers — welfare, health-testing, breeding decisions, marketplace mechanics. New writing every week or two.