Sent E. Stork to E. Nettleship, 16th Oct. 1910.
16 Oct 1910
Description:

‘Dear Mr Nettleship,

I must again ask your forgiveness for my long delay in acknowledging your letter. Thus has been a very hard summer, & I am only just able to get away for my holiday. The subject was so interesting to me, & I was going away almost from day to day – certainly from week to week -  but I might have aclknowledged receipt of your letter!

I have bred “bob-tails” for a good many years, & have shown & judged them at the principal shows, so I may perhaps call them my pet hobby. To begin with the origin of the breed is obscure, & he is a fascinating beast inasmuch as he often transmits what most people consider an acquired feature. First as to his tail. Most puppies - & I write throughout of “pedigree” animals whose ancestry I can trace back at least six generations – are born with tails as long as collies; the tails always have a white tip; the puppies practically always have a white foreface. But there are certain families in which every now & then there is an individual, usually a male, who gets tail-less puppies. Any by inbreeding, with say two true generations, I have succeeded several times in getting puppies with nothing but a little pad of adipose tissue where the tail should be. If I had to sum up, I should say that in 5 generations I could get 90% of my puppies natural bobtails. But as “show points” are teh chief consideration, I have been obliged to let this side of the question lapse.

The sheep-dog has a peculiar shuffling gait, his chief characteristic; & I am firmly convinced that the show dogs have lost this as the natural bob-tails have diminished; or to put it higher still, that the natural bob-tails always show it; & that the dogs which most often beget natural bob-tails have this peculiar ambling walk.

Next as to “wall” eyes. They are relatively uncommon compared with the numbers 15 years ago. Before thinking of this matter from the point of view you have suggested – albinism – I had long decided to forsake wall-eyed families, & for this reason. The Sheep-dog Club in its standard description of the breed says “Dark, or wall-eyes are to be preferred” – light brown eyes are a defect. I have found very early in my breeding experiments that in using wall-eyed stock unless one got wall-eyed puppies one certainly got yellow-eyes, or at best light-brown-eyed puppies. But certain individuals, & here again the prepotent factor is the male, will habitually get wall-eyed puppies. I have a dog in my kennels with a wall-eye, whose ancestry contains several wall-eyed males. The great majority - 2/3 – of his puppies have wall-eyes, but he never gets a dark eye. One of his eyes is a lovely turquois-blue; the other is light-brown with a ‘fleck’ as big as a millet-seed of blue in the lower & outer quadrant. Many of his puppies have two blue eyes one daughter had a blue eye on one side, & an eye ¾ yellow, & ¼ blue on the other. I believe 9 out of 10 of his puppies have shown the wall-eye, & he has been at stud 7 years, though I do not recommend him now owing to my objection to light-coloured eyes. The only approach to complete albinism I have seen was in a bitch belonging to Mr Percey Hawey of Joy[?] House, Neatishead, nr. Norwich. She had a good pedigree, & the only sign of her family tendency to albinism was in her paternal great-aunt – a Champion, by the way – who had one wall eye. This bitch is all-white – a dirty white – with liver-pink nose, and “pink” eyes, as they are called (the irides are very pale brownish-yellow, but the red-reflex is glaring). She is not deaf[?]. I believe you can see her now if you like. But wall-eyed dogs very often have “button-fly” noses, i.e. noses mottled pink & black - & this is another practical objection to wall-eyed strains for black noses are a sine qua non. All puppies are born with pink noses; then about the 3rd day there appears a fine “peppering” on the nose of grey granules which gradually enlarge & deepen in colour until the nose becomes quite black, usually by the end of the first fortnight. If the process is slow, or patchy, it is safe to anticipate a wall-eyed puppy, & also one with later on, the characteristic gait. In some wall-eyed dog, & the best “movers”, the nose always remains “butterfly”. I believe that the skin of white dogs is white. For terriers often show a greyish blue “ticking” of the skin under the white area, but the general scheme is white. And in bobtails, Newfoundlands, & bull-dogs it is easy to see that the skin under the white patches is white or pink, & that under the darker patches a greyish-blue of intensity varying with the depth of colour in the coat. I am told that white-coated horses have a pigmented (grey) skin, but I once saw a horse in Chianni’s Circus at Bologna with a complete pink skinm pink nose, & pale blue eyes – a perfect albio, in which the white, glistening effect of the coat was the first & most striking impression. Some years ago when in Ceylon I saw a young Cingalese [sic] woman who had the figure & features of her race . But she was as fair as the fairest English blonde, had pale yellow hair, eyes with greenish-blue irides, and the red reflex or “pink-eye” very distinct, & also very marked constant horizontal nystagmus. She was deaf. Her family history was quite free from albinism.

I am afraid this is a patchy answer to your letter, but I shall be very happy to clear up any points you may think worh enquiry. My address for the next fortnight will be at Waye[?] House, Ashburton, Devon.

Yrs very truly,

Ernest Stork.’