In the early seventies I lived in the Garden District of New Orleans and had a standard white. I would walk her down to Audubon Park, which is about a square mile of city park across the street from Tulane Univ. I would encounter guys working their gun dogs. In the course of conversation I would say something like, "Gee, someday I hope to have a good gun dog." Time after time after time I was told about a guy from southern Louisiana that had two standard blacks that he would enter in open trials. It was never a matter of whether his dogs would do any good, but more a matter of which one would get first and which would get second.
Ten years later I was casting about for a wire-haired pointer. They were fairly new in the country at that time and you could about count the number of breeders on your fingers and toes. I probably talked with most of them and kept hearing the same story about the end-all of wire-haired pointers. I finally tracked down the guy that had this end-all pointer and he lived in Pearl River, north of New Orleans. I told him my poodle story. He said, "My God, those were my dogs! Well, one of them was. The first dog I trained was my wife's poodle, and that was done on a bet. The second dog was easy."
I will say that I still regard that standard white as far and away the smartest dog I have ever owned. I regret that she was my first dog and wish that I would have known then what I know now about dogs. They are, however, high maintenance, what with the need for trims and their propensity for bringing half the field home in their coat.
