FROM MEAT WINNER TO MEET WINNER By Tony Lewis, Lyth Whippets © Return to Whippets: Breed of the Month

I believe the Whippet is entirely the product of the Industrial revolution in Britain. The industrial revolution was the signal for huge numbers of workers to leave the land and move into centers of industrial development, coal mining, potteries, iron works, etc. These workers, rural in origin, took their sports with them. The most popular sports included bear, bull and badger bating, dog fighting, and rat pits. The British have always been reknowned for their dog breeding. They bred what ever breed or mixture of breeds got the job done. These dog sports were accompanied by gambling at all levels of society as they are still today. With the advent of the Victorian era many of these barbaric sports were made illegal. One of the lesser barbaric sports was the rabbit snap dog competition. These took place on any open space large enough to hold them and I doubt if there were any hard and fast rules. One of the farm workers we had when I was a kid told me he remembered such competitions, before the first world war, taking place on a "Pit Bonk", the spoil heap left over from the mines. This was many years after snap dog competitions had been made illegal. Snap dog competitions followed the following general pattern. A set number of rabbits, (European rabbit not hares) would be caught, usually with the aid of nets and ferrets. A wager would be laid between two dogs over a set number of rabbits. A circle would be drawn of some twenty five to thirty yards in radius, and a rabbit would be held on the center spot. At a given signal the rabbit would be released and the dog outside the circle would also be released from an agreed position. This would be repeated for each dog. The dog that killed the most rabbits within the circle was proclaimed the winner. Matches could be over any number of rabbits. Twenty five each being the normal. These poor rabbits taken from the wild, disoriented and confused had little or no chance to escape. I can imagine that as with the lurcher breeders in Britain, today, it would not take the old time breeders long to calculate what the best mixture of dog would be. They needed speed, Greyhound. Fast reaction, Rat Pit dog. Toughness and gameness, Terrier and Bulldog. What did they come up with? "The Whippet" It should be remembered that the snap dogs were much smaller than the Whippets of today, with most being in the 14lbs to 20lb. range. Eventually this sport was made illegal. The dogs they had produced were programmed to chase anything that moved, when it moved, and to latch onto it. Wave a rag and the new breed, "The Whippet", knew what to do. Stand fifty, a hundred yards away, and the Whippet homed in on the lure with fanatical determination. Whippet racing and the breed were born. The Whippet as we know it, has never been the dog of choice for the poacher. The Whippet's thin coat, which makes it unsuitable for work during the average English winter, and a tendency to give tongue when in pursuit of game all go against the Whippet as a poachers dog. A highly visible white dog was very unsuitable. Whippet hare coursing is a relatively recent sport both in the USA and the U.K. Certainly the Whippet was used to put meat on the table, but not by catching it, but by winning it.

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