In lofty terms, Earth Mother embodies the bounty of the Earth. She is nurturing, kind, gentle, loving, and soulful. All things come from her, return to her, and are her.
And then there is the earthdog.
The only thing that comes from an earthdog is the tenacity to hunt down their quarry and return it the Spirit in the Sky. They will ferociously dig, burrow, scrape, plow, and get their faces caked in dirt. Some even offer what the Scottish Terrier Club calls the “death stare:” A staring Scottie hopes that by being quiet, the quarry just might come out where it can be reached by eager jaws. All forms of acquisition are game if it means emerging victorious with something verminy in the dog’s mouth.
At the risk of hyperbole, there have always been earth dogs. Pliny the Elder likely provided the first written mention of these digging terriers in the first century. He wrote that when the Romans invaded Britain in 55 B.C., “they found much to their surprise, small dogs that would follow their quarry to the ground,” dogs they called “workers in the earth.” There came a time and place, however, when owning such a dog was not necessarily boasted of in a tavern, nor shouted from the treetops because such terriers were owned by poachers, and that was enough to get their masters jailed or hung. Think Robin Hood.
Needless to say, times changed, and we now have organized trials to test the mettle of these dogs.
Four levels of AKC earthdog titles are available for qualified breeds to pursue: Junior Earthdog, Senior Earthdog, Master Earthdog and Endurance Earthdog (awarded to a dog which, on five occasions, passes both the Senior and Master classes at the same earthdog event). Tender-hearted souls will be glad to learn that rodents “volunteering” to participate in earthdog trials have an “Rodent Earth Mother” looking out for them because in AKC earthdog trials, rats are safely ensconced in cages and not harmed. The non-competitive tests simply offer owners and breeders a standardized gauge to measure their dogs’ natural aptitude, and “trained hunting and working behaviors when exposed to an underground hunting situation” (AKC website).
As an aside, the American Working Terrier Association’s earthdog tests predates the AKC’s earthdog program (the AWTA was formed in 1971 while the AKC began offering Earthdog Performance Den Trials in 1994), and as far as we can tell, the AWTA’s tests differ from the AKC’s in that there are fewer steps of increasing difficulty. The AWTA awards a “Working Certificate” “Hunting Certificate,” or “Certificates of Gameness” to qualifying dogs of certain breeds.
Insofar as the AKC is concerned, one dog had to be the very first to earn an earthdog title, and while we’re still researching the recipient of the first Junior Earthdog title, we know that the first Senior Earthdog title was earned in 1995 by a Border Terrier named Lady Wheaten. A year later, the first Master Earthdog title was earned by longhaired miniature Dachshund known as Beejay’s Chocolate Smoke CD, ME.
Unlike the Golden Retriever in our image, not every breed is eligible to earn an AKC earthdog title. These breeds are:
- American Hairless Terrier
- Australian Terrier
- Bedlington Terrier
- Border Terrier
- Cairn Terrier
- Cesky Terrier
- Dachshund
- Dandie Dinmont Terrier
- Glen of Imaal Terrier
- Jagdterrier
- Lakeland Terrier
- Manchester Terrier
- Miniature Bull Terrier
- Miniature Pinschers
- Miniature Schnauzer
- Norfolk Terrier
- Norwich Terrier
- Parson Russell Terrier
- Rat Terrier
- Russell Terrier
- Scottish Terrier
- Sealyham Terrier
- Silky Terrier
- Skye Terrier
- Smooth Fox Terrier
- Welsh Terrier
- West Highland White Terrier
- Wire Fox Terrier
- Yorkshire Terrier
We here at NPDD love “firsts.” If you know that your breed (not your dog, but the breed) was the first at something, we’d like to hear about. To clarify, we don’t want to know who the first of your breed was to get that “something,” we want to know what breed did something first.