Heard in a show ring a while back: He’s a light made up lathy dog, but not shelley.
Huh?
They just don’t seem to coin “dog words” like they used to, and to be honest with you, we hope these old terms never leave the dog person’s lexicon; once you really understand the word, nothing else quite describes a quality like that term. “Cobby,” for example, generally means “square-like,” but when applied to a dog it means so much more: The dog may be compact and short bodied, but gosh darn it, what the dog really is – is cobby.
Back in the early 1900s, a lathy dog was lean, hard bodied, muscular and tough, but without being a cardboard cutout dog. Such a dog stands to be at risk of being “shelly,” which is to say, a narrow bodied dog with little spring to his ribs. “Lathy” and “shelley,” are so much more succinct and descriptive, we think. As an aside, the Basset Hound is not a lathy or shelley dog, we just like the artwork.
Image: Basset Hound by Melissa Stewart – MissysPortraits
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