Evidently, it doesn’t take much to amuse us these days, and much of our merriment comes from our own foibles.  We find increasingly that while researching one topic, we get distracted by an interesting tidbit and end up writing about something very different.

We feel a little like the guys in the video clip below:

It was while we were reading about the difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England that we came across the Irish Staffordshire Bull Terrier. By the way, for anyone wondering, the first is a country, the second is an island, and the third is part of an island.

But we’ve digressed from the Irish Staffordshire Bull Terrier.

Roughly twenty-seven dog breeds originated in the UK, and one of them is the Staffordshire Bull Terrier named for the area of Staffordshire; it had the highest number of these dogs, and the biggest breed club with the greatest influence over the breed.  This popular breed was not only a combatant in the cruel sport of dog fighting, but was also an effective vermin hunter.

Many registered Staffordshire Bull Terriers were taken to Ireland where they competed in Irish Kennel Club trials. A Staffordshire Bull Terrier Club of Ireland was created in 1947, but differences of opinion within the club broke it up by 1956. That didn’t diminish the number of Staffies around Dublin, nor the enthusiasm of their owners. By year’s end, a new Irish Staffordshire Bull Terrier Association was formed, but there was just one thing.

When England sought breed acceptance from the Kennel Club for the Staffordshire Bull Terrier, there were now two types, the English type, of course, and an Irish one that had been developed by Irish breeders to be taller, leaner, leggier, longer headed, and if possible, more athletic than the British type. Some believe these “Irish Staffs” had been influenced by the Scottish Blue Paul, the English White Terrier and the English Bull Terrier.

The Irish Staffordshire Bull Terriers had also been bred to be very game, and because they were used to hunt badgers, wild hogs, and foxes, they got another, well earned moniker: The “Sporting” Staffordshire Bull Terrier. For some reason, sources also refer to them as the  “old type.”

Lines within the Irish Staffordshire were created by families involved in the local Irish fancy, namely the Lees from Dublin using the Lee and Diddycye prefix before their dogs’ names, and the O’Flynn’s of Cork.  The dogs that had made their way from England to Ireland years before were the foundation for their dogs, and indeed, of all Irish Staffordshire Bull Terriers today.

All that said, the Irish Staffordshire Bull Terrier is not recognized as a separate breed, though it is regarded as an important progenitor of the American Pit Bull Terrier, and may have been influential in some bloodlines of early American Bulldogs.  Our readings point to it being a line or strain of Staffordshire Bull Terrier, albeit one with apparent differences. We could, we suppose, default to the definition that one Staffie forum member wrote: The definition of an Irish Staffordshire Bull Terrier? A Staffordshire Bull Terrier born and bred in Ireland. One could almost hear him chuckling as he wrote it.

We share the Irish Staffie here because it would be easy for a novice dog owner surfing the Internet to assume that the Irish Staffie is a breed apart from the Staffordshire Bull Terrier. It’s not.

You can see the rabbit hole we went down just from learning the difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England, but we’re glad we did.