Shoeleather Llewellins

This following article appeared in Issue 53 of Purina’s Today’s Breeder

The Lustrous Llewellin

Sitting on the steps behind his stately Illinois farmhouse, Joe Noe pauses in mid-sentence, then points.

In a nearby dog pen a white-and-black Llewellin Setter is locked in a classic pose, nose up, tail straight up, long hair flowing in the breeze. The dog, “Gus,” holds steady until a sparrow finally flies away.

“See how pretty that is. The dog has never been in the field. All he’s known is the inside of a house until recently, ” Joe says excitedly. “It’s just in these dogs naturally to point like that. And that’s what you want in a dog.”

No question that’s what Joe wants in a dog. This experienced trainer wants stylish points and birdy Llewellin setters in his Shoeleather Kennel in Blandinsville, Ill. In nearly 40 years with Llewellins, Joe has only fallen deeper in love with this historic strain of English Setter.

“They are the purest, oldest strain of setter known,” Joe says, The finest, too, he’ll tell you.

Field Trial Winners

Since starting his kennel in 1967, Joe has placed puppies in nearly every state as well as Canada, England and South Africa. Most go to hunters drawn to the Llewellin temperament, instincts and biddability. But in recent years, dogs bred in Joe’s kennel have also enjoyed field trial success.

Blackeyed-Storm is the winningest Llewellin among setters competing in American Kennel Club trials. She has 12 placements in horseback open and amateur gun dog events. Owned by Michael Eades of Enumclaw, Wash., 4-year-old “Storm” is out of Joe’s top bitch, Blizzard’s Chessie, and Joe’s top sire, Adam’s Spur.

“Chessie” and “Spur” sired another top trial dog in Shoeleather’s Tanner. Owned by Teresa and Keith Hickam of Royal City, Wash., “Tanner” has six AKC placements. Last March Tanner also took fourth at the Canadian Kennel Club’s inaugural National Pheasant Shooting Dog Championship and won the first walking Midwest Llewellin Shooting Dog Championship.

The latter is a source of pride for Joe. Ever the historian, he notes, “no pure Llewellin has placed in the National Bird Dog Championship since 1915.”

To rectify that–and to fulfill a promise made to his dog-breeding mentor, the late Robert J. Johnson of London, Ky–Joe and his wife, Lorri, have worked to improve Llewellin trials by creating standards, judging and organizing events. The first was judging an all-Llewellin trail in West Liberty, Ky., in 1994. Then came judging and organizing the 1997 Llewellin Setter Classic in Tiskilwa, Ill. The capper was hosting last spring’s championship near McLeansboro, Ill. That championship was a first for Llewellins and was sanctioned by The American Field, for which Joe has been a regular correspondent.

“What’s next? A pure Llewellin that qualifies for the National Field Trial Championship in Grand Junction, Tenn.,” Joe says, “That’s the dream Mr. Johnson put in me when I got my first dogs. I promised that man I would get these dogs qualified in the Nationals.”

Joe pauses to wipe tears streaming down his face. In front of him is a table covered with books and magazine articles on setters. Walls around him are filled with pictures of setters, some dating to the breed’s hey-day in the early 1900s.

“Llewellins started it. They need to finish it. I love them,” he says, “It’s time to get the dream completed.”

The Dream

That Joe dreams “the dream” is proof of fate, if not destiny. A native of Naperville, Ill., Joe frequently passed Johnson’s kennel on his way to Milligan College in northeast Tennessee. Eventually curiosity won and Joe stopped at the sign advertising “Laverack and Llewellin Setters.”

Before leaving Joe spent $40 of $100 he had saved for the semester on a Llewellin named Blue Shale. With “Blue” at his side, Joe finished his stay at Milligan studying religion and bird-dog training. Fortunately for Joe, Blue was a natural.

Joe tells of seeing a covey of quail flush one Sunday on his way to preach. Since he had an hour to spare and since Blue was his constant companion, Joe pulled over.

“We headed toward a patch of honeysuckle high up in the hollow and all of a sudden Blue stopped with his tail straight up in the air and wouldn’t move,” Joe says. “I said, ‘Go on Blue,’ I said it again, and again. But he wouldn’t move. Finally I took two steps forward and the air was full of little brown bombs.”

“I said, ‘Oh, that’s a point,’ And he was still standing there. That was his and my first point.”

Far from their last though. Blue lived 17 years and “only busted one covey of quail in his life.” Before long Joe acquired another dog from Johnson. Hunting with those Llewellins changed Joe forever.

A Companion Breed

“What’s amazing about these dogs is they are your best friend and your hunting companion. They can stay in the house and get along with kids. But they also go out in the field and perform,” Joe says, “I don’t worry about the run. It’s in them. And I’ve never seen anything beat them as far as nose.”

Nose and nervous energy are the first things Joe looks for in puppies. Before they can hear or see, Joe will briefly remove a mother from the whelping box.

Joe also favors dogs with long and deep rib cages, viewing those as indicators of lung capacity. He wants footpads that are oval, ears that sit low on the head, and shoulders and hips that are strong.

“There’s no reason you can’t have a high-style, hard-running dog with good conformation,” Joe says.

Joe also keeps a keen eye out for dogs he calls “throwbacks” –dogs like Shoeleather Fred and Blizzard’s Rodney. Both have unique tufts of hair on their foreheads that are reminiscent of early Llewellins, Joe is particularly proud of the black tuft worn by “Fed,” a tri-color he calls “the future.”

“Mr. Johnson told me to look for dogs with throwback characteristics,” Joe says. “Those are latent genes. That’s what created Llewellins. So when you breed them, they throw better dogs.”

Constant Llewellins

Joe explains details like that with ease. While he has changed occupations frequently–from outdoor writer to preacher to teacher to electrical worker back to outdoor writer–Llewellins have remained a constant.

Since marrying Lorri in 1986, Joe has generally maintained a full kennel. At present he has 30 dogs. Five dogs live in the 12-room farmhouse, which was built by Amish workers in 1922 and is graced with beautiful wood trim. That’s not what sold the Noes on their 14-acre farm though.

“I loved the house. Joe really liked the outbuildings,” Lorri says. “Those were a must.”

One shed shelters a quail aviary. Several others house setters. The largest outbuilding is a former dairy barn that’s now home to dogs and horses. During a recent visit, Amish workers were putting a new metal roof on the barn.

“The dog barn gets a new roof before I get my tile floor in the kitchen,” Lorri says, laughing.

No surprise there. On their first date, Joe regaled Lorri about Llewellins and field trails.

“I asked, ‘What’s a field trial?’” recalls Lorri, a trauma nurse, “He told me about horses and dogs and that sounded good. I’ve always liked horses and dogs.”

Nutrition & Training

Good thing. Eighteen years later Lorri and her husband spend long hours on kennel chores. One they don’t mind is pouring Purina dog food into bowls.

“I’ve tried every maker of dog food, including locally produced feeds. Nothing outperforms Purina,” Joe says. “Nothing keeps my dogs up, maintains their coat, their health, their body weight and their energy level like Purina Pro Plan. Dogs utilize the food better than anything else I’ve fed.”

Llewellin training is different than training many other breeds, at least at Shoeleather Kennel. And training may take time. “It’s not that they don’t have natural ability, they do,” Joe says. “but a setter wants to bond with one person and be loved by that person.”

So Joe is patient with his dogs. That includes Gus, who so proudly pointed a sparrow. After living in a house with no field experience for his first four years, Gus was recently returned to Joe by an owner forced to choose between his fiancee and a Llewellin.

“He gave up the dog to marry the girl, which is not something I would do,” Joe says. To the contrary, Joe has spent his life trying to restore long-lost luster to Llewellins.

Recapturing the Long-Lost Setter

The future looked bright for Llewellin Setter in the early 1900s. Stylish dogs blessed with natural hunting ability, this strain dominated early bird-dog field trials in the United States.

Count Gladstone IV won the country’s first pointing dog National Championship in 1896 at West Point, Miss. Other Llewellins followed suit with such success that they earned a separate registry. In 1901 The American Field registered Llewellin Setters in its studbook – the first strain within a breed classification to be recognized by a dog registry. That practice persists today.

But dominance was short-lived for Llewellins, whose last National Champion was LaBesita in 1915. From that moment forward, pointer took over the field-trial scene, gaining in popularity because they trained faster and could better handle pressure.

Within a few years Llewellins became mostly an afterthought among field trialers, even though their genes run strong in today’s field-trial English Setters. In fact, Gun Dog magazine writer Dave Duffey once wrote, “It is claimed that 18 or the 24 setters to win the National Bird Dog Championship were pure or predominantly Llewellin.”

Nevertheless, after World War II purity of Llewellin genes became less important to all but a handful of breeders. One of those Llewellin purists is Joe Noe of Blandinsville, Ill., a walking repository of the breed’s history with a library of setter books and articles that is the envy of fellow Llewellin enthusiasts.

Joe can tell you all about the breeding of these dogs in the 1800s and was carried on by R. Purcell Llewellin for whom the strain is named. Llewellin started shipping setters to the United States in the 1870s. Ironically, Joe says, those dogs were culls–dogs whose hair Llewellin deemed too short and whose pace the average English sportsman considered too fast. As it turned out, that combination was perfectly suited to the 160-acre farms of the day used for hunting and field trialing in this country.

“The Llewellin, because of its range and out-there mentality, its nose and its high-pointing tail style changed the standard for bird dogs forever,” Joe says.

These days Joe breeds Llewellins with a focus on returning the dog to its former prominence. He conducts DNA testing on every dog in his Shoeleather Kennel as proof of purity, even though the American Kennel Club lumps Llewellin under the heading English Setter. he looks for “throwback” traits reminiscent of the 1900s and earlier. And he dreams of the day when a pure Llewellin will again be a dominant force on the national field-trial scene.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 8:23 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.