When it came to tracking birds, the use of traps, nets, and even falcons helped. But even with these aids, people still needed help finding the birds, moving them, holding them in a location, and even distracting and enticing them. The sensitive winged game targets (with almost endless escape routes in water and air) required a deliberate, patient, and restrained approach to hunting. As a result, humans needed a highly adept and responsive partner in order to get the job done.

Many early dogs were simply too impulsive or independent for the jobs. Persuading a dog to deliver a plump and delicious bird without damaging it (much less eating it) was an impossibly tall order for many an ancient trainer of canines. We had to carefully develop new dogs for these kinds of jobs.

Employing a dog in this kind of pursuit required a level of complex collaboration between man and dog. Here was a critical, unfilled niche in the canine job market. Enter the gun dog.

While the exact origin of the world’s first gun dogs is far from definitive, the ancestry of many of these fish and fowl canines can be traced back to the ancient Iberian and Italian Peninsulas, since archaeologists have discovered depictions of such dogs in early Etruscan artwork.(29) The medium-sized, curly-haired water dogs, common along the Italian peninsula as early as 700 BC, were used for a variety of functions in and around the water.(30)(31)(32)

Such small dogs were probably used for flushing out lowland birds and getting them into nets in river regions such as the Nile in northern Africa, possibly as early as the first century BC.(33) This practice of “fowling” gamebirds by trapping them with the aid of spaniels spawned the first “setting” spaniels: setters.(34) These dogs were adept at not only locating the hidden birds but actually holding them in place by crouching in poised hesitation rather than pushing them out, so that a net could be placed over the birds.(35) Since ancient times, both spaniels and setters have been bred into many different specific breeds, used in various regions for a range of specific hunting needs. They also became highly popular in Europe and the United States as companions.