Spurlaut In Dachshunds
by Jolanta Jeanneney
for DCA Newsletter
March 2005
As
the first storm of the new year was blanketing fields
with heavy, wet snow, I had a chance to sit by our warm stove and read the
latest issue of Full Cry. I have my favorite columns in this magazine and one of them
is by Richard McDuffie from
My convictions
that the dachshund should vocalize on rabbits were tested not so long ago when
we bred our wirehair dachshund Vamba, Gita’s
daughter, with hope of keeping a female pup out of the breeding. Vamba is a
quick rabbit hunter with a very strong voice, who opens easily, day in, day
out, whenever she comes across rabbit scent. We bred her to Falko,
a son out of Larry Gohlke’s Lolly,
the small, responsive and biddable male, who opens …sometimes. Our goal was to
reduce the size, improve biddability and maintain
voicing ability. From the litter of six we kept one female, Isa,
whose temperament was hard to match. I had high hopes
for this pup with a great coat, but quite quickly realized that her talent for
field work was lacking. She was given countless opportunities to work rabbits,
and with exposure to game, her desire to trail rabbits has grown strong. But even
though Isa was a vocal dog around the house, she was
mute on rabbits. In
addition, her style of trailing rabbits was different from what we are used to and
what is desirable. Sometimes she would keep her nose to the ground, but often
she would bound along like a gazelle, or a cartoon character, bouncing
up with all four feet off the ground, while looking far ahead. Still I loved Isa dearly for her
character and personality and was willing to wait, hoping that she would
improve with age. Also Isa
provided me with a learning opportunity because she was so different in the
field than most our dachshunds. Sometimes you learn the most from unexpected new
situations, and this was one of them.
Just about when she was to turn two
years old, Isa surprised me
by giving quite a few yelps on a rabbit. At the time she
was by herself in the enclosed field and her voice sounded strong. I could hardly believe my ears; to be sure that she did not
open just on the sight of a rabbit, next evening I let her out there when it
was dark. Again, she opened, not a lot, but she certainly was not mute. For the
next four months she accompanied me every time I took
other dogs to the beagle club. I watched her closely.
Yes, occasionally she would voice, but there was a huge difference between her
and other dogs who open easily while following rabbits
for a long distance. Her few barks were far from being useful in the field, and
her inability to share with me her excitement of the
chase left me disappointed. I would wander around the grounds looking for her
as she was hunting silently most of the time; I could not locate her easily and
the thrill of our hunt without a gun was completely gone. Finally, when the
right home came along, I decided to let her go with a
very heavy heart. It was one of the hardest decisions I
had to make, but a right one. Now, without Isa, we
are down to eleven dachshunds, and all of them voice on rabbits.
This innate ability of the dachshund
to voice on the scent track of live game is called in German “spurlaut” (spur=scent
track, laut=sound). In English
a spurlaut dog is called an open trailer or we say that a dog gives tongue.
I think that nobody will argue with
the point of view that the voicing ability is essential for the dachshund used
by hunters who take small game with a gun. The spurlaut dachshund makes the
hunt safer and more enjoyable.
But there are some risks involved with
spurlaut dachshunds running freely through a coyote territory and these days
coyotes are omnipresent. It happened to Teddy Moritz on several occasions when
the sound of the vocalizing dachshunds running rabbits in the natural habitat
attracted coyotes. The encounter of a mini dachshund and coyotes can have a
disastrous outcome. So, as Teddy says, “it is a tough
decision whether to breed for a lot of mouth on the track. In this country,
where coyotes can be a very deadly threat to a small dog, perhaps spurlaut
isn't as desirable as it is in countries where there are no coyotes.” It should
be pointed out that falconers use the miniature dachshund as a part of the
hunting team – he is supposed to jump and run the rabbit so the hawk has more
opportunities to catch the cottontail. Since the hawk in the tree can easily
see the moving rabbit, dachshunds do not need to voice to indicate the
direction of chase.
The spurlaut trait is genetically
controlled and the dog who does not have a gene for
spurlaut is going to stay mute even though he may be a hunting maniac with a
lot of hunting drive. A dog without a gene for spurlaut is going to be silent
even though he might be chasing rabbits every day of his life. Nevertheless,
this is not a simple black and white situation. Some dachshunds do not voice on
the scent track of live game such as rabbit or hare but they do open on the sight
of live game. In German this ability to open on the sight of game is called “sichtlaut” (sicht=sight). According
to the German literature, spurlaut is dominant over sichtlaut,
which in turn is dominant over muteness. And because
muteness is recessive it can be carried over many generations through
heterozygous carriers, who themselves are spurlaut. In consequence -- if a
breeder wants to maintain “spurlaut” in his breeding program, he has to select
for this trait, otherwise it can be easily lost. You should not be expecting
spurlaut dogs in the offspring of mute parents. However, it is quite common for
mute dogs to turn up in the offspring of spurlaut parents. Of course, from a
breeding point of view dachshunds who are homozygous
for spurlaut gene, are the most valuable. They could be bred to a mute partner
and still produce 100% spurlaut offspring.
The voice is triggered by the scent of the track but the
stimulus threshold necessary for the release of voice is different for every
dog. Some dogs open very easily, just when they get in contact with the scent.
Other dogs have to follow the scent track for a while before they open. It
looks like they need some time for the momentum to build up. Some dachshunds
voice on a relatively cold track while others open only when the scent is
really fresh and strong. All these variations can be easily observed at field
trials conducted on cottontails. In my own experience,
the speed of chase is a factor as well. Dogs who pursue the game with a good
speed usually voice more easily than the ones who move slowly. The variation in
expression of spurlaut in individual dachshunds suggests involvement of modifier
genes with small quantitative effects, but at this point
this is just a hypothesis. Certainly future
I have never attempted to breed a
litter of puppies out of mute parents, but I have bred many litters out of
spurlaut parents. Our only inbred litter was out of spurlaut Gita and her
spurlaut son Sherman. We kept two females, Vamba and Vesper, and they were
raised together, in the same environment. They were taken on walks together and
explored scents of neighboring fields and woods. Vamba had opened on a rabbit
scent shortly before she turned six month old; she was fascinated by the scent
and was a true self-starter. Being very fast she could really put pressure on a
rabbit and her voice was like a machine-gun in the woods. On quite a few occasions,
she bumped deer in the woods and opened on them too. Vesper, even though she was
quite keen to explore the scent of game and follow it, never opened and
remained mute until at the age of a year and a half, when we found a new home
for her. There are more examples of mute and spurlaut dogs occurring in the
same litter. In wires bred by David and Trudy Kawami, littermates Avi (spurlaut) and
To illustrate how easy it is to lose
the spurlaut trait in a breeding program, which does not include a screening
process for the trait, let’s go back to the example of
Vamba and Vesper. We carried this bloodline by keeping spurlaut Vamba in our
breeding program. But what would have happened if we had
chosen to keep Vesper instead? If genetically mute and homozygous recessive
Vesper had been bred to another dog just like her, she would have produced a 100%
mute offspring. The gene for spurlaut would have been lost in this particular situation
completely. Since spurlaut is dominant over muteness – it is easy to carry it
from one generation to the next one if you screen for it, but once it is lost,
that is it. You have to outcross to a spurlaut dog to introduce it to your
bloodline again.
Part of the problem with breeding
for spurlaut is the difficulty of screening puppies for this trait. When
puppies are born, we have no way of knowing which ones are going to be spurlaut
and which ones are going to be mute. You cannot select for spurlaut when
puppies are under 16 weeks old. Moreover, it is not
realistic to expect a puppy to open on its first rabbit though some can do it;
pups have to be exposed to the scent of rabbits or other game and their hunting
instinct needs to be awakened first. Only when puppies actually trail rabbits
can you expect that they will voice on them. Some are very precocious and open
when they are 3-4 months old, but the majority of spurlaut dachshunds, in my experience, open at the age of 6-7 months. Of course,
there are some dogs who need a lot of work on rabbits
before they voice, and the mute ones never open or open very rarely. The Germans
believe that the dogs who show good spurlaut at an
early age tend to be good producers of this trait. Therefore, dachshunds who pass the spurlaut test before the age of one year, get a
special performance award Sp/J, where J (for Jugend) indicates this
precociousness.
Since screening puppies for spurlaut
is impossible at a very early age, certainly not at the age of 8-12 weeks, you
maximize your chance of maintaining the trait if you use strong spurlaut dogs
for breeding in the first place. Still, we know it is not a 100% guarantee, as
some homozygous recessive mute dogs will segregate in the offspring of
heterozygous parents; testing is necessary.
These days you can find some open
trailing dachshunds at field trials, but majority of field trial dachshunds run
rabbits silently. It is a result of many generations of breeding without
applying selection for the trait. We really do not know the frequency of the
spurlaut gene in the population of American dachshunds. Many dogs are never
taken to the field and are never exposed to the scent of rabbits or hare. When I left
Some people might be under the
impression that the majority of European-bred dachshunds are spurlaut, which is
far from the truth. There are a lot of breeders in
This concludes the first part of my reflections on spurlaut. The second part will be
published in the next issue of the newsletter. If you have any comments,
questions or experiences related to this topic, contact me at Jolanta
Jeanneney, 1584 Helderberg Trail,