From a distance, the half-dozen gun dogs romping in a cut clover field looked like a bunch of English setters. But up close, the genial pack of long-tailed, long-haired black and white canines were clearly different in their body shapes, head sizes and running style from the more familiar setters.

Setter-like in appearance when viewed from a distance, the Large Munsterlander is a versatile hunting dog that hunts and points upland game birds, tracks feathered and furred game and retrieves both waterfowl and upland birds.

“These are just some farm dogs we use for hunting,” Curt Shreve tells some of the people who casually ask what kind of dog he is using to point ruffed grouse and woodcock in the northern Minnesota woods or to retrieve ducks and geese out of cattail sloughs in the southern part of his home state.

“I don’t mean to sound flippant,” Shreve says. “But I do get kind of tired of explaining that these are not weird looking English setters but are Large Munsterlanders, originally developed in Germany as versatile hunting dogs and brought to North America in the 1970s to hunt upland game birds and waterfowl.”

For 20 years, Shreve has had a kennel full of Large Munsterlanders, a breed that he chose for hunting woods grouse and prairie grouse, ringneck pheasants and bobwhite quail, plus all the species of waterfowl in this country.

“My initial interest in these gun dogs came about because of their status as versatile gun dogs produced by the German Large Munsterlander breed club in Europe to hunt and point game birds, track all species of feathered and furred game and to retrieve any type of small game shot with a gun,” Shreve says.

“Though I was generally pleased with the first LMs I got 20 years ago, I could see early on that the line we had needed some re-focusing of prey drive and improvements in pointing abilities. So our breeding group started to import some LMs from Germany we thought would bring in the blood we needed to get a more methodical, consistent search for game birds and a more dependable point from our dogs,” Shreve recalls.

The conformation standard for Large Munsterlanders is flexible enough to include a fairly wide range of sizes, weights and body types while still maintaining definite standards in coat color and hair length. The Large Munsterlander is a “pointer” first and foremost, with the dog’s pointing instinct firmly embedded by 100-plus years of breeding in Germany.

“Land sharks” was what Shreve called some of those first imported LMs because their prey drive made them want to hunt everything with a heartbeat. “Some of these imported dogs came from parts of Germany where hunting big game was a major objective. Those dogs had been bred as trackers that would follow wounded wild boar, bring them to bay and kill them if necessary,” Shreve says.

“Many of the early imported LMs, when brought to Minnesota, tended to chase deer and moose in the woods and fight with raccoons and predators anywhere the dogs could find them. They were not hostile toward other dogs or sharp with their handlers, but they were certainly strong to the stage of being overly aggressive at hunting anything with fur,” Shreve says.

“On a quail hunt down in Texas, we actually had one of these dogs take on a full-size wild steer and probably would have won the battle if the dog’s owner hadn’t intervened.

“This hard-to-control exuberance for getting game, in addition to making them hard to handle, compromised their pointing abilities,” Shreve notes. “So in our breeding program, we re-directed the prey drive by pairing these hard-charging German Munsterlanders with some of our more cooperative American-bred LMs.

“The results have produced a line with strong hunting and pointing instincts combined with good tracking and retrieving abilities—all traits that have produced gun dogs good for upland game and waterfowl hunting. Not every litter inherits all these traits, but in each litter there are more pups showing what we’re after,” Shreve says.