Spinoni deserve a chance. But they haven't yet had the opportunity or attracted enough serious interest from experienced hunters to make evaluations anything but speculative.

The other breeds you mention have put in a least 50 to over 150 years of being looked at and utilized by North Americans.

Enough hunters bought "Labs, shorthairs, Brits, pointers and goldens" to ensure their popularity. Wirehaired pointing griffons, which you recognize as comparable to the Spinone, remain a rare breed. That should tell you something.

When they first arrived in the U.S., Labrador and golden retrievers were sneered and snickered at by veteran waterfowlers who wouldn't employ anything but a Chesapeake Bay retriever, Irish water spaniel or American water spaniel. Now the Irish is almost obsolete and the American is relatively rare. Curly-coated and flat-coated retrievers never caught on.

Unwarranted publicity can be near fatal to a breed's reputation. Witness the claims, over-publicity (and lack of the hunting style favored in this country) that the German shorthaired pointer overcame while reaching its deserved popular reputation vs. the Weimaraner's continuing struggle to overcome even more ballyhooing upon its introduction as a super-dog three-quarters of a century ago.

Two other German dock-tailed pointer/retriever breeds, subsequently, were quietly introduced, their promoters apparently having learned a lesson. Their advent in this country also coincided with the inception and growth of the North American Versatile Hunting Dog Association (NAVHDA).

This afforded a venue for demonstrating just how thoroughly gun dogs of the right breeding could be trained. The German wirehaired pointer and the pudelpointer were up to the task; the Drahthaar (wirehair) challenging the popular Kurzhaar (shorthair) in numbers as well as ability and the pudelpointer, comparatively obscure, but on a percentage basis, as good as they come.

How can I justify testimony about other breeds of gun dogs but confess to being uninformed about a relatively recent Italian import? I'm verging on being anachronistic and distrustful or modernity and contrived revisionist history. I hope to compensate for short-changing readers by not keeping up on future canine trends, notions and novelties by telling it like it is…and how it was, not something I imagined or gleaned from unverifiable literature.

Way back in "my time" the legendary gun writer Elmer Keith wrote a book entitled Hell! I Was THERE!

I'm echoing his claim. I've been hunting and training dogs since the late 1930s and have been paid for articles in numerous national publications since the 1940s, including 23 years as gun dog editor of Outdoor Life and as "Training Q&A" columnist for Gun Dog since its inception in 1981. Most of whatever know-how I possess came from training my own dogs and those of paying clients.

I acquired various dog breeds out of curiosity and the desire to know them from actual hands-on experience. At one time, I couldn't think of a recognized gun dog breed that I hadn't personally trained and hunted with. Now, as I approach 83 yeas of age, I'm forced to 'fess up that claim is no longer true. But I hope a comment by a friendly critic that "you must have written more stuff about hunting dogs than anyone, dead or alive," is verifiable.