Game, setter, match

An affectionate free spirit in a glamorous feathered coat, the English setter comes in Robin Reliant or Ferrari mode

- Matthew Dennison

THEY’RE like a drug, you just can’t give them up,’ Charlotte Jenkinson tells me about the English setters with which she and her husband have shared their lives for the past three decades. She ought to know. Mrs Jenkinson’s parents, Maj-Gen and Mrs Richard Keightley have been English-setter owners for more than half a century, since the Maj-Gen’s return from duty with the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards in Germany in the 1980s. For Mrs Jenkinson, English setters—‘incredibly affectionate, absolutely beautiful, irrepressible in their free-spiritedness and trustworthy’— have played a part in her life for almost as long as she can remember. Devoted to her current six-year-old, black-and-white or ‘blue belton’ setter Merlin, it’s not a situation she has any intention of changing.

In the third decade of the 21st century, the English setter, with a working history in these islands that can be traced back more than 500 years, is a breed in crisis. Last year, the Kennel Club registered only 212 puppies (against 44,311 labrador-retriever registrations) and the gene pool is dwindling. ‘People now only recognise them if they’ve had one,’ reflects Mrs Keightley, one of whose setters was recently mistaken for a crossbred collie. For English-setter fanciers, this is as baffling as it is troubling. ‘They’re very loving, very sensitive, very beautiful dogs,’ says Mrs Keightley, who currently has three bitches, ranging in age from 10 to 13: two orange beltons (their white coats flecked with orange), called Piccalilli and Freckles, and, like her daughter, a blue belton, Pixel.