Jocelyn Lucas, the Rabbit-Hunting Sealyham Man

Jocelyn Lucas is pictured above, unloading his pack of over-large Sealyham terriers for a day of bushing rabbits in the field.

Lucas, it seems, was more of a rabbit-hunting man than a serious digger, though he did occasionally take his pack of terriers with him on a dig, allowing all the dogs to go underground at once.

Yes, that's right, as many as a dozen dogs underground at once!

At this point, most serious diggers must wonder how often Lucas took his dogs digging. The answer seems to be not too often. When he did go digging, it was with a full retinue of onlookers and paid diggers in tow. This was "hunting" as social occasion, and it was important to look both sporty and well-bred.

None of this is to take a thing away from his book, Hunt and Working Terriers (1931), in which Lucas does an admirable job of surveying the world of working terriers and laying out the basic elements of the sport. It is to say that Lucas picked a decidedly odd dog to use to pursue sport in the field.

Lucas is pictured above, in 1959, with some of his pups.

As far as I can tell, almost no one worked Sealyham terriers before Lucas, and almost no one has worked them since.

To be honest, the Sealyham is a breed created for the show ring and it has largely remained there. Though histories of the breed claim it was created by John Tucker Edwardes for the purpose of working fox undergounrd, Edwardes was long dead before this breed was pulled into the Kennel Club, and I can find no pictures of Edwardes' dogs at all.

As for the early Kennel Club Sealyhams, they do not look a bit like the modern dogs, and in fact are indistinguishable from cobby-bodied non-pedigree Jack Russell terriers with whom they no doubt share common roots.

Lucas, of course, finally gave up on his beloved Sealyham terriers, as the show ring continued to move to ever-larger dogs and ever-more-feathered coats.

Trying to breed something useful for the field and find a competitive edge in the marketplace, Lucas did a simple one-generation cross of a small Sealyham with a Norfolk terrier to create something he called the "Lucas Terrier," but the breed never caught on.

As an homage to Lucas, whom he met in the 1970s when he was a very an old man, Brian Plummer tried to revive the Lucas Terrier as a working breed. The few folks around that had already created their own "Lucas terriers" by making one-generatin crosses of show-Sealyham and show-Norfolk terriers bridled, objecting that Plummer's dogs were not "pure Lucas terriers" because he tried to inject some gameness into his dogs by outcrossing them with other true working terriers. For these "pure Lucas" types, the standard for a Lucas terrier was not that the dog worked, but that the dog conform to the "single generation" cross that -- ironically -- made their dogs impure "mutts" in the eyes of Kennel Club Sealyham owner.

In the end, the Lucas Terrier, which has never consisted of more than 100 dogs of various provenance, has split into two breeds each of which now sniffs that it alone is the "real" thing.

Ironically, so far as I can tell, neither camp seems to actually work their dogs to ground or to gun!

Beautiful!

As for hunting rabbits with pedigree terriers, it has never caught on for a simple reason: Any low-cost mutt of a terrier can bush rabbits, and almost none can do it as well as a common beagle, basset or dachshund.

So what is the future for the Lucas Terrier?

Time will tell, but right now it seems to be lost in the between the warm cushions of romantic history and the back of the living room couch.
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