How we found the Polish Hunting Spaniel

At the beginning of 2019, we decided it was the right time to add a second dog to our family. We already had Nell, our working cocker spaniel, and assumed we would simply get another working cocker. Finding one in the Netherlands turned out to be much harder than we expected.

Then somebody replied to a Facebook post of mine and asked whether I had ever considered a Polish Hunting Spaniel.

I had never heard of the breed.

A few days of frantic Googling later, I was on a flight to Warsaw.

At that point we were not looking for a future breeding dog, a show dog or the beginning of a kennel. We wanted another spaniel, and the main thing I cared about was whether the puppy would fit well with Nell. I had also become increasingly aware of how much difference a breeder can make, so I wanted to meet the breeder in person before making a decision.

That is how we found Grace.

I had read that, rather than choosing a puppy on appearance or first attraction, it was often better to let the breeder help match the puppy to the home. I found that slightly difficult at the time because choosing a dog feels intensely personal, but I also knew I was choosing somebody who would share our life for well over a decade. The match with Nell mattered more than whether a particular puppy happened to catch my eye first.

Grace gradually changed the direction of our lives.

She showed an early aptitude for scent work and agility, travelled easily with us and was the sort of dog who made me want to understand more about what she could do and why. One course led to another. Then books. Then seminars. Then, somehow, several thousand kilometres of driving to dog shows despite the fact that I had never had the slightest ambition to become a person who drives several thousand kilometres to dog shows.

The shows themselves were never really the point. What caught my attention were the judges' evaluations of structure and movement. I wanted to understand what they were seeing, which led me further into canine anatomy, biomechanics and the relationship between structure and function.

Nell had already given me a reason to care about this. As she grew older, physiotherapy revealed physical problems that had probably been accumulating quietly for years. She was a highly motivated dog and had always thrown herself into life at full speed, which also meant she was very good at working through discomfort. That experience changed how I looked at apparently successful, active dogs: being willing to keep going does not necessarily tell you that the body is coping well.

Learning more about structure made the Polish Hunting Spaniel breed standard much more interesting to me. The breed was developed to work in difficult terrain, including fields, reeds, marshes and water, and its proportions, movement and physical type make much more sense when viewed against that job. Structure is not separate from working ability; it determines how efficiently and comfortably a dog can keep doing the work over time.

I also began to appreciate how useful a small breed community can be. The PSM population is still relatively compact, and many owners and breeders know one another and the dogs behind their dogs. That makes it possible to learn a great deal about families, health, temperament and working characteristics over generations rather than seeing each dog only as an isolated individual.

What interested me most, though, was that the breed's original hunting abilities have obvious applications beyond hunting.

A PSM does not need to spend their life working with a hunter for the underlying abilities to remain useful. Searching, tracking, retrieving, scent discrimination, working in varied terrain and making decisions with a human partner all transfer naturally into modern activities such as nosework, tracking, detection work and other scent-based tasks. I want the dogs we breed to retain those abilities even when their lives look very different from the lives of the dogs for whom the breed was originally developed.

Over time, Grace stopped being simply the dog through whom we discovered the breed and became the dog through whom I started thinking seriously about breeding.

That happened slowly. There was no moment when I decided that because I loved Grace I should have puppies from her. In fact, I spent a long time asking whether breeding from her was a good idea at all. The more I learnt about structure, health, temperament, genetics and the breed population, the more specific that question became.

Eventually the answer was yes.

The first Zeta Centauri litter was born in 2023. By then, what had begun as an attempt to find a second spaniel had turned into something rather larger than either of us expected.