A wonderful collection of charming stories about days spent afield with gundogs was published in 1938. The title was The Dog in Sport, and in it, author J. Wentworth Day wrote, “There were Ponto and Tanto, the two great, solemn-eyed, double-nosed Spanish pointers who lurked in a dignified way about the house, a gentle gloom upon their countenances. They were the grandchildren of the Spanish pointers owned by my great-grandfather, Robert Asplan, the little, old, dapper gentleman who wore black knee-breeches with stockings and silver-buckled shoes.”

When I first read those lines I almost said aloud, “What the heck is a double-nosed Spanish pointer?” I’d heard about Spanish pointers; they were said to be the granddaddy of the modern (English) pointer. But “double-nosed”? What was that? A nose that did double duty, air scenting and tracking? Or did double-nosed describe a physical feature? Searching the literature, I eventually found out. Freeman Lloyd, a noted American journalist, wrote in an issue of the AKC’s Gazette magazine published in the 1930s that some dogs had noses “like the double barrels of a shotgun.”

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