Dogs of State: A.M. Foley

Dogs of State

by A.M. Foley

Maryland led the nation in 1964, creating a tradition that has since been adopted by twelve other states. Maryland was the first to elect an Official State Dog, naming (of course) the Chesapeake Bay Retriever. One year later, Pennsylvania jumped on the bandwagon, formally selecting the Great Dane, though the breed is German in origin and not locally developed, as were Chessies.

Other states subsequently chose breeds and categories foreign and domestic. Selected breeds originating within state borders were: North Carolina’s Plott Hound, the Texas Blue Lacy, New Hampshire’s Chinook, the Alaskan Malamute and Massachusetts’s Boston Terrier. As for Delaware, it may be known as “The First State,” but it was late to this party, not naming the Golden Retriever as its State

Major and Champ Biden 97

Dog until 2016. Even then it was a tepid endorsement, qualified with an annual expiration date. Thus Golden Retrievers are currently dethroned, replaced with a blanket designation of Delaware “rescue dogs.”

Delaware may have been inspired by President and Doctor Biden, who who, as private citizens Joe and Jill, adopted a rescue in 2018. Two years before Biden’s election victory, they adopted Major, a German Shepherd, from the Delaware Humane Society. Major has now gone from the pound to the White House, along with fellow Shepherd, Champ, purchased from a breeder in 2008. So there are now two “First Dogs,” if such is possible.

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In the case of Chesapeake Bay Retrievers, all of them are descendants of actual “rescues,” two dogs that were saved at sea in 1807 from a British brig sinking offshore into the Atlantic. The brig had foundered in an ocean gale while bound out of Newfoundland with a load of codfish for England.

The storm swept away all the sinking brig’s boats. The helpless crew apparently abandoned all hope. They were described as “in a state of intoxication” by the seaman, George Law, who effected their rescue. Law was in charge of a boat launched from his uncle’s ship Canton, which had chanced upon the scene on its way to Baltimore. He wrote some years later of boarding the brig:

“ . . . I found aboard her two Newfoundland pups, male and female, which I saved, and subsequently, on our landing the English crew at Norfolk, . . . I purchased these two pups of the English captain for a guinea apiece. Being bound again to sea, I gave the [male] pup, which was called Sailor, to Mr. John Mercer, of West River, and [the female] pup, which was called Canton, to Doctor James Stewart of Sparrow’s Point.

“The history which the English captain gave me of these pups was, that the owner of his brig was extensively engaged in the Newfoundland trade, and had directed his [agent] to select and send him a

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