Poaching salmon is disgraceful, as well as being illegal. Even when done by a Dalmatian. ("You mean an Albanian or someone from down that part of the world?" "No, a Dalmatian dog.") Daft, it sounds. The story was told in Tubbercurry District Court. Now, you may have seen on TV the amazing spectacle of bears on the west coast of North America, pulling salmon from the water as the migrating fish come to shallows or to a rocky incline where they have to jump out of the water to get up-river. And regularly you may find on the bank of a spawning river in Ireland, the corpse of a spent salmon, killed by an otter and left to be finished by other creatures after the otter has taken his portion - the rats, the crows and other eaters of carrion.
Owners of these dogs are accustomed to being stopped by well-meaning passers-by when they take their pets out for a walk, and asked many questions. Are they easily house-trained? Are they good guard-dogs? Do they need a lot of exercise? Are they good dogs to hunt and shoot with? Well, books have been written to show that they are, in fact, allround dogs. Said, even to be better in the field than many of the known sporting breeds. They are natural retrievers - now even of salmon, it seems. (Though in dubious circumstances.)
Leaving the river, for the moment, ancient Egyptian paintings, according to "How to Raise and Train a Dalmatian" by Arthur Liebers, show a dog with a white coat and the usual black spots following a chariot, and when people travelled by horse-drawn coach "the Dalmatian is found running along with the carriage, usually trotting under the front or rear axle or between the horses". They have an affinity with horses, many owners think. Another very useful role they play is in co-operation with firemen. It is said they can work to a degree in smoke-filled rooms and have rescued people from suffocation. They can bark very well, thank you. And now a Dalmatian has been trained to snatch salmon from the river, the Owengarriff?
Fisheries officers testified that three times in one week last February the defendant was seen instructing the dog to snatch salmon from the river (a tributary of the Moy) and was later seen "removing a fish from the dog's mouth, after instructing it to catch it". They are individualists. One owner of several Dalmatians says that while they kill the odd rabbit on the grounds, the two Burmese cats probably chalk up more corpses. Y