Читать книгу Jack Russell Terrier: An Owner’s Guide - Robert Killick - Страница 12

The Terrier was most likely a late addition to the British Isles. Early man saw rats as a food source but later, when he had discovered how to keep the crops he had grown, they became a nuisance and he needed smaller wolf-like dogs to catch and kill them. For reasons not understood, every breed of Terrier emanates from the British Isles, and even though a few new breeds have been developed, they came from British breeds originally. The German Hunt Terrier (Jagdterrier) and the Czech Cesky Terrier are two examples. For millennia, small, feisty dogs of no particular type were kept around British homesteads to control rats and other small mammals considered vermin. These dogs doubled as farm guards. We can only assume that it was from an amalgam of many breeds that the first Terrier types evolved.