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Button, one of Johnny Holden's Boykin Spaniels, takes a well-earned break after an exuberant workout.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Button retrieves a dummy in a training exercise. Boykins have been bred for decades as compact hunting dogs that are especially suited to swampy areas and small boats.
Photo by Mic Smith
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With dog whistles and remote controls for dummy launchers dangling around his neck, Johnny Holden prepares an enthusiastic Snuff for a training session.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Johnny Holden is one of 15 "Gold Level" breeders recognized by the Boykin Spaniel Society. Here, he walks with his dogs (from left) Snuff, Button and Jones.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Holden, posing with (from left) Button, Jones and Snuff, breeds and trains Boykin Spaniels on his LockHaven Farm in Galivants Ferry, SC.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Boykin Spaniels are bred to be working, hunting dogs, but they also need to be an active member of their human family. One of Johnny Holden's dogs poses during a training exercise.
Photo by Mic Smith
Jones, Button and Snuff sit quietly in their kennels as the trailer carrying the three Boykin Spaniels bounces along behind the pickup truck. It is a fine day—cool and cloudless, with only an unmistakable anticipation hanging in the air—and Johnny Holden parks in a field on his Galivants Ferry farm and gets out, dog whistles and remote controls dangling around his neck.
Holden walks into the field and sets up two electronic launchers, then goes back to the trailer and lets Jones out first. The little dog, with his floppy ears and big yellow eyes and curly brown hair, sniffs around excitedly, big tongue panting, and rolls around in the grass on his back. But as soon as Holden yells—“Heel! Sit!”—the dog heels, and sits, and perks up, ready for action.
With the punch of a button on his necklace, Holden fires one of the launchers, propelling a rubber duck dummy in the air with a loud bang, simulating a hunt. But the dog doesn’t move. Only when Holden gives a voice command does Jones take off, bounding and leaping through the field at LockHaven Farm to find the dummy wherever it has landed in the tall grass.
“Atta boy!” Holden yells as Jones zigzags with his nose to the ground and comes up with the dummy in his mouth.
“Good boy!” Holden yells again, and Jones wags his little nub of a tail as he delivers the rubber duck to Holden’s outstretched hand. “Now heel!”
And Jones heels, and sits, and perks up, ready to do it again—a rhythm of action that, as everyone who knows the South Carolina state dog will tell you, is inherent to this special breed of history and heart.
A well-bred past
By now, the Boykin Spaniel’s origin story has become something of a legend. It goes like this: In the early 1900s, a banker named Alexander White was walking home from church in Spartanburg when a little stray dog began following him. He fell in love with the dog and especially liked the way the dog retrieved. White wasn’t a dog trainer, but he knew one—his friend and hunting partner, L.W. “Whit” Boykin.
Boykin trained the little dog, named “Dumpy,” who turned out to be a gem. So, Boykin bred Dumpy and thus founded a line of compact hunting dogs that were especially good for hunting in the Wateree swamps, where hunters used small boats. (The Boykin has been referred to as “the dog that doesn’t rock the boat.”)
“Boykins think they can do anything a Lab can do, and they pretty much can; it’s just that their legs are a little lower, so it takes them a little longer,” says Holden, a longtime breeder. “I tell people, ‘If you’re going to hunt big water, get you a Lab or a Chesapeake. If you’re going to hunt swamps or duck impoundments, Boykins are the perfect dog.’”
Because of their reputation as loyal and outstanding hunters, their popularity soared—so much so that, in the 1970s, a Camden veterinarian named Dr. Peter McKoy noticed how many of the dogs coming through his vet clinic were being called “Boykins” just because they had brown curly hair. He was worried that, without an official registry, the true breed would die out. And because the American Kennel Club wouldn’t officially recognize the breed, a group of Camden citizens founded the Boykin Spaniel Society in 1977.
The society solicited members, compiled data, collected dues, held meetings, wrote bylaws and established breed standards—all the things needed to become an official registry.
“In that first year, they got 677 dogs to start the foundation stock (essentially, the first dogs to define the bloodline) of the Boykin Spaniel Society. And here we are, 58 years later, and we’ve got over 50,000 dogs recorded and almost 170,000 litters recorded,” says Dawn Crites, the administrative director of the society.
Johnny Holden, for his part, is one of the society’s 15 recognized “Gold Level” breeders, a designation for breeders who are vetted by the BSS Board of Trustees and who volunteer to have their dogs genetically tested for hereditary diseases before breeding and selling them.
It’s a job Holden takes seriously. “A lot of people, you know, just think you can take two little brown dogs and cross them, and get you a bunch of good puppies,” he says. “But it don’t work that way. You’ve got to have your pedigree there. The No. 1 thing I breed for is health, and the No. 2 is pedigree.”
Among the issues he screens for, the main ones are exercise-induced collapse, collie eye anomaly, hip dysplasia and degenerative myelopathy.
“You get excellent by breeding to excellent,” Holden says. “But what happens, my theory is: People want to get into breeding. They buy them a female. They don’t do any research, and they don’t buy it from a reputable breeder. And if you don’t test, you don’t know.”
What Holden does know is that his love of dogs runs deep—all the way back to when he would go visit his grandaddy, a Baptist preacher and retired farmer, after church on Sundays. His granddaddy often had a litter of puppies, and when Holden was 12, he received a little black-and-white feist squirrel dog named Bandit.
“I tell you … we had the most fun. Bandit was perfect,” Holden recalls. “He had a black patch on one of his eyes, and man, we cleaned the squirrels out. I don’t believe there were more than four squirrels left in Horry County.”
Then Holden got into coon hunting. But his wife, Terri, who runs LockHaven Farm with him, didn’t like him going out hunting at night. So, one Christmas she gave him a black Lab named J.D., who, in Holden’s words, “trained me more than I trained him.”
Almost a decade later, one Sunday at church, the preacher asked the congregation if anyone wanted to help donate to new stained glass windows. Holden’s arm shot up, despite not having the money. He came up with it, though, by selling a litter of puppies. They were beagles, which he was raising to hunt rabbits.
For years he bred beagles and labs. But when a friend of his—a private detective who kept a Boykin Spaniel in the patrol car for companionship—decided he couldn’t keep a pet any longer, Holden took the dog. That’s when his career as a Boykin breeder began.
And boy does Holden love him a Boykin.
“They get very attached to you, and they’re very personal dogs, and they’re so smart,” he says. “They just love you to death. And maybe some of them are stubborn, but that’s the cool thing about dogs. They’re just like people. No two of them are exactly alike. They have personalities.”
It’s a sentiment you’ll hear from just about every Boykin owner. “They’re very loyal and affectionate,” Crites says. “They just worm their way into your soul to where you just can’t breathe without them.”
But they are also working dogs, as Crites and Holden both note. This doesn’t mean they can’t be family dogs; it just means that a Boykin needs to be an active member of the family.
“A Boykin is what we call ‘a companionable gun dog,’” Crites says. “They do not do well as a kennel dog. They need to be with their family, and they’re a part of your family. They don’t have to be hunting dogs, but they will find a job. You have to stimulate their nose and give them something to do in order to get that hunting drive focused somewhere, or they will focus it where you don’t want it to go.”
For this reason, some breeders will only sell to hunters. But Holden isn’t one of them.
“We sell a lot of dogs for family dogs,” he says. “And it excites me more knowing my dogs are going to a loving home.”
On command
Back in the field, the 6-year-old Jones gets crated, and the 2-year-old Button gets released. And as eager as Button is to expend some of that hunt-drive energy, Button sits, and heels, and perks up on command.
It’s only after the dummy flies into the air and lands, only after Holden gives the voice command, only after Button bounds out into the field and finds the dummy—it’s only then that Button hears those two words every Boykin wants to hear:
“Good dog!”
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Get There
The Boykin Spaniel Society will host its annual Spring National Field Trial April 9–12 in Camden. For more information, as well as to find a list of reputable Boykin Spaniel breeders, visit boykinspaniel.org.