About Llewellin Setters - White Rock Kennels

Llewellin Setters foot hunting birddogs for bird hunter of quail and pheasant. Llewellin puppies and started dogs available.

There are lots of great websites with detailed histories of the Llewellin Setter and its place within the English Setter breed. Please see our links page for directions to the source material on this subject. We are offering the following summary to convey the essence of the subject as briefly as possible to visitors of this website.

There are two basic types of English Setter – bench setters which are bred for show rings, and field setters which are bred for hunting and field trial activities. Llewellin Setters are a particular strain of field setter which can trace undiluted ancestry back to the late 1800’s kennel of an English nobleman named Richard Purcell Llewellin (1840-1925). Prior to that time in England, English Setters were not a well standardized breed. They had for centuries been bred up from spaniel stock and could have best been described at that time as a loose collection of similar types of dogs. The first serious recorded effort to standardize a hunting English Setter was undertaken in the mid-1800’s by Edward Laverack (1800-1877). He had only mixed success in developing a quality hunting dog, but did succeed in developing a distinct line of dogs which are considered the progenitors of modern bench English Setters.

Using Lavarack’s stock as a starting point, Llewellin spent considerable resources collecting various types of setting-type hunting dogs from all over England for the purpose of developing and standardizing a quality field english setter. Mr. Llewellin was ultimately successful in developing a field english setter which was consistently reproducible and effective at hunting. Dogs from his bloodlines performed so well in field trials in England and the USA during the late 19th and early 20th century that the American Field Dog Stud Book granted them a separate classification for registration purposes as LLEWELLIN SETTERS within the FDSB English Setter registry."

The genius of Mr. Llewellin’s work was that he developed a standard, true field English Setter with an optimum balance of hunting skills, which served as the original blood of the modern field setter. Most of what matters in field setters today springs from the Llewellin Setter, which has lost none of its legendary ability in the full range of upland bird hunting skills.