Irish Red and White Setter: Price in India, Heat and Health

What an Irish Red and White Setter is, and what the standards actually say

An Irish Red and White Setter is a large Irish pointing gundog, FCI standard number 330, carrying clear islands of solid red on a pearl-white base coat and bred primarily for the field rather than the show bench.

The breed sits in FCI Group 7, Pointing Dogs, Section 2, British and Irish Pointers and Setters, Subsection Setter, alongside the English Setter at number 2, the Gordon Setter at number 6 and the Irish Red Setter at number 120. Its country of origin is Ireland, its official authentic language is English, and it is subject to a working trial under FCI nomenclature.

The standard opens with an instruction, not a description, and that is unusual. FCI 330 states that the Irish Red & White Setter is bred primarily for the field, that the standard must be interpreted chiefly from this point of view, and that all judges at bench shows must judge the exhibits chiefly from the working standpoint. The AKC standard repeats the same sentence almost word for word. Two registries on two continents therefore agree that a show judge is being told to think like a field judge, which is worth knowing before you buy a dog described as a show line.

Size, and the three registries that disagree about whether to give one

Two of the three registries give an identical height range and the third gives none at all. The FCI and the AKC agree exactly, 62 to 66 cm for dogs and 57 to 61 cm for bitches American Kennel Club. The Kennel Club's breed standard, last updated on 1 November 2025, carries no Size section whatever, running straight from Coat to Colour to Faults. That is not a quirk of this breed: the Kennel Club's Irish Setter standard omits size in exactly the same way. So a page quoting a Kennel Club height for either Irish setter has taken it from somewhere else.

Coat and colour, where the breed is decided

Colour is the one place the standard uses the word eliminating. FCI 330 requires a base colour of white with solid red patches, described as clear islands of red colour, and permits flecking but not roaning around the face and feet, up the foreleg as far as the elbow and up the hindleg as far as the hock. Visible and excessive roaning, flecking or mottling anywhere else is an eliminating fault. The Kennel Club puts the same rule in plainer words, requiring the dog to be clearly particoloured with a pearl white base, and adds that any other colour or combination of colours is unacceptable.

The coat itself is long, silky, fine feathering on the back of the fore and hind legs and on the outer ear flap, with a reasonable amount on the flank extending onto the chest and throat to form a fringe, and short flat hair everywhere else. Slight wave is permissible and curl is not. That distribution matters more in Chennai than in Kildare, because the feathering sits exactly where an Indian dog picks up ticks and holds monsoon damp, which the grooming section below works through in detail.

The older breed: what the registers say about which setter came first

The Irish Red and White Setter is the older of Ireland's two setters and the solid red Irish Setter was bred out of it, and both breeds' own governing standards say so in writing rather than leaving it to folklore.

Most English-language breed pages present the Irish Red and White Setter as a white-marked version of the famous red dog. The registers say the opposite, and they say it twice, from both directions.

So the descent is not contested between the two documents, it is stated in both. FCI 120 says the red breed is derived from the red and white breed. FCI 330 says the red and white is the older and that selective breeding evolved the solid red out of it. English is the official authentic language of both standards, so neither sentence is a translation artefact FCI breeds nomenclature entry.

The Kennel Club, writing independently, opens its Irish Red & White Setter page with the sentence "The Red and White Setter was the original Irish Setter";, and explains that the colour was preferred because it made the dog easier to spot when working at a distance. On the Irish Setter page the same registry describes the red dog as the product of selective colour breeding and some outcrossing to get a racier build and a longer head, producing a dog glamorously coated, lighter in bone and finer in the head than its cousins.

A third Irish setter existed, and it is gone

Ireland had three setter breeds and one of them is extinct. The Kennel Club's Irish Setter page names it: the rarely seen Hail Setter, which had white ticks in its red coat and is now believed to be extinct. That leaves the red and the red and white, and the red and white came within a generation of joining it. FCI 330 records that by the end of the nineteenth century the red and white had become so rare that it was thought to be extinct, that efforts to revive it were made during the 1920s, and that by 1944 it had re-established itself well enough to have a club of its own.

The revival is recent enough to date precisely. The present club, the Irish Red & White Setter Field & Show Society, was formed in 1981, and the standard credits its work with establishing the breed nationally and internationally. The FCI accepted the breed on a definitive basis on 6 June 1989, eight years after that society was founded.

The genetics agree with the history

Two papers published in 2002 confirmed the shared ancestry with a mutation rather than a pedigree. Canine leucocyte adhesion deficiency, a lethal recessive immune disease, was first documented in Irish Setters. Debenham and colleagues at the Animal Health Trust tested 76 Irish red and white setter samples for the same CD18 point mutation and found six carriers, all from a lineage in which sporadic deaths consistent with the disease had been observed. Their paper describes this as the first demonstration that the CLAD mutation exists outside the Irish setter population.

In the same year Foureman, Whiteley and Giger screened US Irish Red and White Setters for the Irish Setter Cys36Ser mutation and found seven carriers among 54 dogs, 13 percent, five of them directly related to a single sire imported from the United Kingdom. Their paper states the relationship in one sentence: the Irish Red and White Setter has a history of interbreeding with Irish Setters and shares a common ancestry with the Irish Setter breed. A shared lethal recessive is harder to argue with than a pedigree book, and it is the strongest evidence either breed page can offer that the two dogs are one population split by colour.

Recognition: the older breed was admitted last by every register that recognises both

Every major register admitted the solid red Irish Setter decades before it admitted the older Irish Red and White Setter, by 34 years at the FCI and by 131 years at the American Kennel Club, and the dates are printed on the registers' own pages.

The American figures in that table come off the AKC's own breed pages, which record the Irish Setter as recognised in 1878 and ranked 73 of 210 for popularity, against 2009 and 162 of 210 for the older breed American Kennel Club breed page. The FCI numbering itself records the order. A low FCI number means an early entry in the nomenclature, and the four setters run English Setter 2, Gordon Setter 6, Irish Red Setter 120 and Irish Red and White Setter 330. On definitive-acceptance dates the order is the same: Irish Red Setter on 22 December 1954, English Setter on 6 March 1963, Gordon Setter on 28 May 1963, and the Irish Red and White Setter last, on 6 June 1989 FCI breeds nomenclature entry.

What recognition means for an Indian buyer

India's answer runs through the FCI, and that is checkable. The FCI members register lists India as a full member represented by the Kennel Club of India in Chennai, so the KCI issues pedigrees against FCI nomenclature. Because the Irish Red and White Setter is recognised by the FCI on a definitive basis, an FCI-pedigreed dog of the breed is in principle registrable in India. In principle is doing real work in that sentence, because recognition creates a route on paper and says nothing about whether any dog has ever travelled it.

A separate limit is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up as a finding. The Kennel Club of India publishes no per-breed registration list, so a query there returns nothing for this breed and nothing for a common control breed either. That is a limit of the source, not evidence about the breed, and Bonbeno reports it as a limit.

The registration restriction nobody outside the UK has noticed

With effect from 6 January 2025 the Kennel Club closed its register to untested imports of this breed. Imported Irish Red and White Setters, and litters from overseas sires, are only eligible for Kennel Club registration if they are proven clear or carriers of canine leukocyte adhesion deficiency, or hold hereditary clear status. Identified carriers may still be bred from, provided they are mated only to a dog that is hereditarily clear or DNA-tested clear. The registry states that the scheme was introduced at the request of the breed clubs to safeguard the UK population from the reintroduction of the condition.

The same restriction applies to the Irish Setter from the same date and covers two conditions rather than one, CLAD and progressive retinal atrophy rcd1. Read together, those two announcements tell you which way the disease risk is thought to travel, which is inward, on imported dogs, into small populations that had cleaned themselves up.

Irish Red and White Setter price in India: no figure exists, and here is what is being sold instead

No Indian price for an Irish Red and White Setter can be sourced, because not one page ranking in India for the term carries a rupee figure for the breed, and every rupee figure the search engines attach to it belongs to a different dog.

Bonbeno pulled the top ten organic results in India for irish red and white setter price in india on 31 August 2026, scraped each one, and read the prices out of the raw page rather than out of a snippet. Nine of the ten results are not Indian pages, and the one that is contains no dog of the breed.

The single India-hosted result is worth describing properly, because it is the whole Indian market for this term. It is a Justdial category page titled for pet shops selling the breed in Delhi. It names five businesses, of which one is in Delhi and the others are in Dehradun, Jhansi, Kota and Surat, it shows shopfront photographs rather than dogs, and its own meta description advertises pet shops for German Shepherds and Labradors. No animal of the breed appears on it and no price for the breed appears on it.

Why there is no price rather than merely no listing

A price needs a seller, and the breed's own parent club directory has none anywhere in Asia. The Irish Red and White Setter Association of America publishes a breeders directory updated in May 2026. Bonbeno counted it: 26 kennels, 24 across twelve United States and two in Ontario, and none in India or anywhere else in Asia. The directory carries no prices at all, and its own note says the association does not endorse any breeder.

One Indian commercial site answers the question by omission. A pet marketplace advertising Irish Setter puppies for sale in India prints its full breed dropdown twice, running to roughly 330 entries and including the English Setter, the Gordon Setter, the Irish Terrier and the Irish Wolfhound. The Irish Red and White Setter is not among them. A site that sells 330 breeds and does not list this one is telling you what it can source.

For contrast, the same search in India for the solid red breed does return Indian rupee figures, and they disagree with each other by two to four times: ₹40,000 to ₹80,000 on one Indian breed page against INR 90,000 to INR 3,00,000 or more on an Indian marketplace, on the same day. So the honest answer to the query is a refusal. Bonbeno will not convert a dollar figure into rupees, will not average the three foreign bands above, and will not repeat an answer engine's number. What a reader can act on instead is the recurring cost of keeping a dog of this size in India, which is real, published and priced in rupees, and which the cost section below sets out line by line.

Why no Indian supply exists, proved rather than assumed

No lawful route exists for an Irish Red and White Setter breeding population to form in India, because the DGFT permits dog imports only for a personal pet, for research or for state security, and the world supply of the breed is roughly the size of one Indian pet shop's annual turnover.

Start with the search instrument, because an absence is only worth publishing if the search worked. Bonbeno ran a control query, labrador retriever price in india, in the same tool in the same session. It returned ten results, all unambiguously about dogs, including Indian breed guides, Indian marketplaces and Indian price videos. A separate Bing India control returned a genuine India-localised results page reporting about 27,500 results with ten Indian pet-commerce domains. The instrument was working, so the absence of any Indian Irish Red and White Setter listing is a finding rather than a broken query.

The law, quoted rather than summarised

Dogs are a Restricted import in India under ITC(HS) 01061900. DGFT Trade Notice 22/2022-23 of 19 December 2022 sets out Policy Condition 7, which allows import of dogs only for three purposes: a pet dog with a valid pet book and relevant records in the name of the importer, dogs imported by research and development organisations with the recommendation of the CPCSEA, and dogs for internal security by the Defence and Police Force. Policy Condition 8 adds that import of commercial dogs for breeding or any other commercial activity beyond those purposes is not permitted.

Paragraph 6 of the same notice removes the remaining ambiguity, stating that any applications for trading or breeding purposes, or applications made on behalf of another person or entity, shall be duly rejected. Paragraph 7 limits entry to the airports and seaports of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kolkata, six named locations, with quarantine at the government station of those ports where required. DAHD added a seventh port, Cochin International Airport at Kochi, for pets arriving under the baggage rules in October 2024. The full route is set out in how to import a dog to India.

The supply side arithmetic

The Royal Kennel Club registered 22 Irish Red and White Setters in 2025, the lowest figure in the breed's own ten-year table and less than half its 2020 peak of 83. Over the decade 2016 to 2025 the breed's annual registrations ran 63, 70, 51, 39, 83, 46, 77, 46, 49 and 22 The Royal Kennel Club.

Put the two halves together and the conclusion is structural rather than anecdotal. The lawful import route moves a household's own pet and rejects breeding applications outright, and the breed's largest registry produced 22 puppies in a year The Royal Kennel Club. There is no supply to import and no lawful way to import it for breeding, which is why a search for an Indian price returns nine foreign pages and an empty category shell.

What this dog actually costs in India, in rupees, line by line

Keeping a 25 to 32 kg long-coated dog in an Indian metro costs real money that can be sourced precisely, starting at Rs 360 for a DHPPi+L dose at a government teaching hospital and running to about Rs 2,499 for one full groom at a Bengaluru clinic chain.

There is no Indian purchase price for this breed and there are excellent Indian care costs, and the two should not be confused. Everything below is a published rupee figure for a service or product an Indian household actually buys, sized to a large long-coated dog, with the source named. None of it is converted from a foreign currency.

Three lines this particular dog generates that a short-coated dog does not

Grooming is the big one and it scales with both weight and coat. The Bengaluru price list Bonbeno checked prices a complete groom at ₹1,999 for a large short-coated dog over 25 kg and ₹2,499 for a large long-coated dog, a ₹500 premium per visit that this breed pays every time. Add ₹599 for dematting on a coat that has been left through a monsoon and the gap widens. The Kennel Club's stated frequency for the breed is more than once a week, which is home combing rather than salon visits, but the salon visit is where the feathering gets sorted.

Ear care is a recurring cost driven by an anatomical fact. Drop-eared dogs carried 47.72 percent of 1,008 Indian otitis externa cases against 28.07 percent for prick-eared dogs, and the monsoon carried 41.87 percent of cases. A consultation for an ear at a private Indian chain starts at ₹300 and a follow-up at ₹200, so two ear episodes a year is a real line rather than a hypothetical one.

Tick preventive is not optional on a feathered dog in India, and Indian law treats de-ticking as part of grooming. A 20 to 40 kg spot-on works out at roughly ₹520 per month from the pack price of ₹1,561 for three pipettes. Second Schedule Part IV paragraph 27 of the 2017 Rules requires that regular de-ticking shall be practised at the time of grooming.

A defensible monthly range for this dog in an Indian metro comes out around ₹6,000 to ₹10,000 excluding food brand choice, built from the lines above rather than borrowed: roughly ₹1,900 to ₹2,400 of food on a 15 kg bag at ₹63 per 100 g lasting about a month for a large adult, ₹520 of tick preventive, one groom amortised at ₹2,499 every six to eight weeks, and periodic deworming and consultation Supertails+ clinic grooming price list Tata 1mg product listing. Bonbeno publishes that as a construction from named figures, not as a survey, and the food line moves most.

Boarding is the line that surprises people, at ₹800 a day for a large breed at a named Bengaluru facility publishing its own 2026 tariff, which is roughly a month of tick preventive for one week away. The costs nobody budgets for are the surgical ones. A Madras Veterinary College emergency surgery charge is Rs 2,500 and a major surgery charge Rs 1,500, at a government teaching hospital that also dispenses drugs and fluids free. A private metro bill for the same event is a different order of magnitude, and for a deep-chested breed the event most likely to produce one is gastric dilatation-volvulus, which the bloat section above covers.

Heat tolerance: a 10.1 degree homeland against a 27.9 degree city

The Irish Red and White Setter comes from a country whose warmest month averages 15.1 degrees Celsius, which is 5.1 degrees colder than the coolest month in Bengaluru, so every Indian city is outside the climate this coat was assembled for.

Bonbeno pulled twenty-year monthly climatologies from NASA POWER by explicit latitude and longitude, covering January 2001 to December 2020, for two Irish reference points and the seven Indian metros most likely to house a large gundog. Wet-bulb temperature is computed from the same monthly means using Stull's 2011 formula, because wet-bulb is what tells you whether a panting dog can shed heat at all.

The single most useful line in that table compares the extremes rather than the averages. Dublin's warmest month averages 15.1 degrees. Bengaluru's coolest month averages 20.2 degrees. So the coldest month in India's mildest large city is 5.1 degrees warmer than the hottest month in the breed's homeland, and Bengaluru is the best case. Against Chennai the annual means differ by 17.8 degrees.

Ireland is humid too, and that is not the same problem

Ireland is more humid than Chennai in relative terms and far safer, which is the point wet-bulb exists to make. Dublin averages 87.6 percent relative humidity against Chennai's 72.4 percent. Yet Dublin's peak monthly wet-bulb is 13.4 degrees and Chennai's is 26.1, a gap of 12.7 degrees, because wet-bulb combines heat and moisture into the single number that decides whether evaporative cooling can work. A dog pants to evaporate water from its airways, and evaporation slows as wet-bulb approaches body temperature.

Kolkata is the hardest Indian city on this measure and not the hottest. Its June peak wet-bulb of 27.1 degrees exceeds Delhi's 26.5 and Chennai's 26.1, even though Delhi's warmest month is 4.4 degrees hotter in dry-bulb terms. Delhi's 45.6 percent annual humidity buys it evaporative headroom that Kolkata does not have. So a buyer in Kolkata or Mumbai should plan around the monsoon months and a buyer in Delhi around May and June, and the two problems need different answers.

One Indian commercial page selling this breed's solid red relative states its ideal weather as 10 to 20 degrees Celsius. No Indian metro in the table has an annual mean inside that band, and the closest, Bengaluru at 23.7 degrees, is 3.7 degrees above its ceiling. The page prints the requirement and sells the dog on the same screen.

Managing the heat, city by city, and what Indian law already says about it

Manage this breed's heat load by moving exercise to the coolest hours rather than by cutting the coat, because the largest study of canine heat-related illness found that exertion, not sunshine, triggers three quarters of cases and that most exertional cases follow an ordinary walk.

Start with what the evidence actually says, because the popular advice has it backwards. Hall, Carter and O'Neill reviewed 905,543 UK dogs under primary veterinary care in 2016 and identified 1,259 heat-related illness events from 1,222 dogs. Of the 879 events with a recorded trigger, 652 were exertional, which is 74.2 percent, against 113 environmental at 12.9 percent and 46 from vehicular confinement at 5.2 percent. Then read one layer deeper. Of the 551 exertional events where the type of exercise was specified, 372, or 67.5 percent, followed walking, against 97 after high-intensity activity such as running or cycling and 76 after play.

The single most actionable number in the whole heat literature is 4.6 percent. Forty of the 879 triggered events happened while the dog was under the care of a veterinary clinic or a groomer. A long-coated dog in an Indian grooming salon, restrained, warm and possibly under a dryer, is inside that category. Ask any Indian groomer what the drying arrangement is before you book.

Indian law names this breed's exact situation

Second Schedule Part IV paragraph 21(1) of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Dog Breeding and Marketing) Rules 2017 bars keeping certain dogs in outdoor facilities without the attending veterinary practitioner's written approval. The three categories it names are dogs that are not accustomed to the temperatures prevalent in the area or region in question, dog breeds that cannot tolerate those temperatures, and the Rules give the example "such as long-haired breeds in high temperature locations", and sick, infirm, aged or young animals. A feathered Irish gundog in Chennai is the clause's own worked example.

A working routine for an Indian household

• Walk before sunrise and after dark, and treat the two-hours-plus daily requirement the Kennel Club states as two hours split across the coolest ends of the day rather than one long block.
• Watch the wet-bulb, not the thermometer, in Kolkata and Mumbai from June onwards, because a 27.1 degree wet-bulb defeats panting at temperatures that look mild on a phone Stull R. Wet-bulb temperature from relative….
• Keep the dog lean, since bodyweight at or above the breed and sex mean was the transferable risk factor in the largest heat study, at an odds ratio of 1.42.
• Cool the dog before the walk, not only after it, because most exertional cases followed an ordinary walk rather than sport.
• Question the groomer's dryer, because being under the care of a clinic or groomer accounted for 40 of 879 triggered events.
• Do not house the dog outdoors in an Indian summer, which the 2017 Rules already restrict for long-haired breeds in high temperature locations.

Seasonality is worth planning around because it is sharp. In Hall's 2016 UK cohort, 40 percent of incident heat-illness cases, 158 of 395, fell in a single month, July. The Indian equivalents are April to June across the plains and the monsoon months on the coast, and the point of naming them is that the risk is concentrated rather than spread, so a household that changes its routine for eight weeks of the year removes most of the exposure.

Temperament: friendly, biddable, and emphatically not a guard dog

The Irish Red and White Setter is a happy, good-natured and affectionate gundog that the Kennel Club describes as biddable and highly intelligent, and no standard for the breed contains a guarding, protective or watchdog clause of any kind.

The three governing standards agree, which is unusual. The Kennel Club lists the characteristics as biddable, highly intelligent, good worker, and the temperament as happy, good natured and affectionate. FCI 330 describes the dog as aristocratic, keen and intelligent, displaying a kindly, friendly attitude behind which should be discernible determination, courage and high spirit, and adds that the breed is very friendly, dependable and an easily trained gundog. The AKC standard uses almost the same words.

Read the utilisation clause alongside the temperament clause, because together they describe a household. FCI 330 opens its utilisation section with the phrase "Most acceptable companion and friend in the homes and the fields" before stating that the breed is bred primarily for the field. A dog written up as a companion in the house and a worker outside it is a dog that expects to be indoors with its people and busy outside, and it will do badly at either half alone.

The registry's own comparison returns a single difference across ten fields, and it is rarity rather than behaviour The Royal Kennel Club. Anyone choosing between the two Irish setters on temperament is choosing between two descriptions the Kennel Club fills in identically. The real differences are the health profiles, the price of finding one, and which skull you prefer.

Who should not buy this breed

• Anyone wanting protection. The standards describe a friendly, kindly dog, and nothing in any of the three mentions guarding American Kennel Club.
• Anyone in a small flat without a plan. The Kennel Club specifies a large house and a large garden, and more than two hours of daily exercise.
• Anyone who dislikes shedding. The registry answers Sheds with a flat Yes, on a medium-length coat with feathering.
• Anyone who wants a dog that settles alone all day. A breed written up as a companion in the home and a worker in the field is describing a dog that is with someone.
• Anyone whose household cannot change its schedule for the Indian summer, because the walking is not optional and the middle of the day is not available.

Training: an easily trained gundog, with recall as the one hard problem

Train an Irish Red and White Setter with reward-based work in short sessions and finish recall before anything else, because FCI 330 calls the breed an easily trained gundog while its working brief is to range widely and freeze on birds it finds a long way from you.

Socialise the puppy deliberately from eight weeks, because a ranging gundog that has never met a crowded Indian street will make its own decisions about one at eighteen months. The standard tells you both halves of the training problem in one paragraph. FCI 330 describes the dog as very friendly, dependable and easily trained, and separately requires determination, courage and high spirit behind the friendly attitude. The Kennel Club adds biddable and highly intelligent. Biddable plus high spirit is the profile of a dog that wants to work with you and will make its own decisions when you are two hundred metres away.

The working style is the reason recall matters more here than for a retriever. A setter finds game by ranging ahead of the handler and then setting, going rigid to indicate the birds' position, which is what the AKC standard means when it instructs judges to assess the dog chiefly from the working standpoint. The Kennel Club's own history of the breed explains that the red and white colour was preferred precisely because it made the dog easier to spot at a distance. A breed developed to be visible far away is a breed that goes far away.

Three things that go wrong in Indian households specifically

Heat shortens every session, so plan for it rather than fighting it. Training in an Indian April at midday is not a discipline problem, it is a physiology problem, and exertional heat illness accounted for 74.2 percent of triggered heat-illness events with most following an ordinary walk. Train early, train short, and use indoor scent games when the wet-bulb is high.

Grooming tolerance is a training subject, not a grooming subject. A dog that has had its ears, feet and leg feathering handled daily from eight weeks will stand for a comb in a Chennai monsoon. A dog that has not will be sedated for it at three years old, and the AKC standard bars clipping the coat as a shortcut.

Start at eight weeks, because that is the earliest the law allows the puppy to leave. Rule 8(1)(a) of the 2017 Rules requires that pups less than eight weeks in age are not sold, Rule 8(1)(e) requires that each pup sold is micro-chipped with a complete record of treatment and vaccination, and Second Schedule Part III paragraph 8(9) records that vaccination can start at seven to eight weeks and is usually completed around eighteen weeks. The socialisation window and the vaccination course overlap, which is the practical tension every Indian puppy owner has to manage with their own vet rather than by keeping the puppy indoors until eighteen weeks.

Exercise: more than two hours a day, and the sources that disagree by a factor of four

The Kennel Club puts this breed's requirement at more than two hours per day, which is the highest band it publishes, and the Indian and North American pages that rank for the breed give figures from thirty minutes upward without saying where any of them come from.

One page carrying three different figures is not a disagreement between sources, it is a page that was assembled rather than written. Thirty to forty minutes and at least two hours cannot both be the requirement for one breed, and a reader taking the low figure would be under-exercising a large gundog by a factor of four. Bonbeno takes the Kennel Club's more than two hours per day, because it is the registry that holds the breed's registrations and it publishes the same band for both Irish setters.

What two hours has to contain, and what it must not

Two hours of lead walking is not the same as two hours of exercise for a ranging gundog. The breed's working pattern is to quarter ground ahead of a handler and then hold a point, so the requirement is as much mental as physical, and the FCI standard's insistence that the breed be judged chiefly from the working standpoint is a statement about what the dog is for. Scent work, retrieves, and long-line freedom in a safe space do more for this dog per minute than pavement mileage.

In India the constraint is not the dog's willingness, it is the clock. Across the seven metros in the climate table, the only hours reliably below the breed's comfort range are before sunrise and after dark for roughly four months of the year. A household that cannot commit to a 5.30 am walk from March to June should not take this breed, and that sentence is the most useful thing this page can tell an Indian buyer about exercise.

One number puts the requirement in context. The Kennel Club places both Irish setters in the same top exercise band it uses for the Gordon Setter, more than two hours per day, and the Gordon's page has already found Indian sources cutting that to one hour. The pattern across Indian commercial pages is consistent: the exercise figure gets smaller as the page gets closer to selling you the dog.

Grooming a feathered coat in Indian humidity, and the clause that bans the obvious shortcut

Groom an Irish Red and White Setter more than once a week with a comb through the feathering rather than a clipper over the body, because the breed's own AKC standard states that it is not to be shaved with clippers and that no trimming beyond a short named list is allowed.

The coat is not uniform, and that is what makes it manageable. FCI 330 describes long silky fine hair called feathering on the back of the fore and hind legs and on the outer ear flap, with a reasonable amount on the flank extending onto the chest and throat to form a fringe, while on all other parts of the body the hair is short, flat and free from curl. So the dog is short-coated over most of its surface and long-coated in six specific places, and those six places are the entire grooming job.

The evidence agrees with the standard, for reasons that have nothing to do with showing. Heat-related illness in dogs is overwhelmingly exertional rather than radiant, with 652 of 879 triggered events, 74.2 percent, following exertion and 372 of 551 specified exercise events following an ordinary walk. Clipping a dog changes what the sun does to it and changes nothing about what a walk in April does to it. A household that shaves the dog and keeps walking at 11 am has swapped a real intervention for a cosmetic one.

Ears, and the Indian number that should decide your routine

Drop ears carried 47.72 percent of 1,008 canine otitis externa cases in a Bengaluru veterinary teaching hospital series, against 24.21 percent for intermediate ears and 28.07 percent for prick ears, at p below 0.00001. This breed's ears are set level with the eyes, lie close to the head and carry feathering on the outer flap, which is the drop category.

The season matters as much as the ear. The same series recorded 41.87 percent of cases in the rainy season against 32.83 percent in winter and 25.30 percent in summer, and attributed the monsoon peak to increased humidity, temperature and moisture altering the microenvironment of the ear canal. So the practical rule is that ear checks go from weekly to daily in July and August, and that the dog's ears are dried after every bath and every swim rather than left to air dry.

Ticks, and the clause in Indian law that names grooming

Feathering is where ticks live, and Indian law makes de-ticking part of grooming rather than a separate job. Second Schedule Part IV paragraph 27 of the 2017 Rules requires that grounds be kept free of accumulations and that weeds, grasses and bushes be controlled so as to control and prevent fleas and ticks, and states that regular de-ticking shall be practised at the time of grooming. The clause is written for breeding establishments, and the husbandry logic transfers to any household with a long-coated dog walking through Indian grass.

A practical weekly routine takes about twenty minutes. Brush the short body coat first, then comb the six feathered areas through to the skin with a wide-tooth comb, check both ear canals and the base of each ear flap, run fingers through the flank fringe and between the toes for ticks, and trim only the feet, under the ears, the tail, pasterns and hocks for neatness. Bathe when dirty rather than on a schedule, and dry the ears deliberately afterwards. The Kennel Club's own frequency guidance is more than once a week, and it says the breed sheds.

Health: the best hip record of the four setters, and the fourth worst thyroid record of 130 breeds

The Irish Red and White Setter's published health issues split cleanly in two, with joint results better than every other setter and better than the Labrador Retriever, and a thyroid result that ranks fourth worst among the 130 breeds OFA publishes.

The hip row is the headline and it survives an arithmetic check. OFA prints 36.9 percent Excellent, 55.1 percent Good and 3.5 percent Fair, which sum to exactly the 95.5 percent normal it also prints, and 2.1 percent mild, 1.9 percent moderate and 0.2 percent severe, which sum to exactly the 4.2 percent dysplastic. That internal consistency matters, because OFA's own ALL BREEDS summary row on the same hip table fails the same test, printing 84.3 percent normal beside Excellent 14.6, Good 0.0 and Fair 0.0, components that cannot sum to the whole.

The thyroid row is the one a buyer should act on. OFA ranks the breed 4th of 130 published breeds, where rank 1 is the worst record, at 79.4 percent normal across 379 evaluations. The abnormal share is dominated by compensative autoimmune thyroiditis at 11.9 percent, with autoimmune thyroiditis at 0.8 percent, idiopathic hypothyroidism at 0.0 percent and 7.9 percent equivocal, and those five figures sum to exactly 100.0. The three worst breeds above it include the English Setter at rank 1, so this is a setter problem rather than a red-and-white problem, and the Gordon Setter at rank 80 is the exception rather than the rule.

Indian law already names the test. Second Schedule Part III paragraph 8(10) of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Dog Breeding and Marketing) Rules 2017 requires that dogs shall have been tested for genetic defects, including hip dysplasia, progressive retinal atrophy, night blindness, hypothyroidism, entropion, ectropion and several dentition faults. Four of those named defects appear in this breed's own OFA record, so an Indian breeder of the breed would be under a statutory testing duty that maps almost exactly onto the registry's findings.

What the Kennel Club asks breeders to do, and what it puts first

The Kennel Club lists genetic diversity as the breed's only Good Practice item, ahead of any disease. Its recommended set runs Good Practice, prioritising genetic diversity, then Best Practice, a DNA test for canine leukocyte adhesion deficiency, eye testing under the BVA/KC/ISDS Eye Scheme and hip testing under the BVA/KC Hip Dysplasia Scheme. Notice what is not on the list. There is no elbow scheme, which is consistent with a 0.7 percent abnormal rate, and no rcd4 DNA test, which is consistent with the breed having no row at all in OFA's rcd4 register, a variant first described in Gordon and Irish Setters and estimated at an allele frequency of 0.26 in the Irish Setter Orthopedic Foundation for Animals The Royal Kennel Club. The Irish Setter by contrast carries three DNA tests and an elbow scheme, and the English Setter carries a DNA test for NCL8 plus hip, elbow and a BAER hearing scheme The Royal Kennel Club.

Putting genetic diversity first is not boilerplate for a breed registering 22 puppies in a year. A population that small has a mathematical problem no health test can solve, and it is the reason the Kennel Club opened the register to carrier dogs rather than excluding them, which the CLAD section below explains.

CLAD: the disease that proves the two Irish setters are one population, and the test that beat it

Canine leucocyte adhesion deficiency is a lethal recessive immune disease that entered the Irish Red and White Setter from the Irish Setter, and the published DNA registers now show a carrier rate of zero in both the UK and the United States after roughly two decades of testing.

The disease is fatal and it presents early. CLAD results from a defective beta-2 subunit of the leukocyte adhesion proteins, and affected dogs show recurrent bacterial infections alongside a marked leukocytosis. The causative mutation in European Irish Setters is a missense change at base pair 107 of the ITGB2 gene, replacing cysteine with serine at amino acid 36, written Cys36Ser. The disease was first described in the mid-1980s in a crossbred Irish Setter in the United States, and that original dog was later genotyped and shown to carry the same mutation as the European dogs, which told the authors the allele had been in the breed for more than two decades before anyone named it.

Two papers in 2002 put the mutation in the red and white breed

A third paper measured the same mutation in the solid red breed, finding a CLAD carrier frequency of 11 percent among 289 Irish red setters sequenced in Germany, which is the scale of the problem the red and white breed inherited. Debenham and colleagues at the Animal Health Trust tested 76 samples and found six carriers, all from a lineage in which sporadic deaths consistent with the disease had been recorded, and described the result as the first demonstration that the CLAD mutation exists outside the Irish setter population. In the same year Foureman, Whiteley and Giger found seven carriers among 54 US dogs, 13 percent, five of them directly related to a single United Kingdom sire, which they described as demonstrating the importation of an allele from another continent.

The recovery is the part worth publishing, because it is rare to be able to show a screening programme working. Bonbeno counted every result row in the Kennel Club's own published DNA test report for this breed. The report carries 72 results and every single one reads Clear, with zero carriers and zero affected dogs. OFA's independent register agrees, reporting 205 evaluations at 100.0 percent normal. Two registers on two continents, roughly 277 dogs between them, and no carrier in either.

Why the registry opened its books to carriers rather than banning them

Excluding carriers from a breed that registered 22 puppies last year would shrink the gene pool faster than the disease would. With effect from 6 January 2025 the Kennel Club requires imported Irish Red and White Setters, and litters by overseas sires, to be proven clear or carriers of CLAD, or hereditarily clear, before it will register them. Identified carriers may still be bred from, provided they are mated only to a hereditarily clear or DNA-tested clear dog of the breed. That is the textbook handling of a recessive in a small population, because a carrier bred to a clear dog produces no affected puppies while keeping the carrier's other genes in circulation, and it is why the registry lists genetic diversity as its first recommendation for the breed.

For an Indian buyer the practical instruction is short. Ask for the CLAD certificate and the issuing laboratory on any dog offered as this breed, whatever country it came from, and treat a carrier result as acceptable rather than disqualifying if the mate is clear. Indian law reinforces the habit from a different direction, since Second Schedule Part III paragraph 8(10) of the 2017 Rules requires breeding dogs to have been tested for named genetic defects.

The eye register contradicts itself on the same 582 dogs, so here are both numbers

OFA's eye summary for the Irish Red and White Setter reports 93.3 percent normal while its own detail rows report 76.8 percent normal, on an identical denominator of 582 examinations, and neither figure should be quoted as the breed's eye rate.

Both numbers come off the same page of the same register on the same day. The summary line reads 582 evaluations, 93.3 percent normal, 6.7 percent abnormal, ranking the breed 59th of 239. The detail table, which names actual diagnoses, reports 447 dogs normal out of 582 tested, which divides to 76.8 percent. The gap is 16.5 percentage points and the denominator is the same in both, so it cannot be explained by different populations.

The arithmetic explains part of the gap and not all of it. 582 minus 447 leaves 135 dogs with at least one non-normal finding, which is 23.2 percent, while the summary line's 6.7 percent abnormal implies about 39 dogs. Across all 34 non-normal diagnosis rows the counts sum to 214 findings, which is more than 135 dogs, so some dogs carry more than one finding and the rows cannot simply be added. What cannot be reconciled is 39 against 135.

Read the diagnoses rather than the headline, because they are what a vet will look for

Cataract of one description or another dominates the non-normal findings. Adding the cataract rows gives 37 of significance unknown plus 18 punctate anterior cortex, 13 incipient posterior cortex, 11 punctate capsular and 10 incipient anterior cortex, which is 89 cataract findings across 582 examinations before the smaller rows are counted. Most are described as incipient or punctate, which are early or pinpoint changes rather than vision-limiting disease, and the register's own wording is significance unknown for the largest single row.

Two findings matter more than their size suggests. Generalized retinal atrophy appears in 2 dogs, 0.3 percent, and the breed's DNA register for progressive retinal atrophy reports 151 dogs at 100.0 percent normal with no carriers. Distichiasis, extra eyelashes growing from the meibomian glands, appears in 9 dogs at 1.5 percent, against 4.4 percent in the Irish Setter and 1.9 percent in the Gordon Setter Orthopedic Foundation for Animals. Entropion appears once, in a breed where Indian law names entropion as a genetic defect a breeding dog must have been tested for.

So the honest summary is a range, not a number. Somewhere between 6.7 and 23.2 percent of examined Irish Red and White Setters carry a recorded eye finding, most of them early lens opacities of unknown significance, and the eye scheme the Kennel Club recommends for the breed is the BVA/KC/ISDS Eye Scheme rather than a DNA test.

Lifespan: why this page publishes no breed-specific median, and what it publishes instead

No study has published a lifespan median for the Irish Red and White Setter on its own, because the largest UK longevity dataset folded the breed into the Irish Setter, and Bonbeno will not print a merged figure under a single breed's name.

The relevant paper is McMillan and colleagues, 2024, covering 155 recognised purebreds. Its supplementary Table S5 lists every breed included in the survival analysis together with a phylogeny reclassification column, defined in the table's own caption as the KC and FCI breeds included in each Breed category. The row for Irish Setter carries Irish Red & White Setter in that column. The English Setter and Gordon Setter rows carry NA, meaning they were analysed as themselves.

So the widely quoted Irish Setter figure is a merged figure. Table S3 gives that combined group a median survival of 12.9 years with a 95 percent confidence interval of 12.6 to 13.1, on 547 recorded deaths, and a hazard ratio of 0.74 against crossbred dogs at p below 0.001. That number describes both Irish setters together and nobody says so, which is exactly why this page will not reprint it as the Irish Red and White Setter's lifespan.

The gundog group figure is the honest transferable one. Teng and colleagues built life tables from 30,563 UK dogs that died between 1 January 2016 and 31 July 2020, and reported life expectancy at age 0 of 11.23 years across the whole population and 11.67 years for the Gundog group specifically, on 5,354 gundogs. Their breed-level tables covered 18 breeds accounting for 50.6 percent of the population, and no setter of any kind is among them. A group figure that genuinely includes the breed beats a breed figure that was never measured.

Read the two registry figures as what they are. The Kennel Club's Over 10 years is a bucket it applies across many breeds, and the AKC's 11 to 15 years is a page figure rather than a standard. Neither is a study, neither carries a confidence interval, and neither should be quoted as though it were McMillan or Teng.

Bloat: a deep-chested breed that no bloat study has ever included

The Irish Red and White Setter has the deep chest that gastric dilatation-volvulus tracks, and no published study of the condition has included the breed, so this page gives the general risk factors and refuses to borrow another breed's odds ratio.

The anatomical risk is real and it comes from the standard. FCI 330 requires a deep chest with well sprung ribs, and the Kennel Club standard says the same The Royal Kennel Club breed standard. Depth of chest relative to width is the conformational feature most consistently associated with gastric dilatation-volvulus in large breeds, which is why the condition is a large deep-chested problem rather than a big-dog problem.

What the studies do establish transfers on anatomy rather than on breed. Across Glickman's eleven-breed cohort the incidence of GDV was 23 cases per 1,000 dog-years at risk for the seven large breeds of 23 to 45 kg and 26 for the four giant breeds above 45 kg, and cumulative incidence across all breeds was 5.7 percent. Of the 105 dogs that developed GDV, 30 died, a case fatality of 28.6 percent. Incidence rose with increasing age, and the only breed-specific characteristic significantly associated with reduced incidence was an owner-perceived personality trait of happiness.

In the UK, Evans and Adams found GDV was the recorded cause of death for 389 dogs, 2.5 percent of all deaths reported in a survey covering 15,881 dogs of 165 breeds that had died in the previous ten years, with a median age at death of 7.92 years. Among live dogs there were 253 episodes in 238 animals, with a median age at first diagnosis of five years.

What an Indian owner should actually do

1. Split the daily ration into two or three meals rather than one, so less volume sits in a deep chest at any moment.
2. Feed from the floor, because a raised bowl was among the factors significantly associated with increased risk in Glickman's non-dietary risk factor study of 1,637 large and giant breed dogs.
3. Slow a fast eater with a maze bowl, because speed of eating was significantly associated with increased risk in the same study.
4. Know the signs before you need them, which are a swollen tight abdomen, unproductive retching, restlessness, drooling and collapse.
5. Find your nearest twenty-four-hour surgical facility now, and save the number, because GDV is measured in hours and Indian metros vary enormously in overnight surgical cover.

Feeding: a large-breed diet, several small meals, and a body condition score you check monthly

Feed an Irish Red and White Setter a complete large-breed diet split across two or three meals a day and score its body condition monthly on a nine-point chart, because bodyweight at or above the breed and sex mean is the one heat risk factor that transfers to this breed from the largest study available.

Lean is the whole instruction, and it is unusually well evidenced for this breed's situation. Hall and colleagues found that dogs at or above their breed and sex mean bodyweight carried an odds ratio of 1.42 for heat-related illness, with a confidence interval of 1.12 to 1.80. That factor is about weight rather than breed, so it applies to this dog even though the breed itself was not modelled. In an Indian climate a lean dog has more thermal margin than a heavy one, and that margin is free.

Score, do not guess. The WSAVA Global Nutrition Committee publishes a nine-point body condition chart designed to be used by an owner with hands rather than by eye, and a monthly check catches drift long before a scale does. On a large feathered dog the eye is actively misleading, because feathering hides the waist.

What is actually available in India, and what a figure would cost you

Large-breed complete diets are widely sold in Indian metros and no breed-specific Indian feeding figure exists for this breed, because no Indian population of the breed exists to have generated one. What does exist is the general arithmetic: a dog of 25 to 34 kg on a complete dry diet is a large-breed feeding problem, and the daily quantity comes off the manufacturer's chart for the dog's adult weight and activity, adjusted by monthly body condition scoring rather than by the number on the bag.

Beware the Indian pages that print a calorie figure for this shape of dog. One Indian commercial page for the solid red Irish Setter states 1,500 kcal for puppies and 1,600 kcal for adults, and on the same page tells the reader that the breed needs a balanced diet "to support their small size and thick coat" while its own specification panel classifies the breed as Large. A page that cannot keep its own size category straight across two paragraphs is not a source for a calorie target. Take the figure from the food manufacturer's own chart and from your vet.

Two Indian-specific adjustments are worth making. Water intake rises sharply in Indian summers and a dog on dry food alone can fall behind, so a second water station and wet food or soaked kibble in April to June is a cheap intervention. And meal timing should move away from the walk, because feeding immediately before or after exertion combines the two things a deep-chested dog does not want at once.

The first year, month by month, with the Indian legal dates written in

An Irish Red and White Setter puppy may lawfully leave its breeder at eight weeks in India, must be micro-chipped when sold, and cannot be screened for hips until it is an adult, so the first year is about socialisation, grooming tolerance and controlled growth rather than about anything a certificate can prove.

Three provisions of the 2017 Rules govern the transaction and every Indian buyer should know all three. Rule 8(1)(a) requires that pups less than eight weeks in age are not sold. Rule 8(1)(b) requires that dogs over six months in age are not sold without first being sterilised, unless the sale is to another licensed breeder. Rule 8(1)(e) requires that each pup sold is micro-chipped, with a complete record of treatment and vaccination maintained. A seller who cannot produce a microchip number is failing a statutory condition of sale, not merely being disorganised.

What cannot be settled in year one, and why patience saves money

Hip and elbow conformation cannot be scored on a puppy. Both the BVA/KC schemes the Kennel Club recommends for this breed and OFA's registers are built on adult radiographs, which is why a breeder can show you the parents' scores and nobody can show you the puppy's. On a breed whose published dysplastic rate is 4.2 percent across 624 evaluations that is reassuring rather than alarming, but the reassurance comes from the pedigree, not from the puppy.

Eye findings are largely late. The dominant OFA eye findings for this breed are incipient and punctate lens opacities, which are age-related changes rather than puppy findings, and the BVA/KC/ISDS Eye Scheme exists to be repeated through a dog's life rather than done once. The one thing that can be settled before the puppy is born is CLAD, because it is a DNA test on the parents, and the Kennel Club has made it a registration condition for imported dogs of this breed since 6 January 2025.

Irish Red and White Setter against the three setters buyers confuse it with

Compare the Irish Red and White Setter against the other three setters on published register data and it wins the joints comfortably, loses the thyroid table badly, and is roughly twenty times rarer than the solid red Irish Setter in the only registry that publishes annual numbers for all four.

Four setter breeds sit in the same FCI subsection, Group 7 Section 2 Subsection Setter, and an Indian buyer searching for any one of them is shown all four. Two of them are Irish. The table below puts every published figure side by side, and every cell comes from the register named in the row, not from a breed-comparison website.

Read the hip row first, because it is the single most surprising number on this page. Across 624 evaluations the Irish Red and White Setter records 4.2 percent dysplastic and 36.9 percent Excellent hips. The Labrador Retriever, the breed Indian buyers treat as the safe large-dog default, records 11.3 percent dysplastic and 21.7 percent Excellent across 324,780 evaluations. On a sample two hundred times smaller the rarer breed is scoring better, and the OFA all-breeds line sits at 14.2 percent dysplastic.

The thyroid row runs the other way and nobody mentions it. The Irish Red and White Setter ranks 4th of the 130 breeds in OFA's thyroid table, where rank 1 is worst, with 79.4 percent normal across 379 evaluations, 11.9 percent compensative autoimmune thyroiditis and 7.9 percent equivocal. The English Setter is rank 1 at 60.4 percent normal and the Gordon Setter is a comfortable rank 80 at 90.5 percent. So the two Irish setters and the English Setter cluster at the bad end of the thyroid table while the Scottish one does not, and Indian law already names hypothyroidism as a genetic defect a breeding dog must have been tested for.

On rarity the comparison is not close. The Royal Kennel Club registered 22 Irish Red and White Setters in 2025 against 480 Irish Setters, 176 English Setters and 93 Gordon Setters. That is roughly one Irish Red and White for every 22 Irish Setters, in the breed's nearest large registry. In the same year the Labrador Retriever took 29,919 registrations, so the Labrador outnumbers this breed 1,360 to one.

How to tell the two Irish setters apart at a glance

Three physical features separate the two Irish setters, and all three come from the standards rather than from opinion. Colour is the obvious one and the least reliable, because an Irish Setter is allowed white on chest, throat, chin or toes and a small star or blaze on the face. The skull is the reliable one. The Irish Setter standard requires an oval skull with a well-defined occipital protuberance; the Irish Red and White standard requires a domed skull without one, and says so by naming the other breed. Build is the third. The AKC gives the Irish Setter an ideal 27 inches and about 70 pounds for a dog, which is half an inch above the FCI's own ceiling of 26.5 inches for the breed, while its standard for the red and white gives 24.5 to 26 inches and no weight at all American Kennel Club FCI-Standard N. 120. The Irish Setter must be racy; the Irish Red and White must be athletic rather than racy, strong and powerful without lumber American Kennel Club.

Eight mistakes Indian buyers make with this breed

The commonest mistake an Indian buyer makes with an Irish Red and White Setter is believing they have found one, because no verified Indian litter of the breed exists and the animal being offered is almost always something else.

1. Accepting a red-and-white dog as the breed. Colour alone proves nothing. An English Setter is white with flecking, a Brittany is orange and white, and an Irish Setter is allowed white on chest, throat, chin and toes plus a facial blaze. The breed's own marker is clear islands of solid red on a pearl-white base, with roaning and mottling elsewhere an eliminating fault under FCI 330.
2. Treating it as a colour variety of the Irish Setter. These are two FCI standards with two numbers, two recognition dates thirty-four years apart and two separate registration series. Anyone describing the red and white as a variety has the history backwards, because the FCI standard says the red and white is the older of the two and that selective breeding evolved the solid red out of it.
3. Paying a rupee price quoted for the breed. No Indian listing, breeder directory entry or registry record for the breed could be verified. Any figure you are shown was written for a different animal.
4. Skipping the CLAD paperwork on an imported dog. The Kennel Club made a clear or carrier CLAD result a condition of registration for imported Irish Red and White Setters and for litters by overseas sires with effect from 6 January 2025. A dog imported into India carries no such gate, so the certificate is the buyer's job.
5. Clippering the coat for the heat. The AKC standard for the breed states that trimming should be kept to a minimum and that the dog is not to be shaved with clippers. A clipped double-textured coat loses its insulating and reflective layer, and heat-related illness in dogs is overwhelmingly exertional rather than radiant, so the fix is a change of walk timing rather than a change of coat.
6. Ignoring the ears through the monsoon. Drop ears carried 47.72 percent of 1,008 canine otitis externa cases in a Bengaluru teaching hospital series, against 28.07 percent for prick ears, and the rainy season carried 41.87 percent of cases against 25.30 percent in summer. This breed has a low drop ear with feathering on the outer flap.
7. Buying it as a guard dog. The standard describes a happy, good natured and affectionate dog and the working brief is finding and pointing game birds, not deterring anyone.
8. Assuming a rare breed is a healthy breed. The hip and elbow figures are excellent, the thyroid figure is the fourth worst of 130 published breeds, and a population registering 22 puppies a year in its nearest large registry has a genetic diversity problem the Kennel Club lists first among its recommended tests The Royal Kennel Club.

Adoption, and what to do instead when the breed is not here

Adopt rather than import if you want an Irish Red and White Setter in India, because the lawful supply route for the breed is a personal pet import under baggage rules and nothing else, and the animals that actually need homes in Indian cities are gundog crosses with the same exercise and coat needs.

Indian law closes the commercial route completely. Dogs sit at ITC(HS) 01061900 as a Restricted import, and Policy Condition 7 of the DGFT's trade notice allows import only for a pet dog with a valid pet book in the importer's own name, for research organisations with a CPCSEA recommendation, or for Defence and Police internal security. Policy Condition 8 adds that import of commercial dogs for breeding or any other commercial activity is not permitted, and the notice states plainly that applications for trading or breeding purposes shall be duly rejected. Import of pet animals is allowed only through the airports and seaports of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata and, since October 2024, Kochi airport Department of Animal Husbandry….

So no breeding population can lawfully form. A person transferring residence to India after two years of continuous stay abroad may bring up to two pets as passenger baggage without a DGFT authorisation. That is one household bringing its own dog, and it is not a supply chain. Combine it with 22 UK registrations in 2025 and the arithmetic is unforgiving: the entire annual output of the breed's nearest large registry would not stock a single Indian pet shop.

Five checks before you accept any dog offered as this breed

1. Ask for the export pedigree and the registering body's name, then check that body against the FCI members list, where India is a full member represented by the Kennel Club of India in Chennai.
2. Ask for the CLAD DNA certificate and the laboratory that issued it, because the Kennel Club requires a clear or carrier result to register an imported dog of this breed.
3. Ask for the hip score and the scheme it was issued under, because hip screening is one of only three tests the Kennel Club lists for the breed.
4. Ask to see the dam, and read the skull, because a domed skull without an occipital protuberance is what separates this breed from the solid red.
5. Ask for the date of birth and the microchip record, because Indian law requires that pups under eight weeks are not sold and that each pup sold is micro-chipped, under Rule 8(1)(a) and Rule 8(1)(e) of the 2017 Rules.

What adoption actually looks like for this shape of dog in India

No breed-specific rescue exists for the Irish Red and White Setter in India, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. What does exist in every Indian metro is a supply of medium to large, active, drop-eared, feathered gundog crosses surrendered for exactly the reason this breed would be surrendered, which is that a household underestimated more than two hours of daily exercise. Contact your city's municipal shelter and the established rescues, describe the dog by requirement rather than by breed, and ask for an adult rather than a puppy so the energy level is already visible.

Adopting an adult removes the two biggest unknowns. Hip and elbow conformation can be assessed in an adult and cannot be predicted in an eight-week puppy, and OFA's schemes are built on adult radiographs for that reason. Temperament is likewise observable. If you want the specific look, accept that you are choosing a dog with the same coat, ear and exercise profile rather than the registered breed, and read the Gordon Setter and English Setter pages for how the same argument plays out in the two other vulnerable setters.

Compare with similar breeds

Irish Red and White Setter sits in 2 Bonbeno groups. Each one compares it directly against the breeds it is genuinely an alternative to, on the same figures.