Red Decoy Dog: What It Actually Was

What a Red Decoy Dog actually was

A Red Decoy Dog was the working dog used to lure wildfowl into netted traps in England, defined in the primary literature by its job rather than by any breed name, and described only by colour, by size relative to a fox, and by its tail.

The whole question turns on one book, and the book is free. Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey's The Book of Duck Decoys, published in London in 1886, is the standard nineteenth-century work on English decoys, and it tells you what the dog was in its glossary rather than in a breed chapter.

The dog is defined in a list of equipment. It sits between the man and the ditches, described the way the hoops and the screens are described, by what it is for. That is not how a breed is introduced in any nineteenth-century sporting book, and it is precisely how a working category is introduced.

The one physical description that exists

Payne-Gallwey's section headed simply 'The Dog' gives the only specification anyone wrote down: 'A bright intelligent little fellow, about a third smaller than a Fox, with a curly bushy tail if possible, and of a red or yellow colour. A good Decoy dog is hard to find, but, when obtained, is invaluable.';

Read the phrase 'if possible' in the tail clause. A breed standard does not say a feature is desirable if it can be managed; a man describing what he looks for in a working animal does. And 'a good Decoy dog is hard to find' is what you say about a type you select from whatever is available, not about a breed you buy from a breeder.

One secondary source is worth naming because it independently reaches the same reading. David Hancock's survey of decoy dogs records that the distinctive feature of dogs used in this way was the well-flagged tail, and that their colour was usually fox-red. That is the 1886 specification restated a century later, still by feature and colour rather than by breed, by a writer who had read the same literature.

Bonbeno's two-condition test, applied to a job description

To count as a breed on this site an animal needs two documents, a written breed standard and a studbook. The Red Decoy Dog has never had either, at any point, and there is no serious argument that it did.

The test matters here because the Red Decoy Dog is routinely filed with breeds that genuinely ended, and that is a different thing. Some extinct breeds ran out of time having had both documents. This one had neither, so there was nothing to end.

The verdict, and the word that fits it

The Red Decoy Dog is a working category, and it belongs beside the turnspit rather than beside the English Water Spaniel. This site has run the same test on both. The Turnspit Dog was a job description that never had either document, and the English Water Spaniel had a written standard and appeared in a kennel club stud book in a named class and still died out. The first is a category, the second is a breed that ended, and the Red Decoy Dog is the first kind.

One nuance that cuts the other way, and it is real. Sustained selection for a job in a fixed place does produce something like a landrace, and English decoy men were selecting for fox-red colour and a flagged tail over generations in the same marshes. That is how a landrace starts. It is not how a breed is made, because nobody wrote anything down.

One closing point on breed recognition as a concept, because this page turns on it. Breed recognition is a decision a register makes rather than a property an animal has, and the whole difference between this name and the Kooikerhondje is that a Dutch register made that decision and no English one ever did. The dogs may have been comparable animals doing comparable work. Only one of them acquired a document, and only the one with the document has a measurable population today.

When the Red Decoy Dog disappeared, and why no date is given here

No source dates the disappearance of the Red Decoy Dog, and Wikipedia says so itself. This page supplies no year, because none exists in any document we could reach.

Wikipedia's own article states plainly that it is unknown when the Red Decoy Dog became extinct, and reasons that its decline likely tracked the spread of shooting as wildfowlers replaced nets with shotguns. That is a sound mechanism and it is not a date.

What can be dated is the work, not the dog

The honest way to bound this is to date the practice rather than the animal. Duck decoying was a commercial industry in the English fens and coastal counties through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Payne-Gallwey wrote his manual in 1886 precisely because the practice was declining and he wanted it recorded. A dog defined entirely by a job vanishes when the job does, and it leaves no register behind to record the moment.

The one thing that did survive, and it is not a dog

Decoy structures survive in England as heritage sites, with their pipes, hoops and screens intact, and several are managed for conservation rather than for capture. That matters for this page for one reason: the equipment outlasted the animal, and it is the equipment that tells you what the animal was. Payne-Gallwey's glossary defines the dog in the same list as the hoops, and the hoops are still there.

So the accurate summary is that a working type disappeared at an unrecorded moment when the work it existed for stopped being economic, leaving behind two breeds in other countries and a set of earthworks in England.

The two breeds that survived the work

Two living breeds still do what the Red Decoy Dog did, and both are on the FCI register with real health data behind them: the Nederlandse Kooikerhondje at 314 and the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever at 312.

The FCI's definitive register was enumerated record by record on 9 September 2026, reading each page's own title rather than assembling a URL from a name, and it holds both. No record's title contains DECOY, which is the register's answer to the question this page is about.

The Kooikerhondje's name is the argument

Kooikerhondje means the little dog of the kooiker, the decoy man. The breed is named for the job, exactly as the English dog was, and the difference is that the Dutch wrote it down and registered it while the English did not. The same working category produced a breed in one country and nothing durable in the other, which is the cleanest illustration available of what registration actually does.

What the Kooikerhondje's literature actually covers

The breed's veterinary literature clusters tightly on inherited disease, which is what a small registered population produces. It covers type III von Willebrand disease across several papers from the 1990s and 2000s, a hereditary inflammatory myopathy described in 2023, hereditary necrotising myelopathy linked to an IBA57 variant, and patellar luxationMandigers Paul JJ, Stehling Oliver. The Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever's literature clusters on hypoadrenocorticism and an immune-mediated rheumatic disease complex.

Neither body of work would exist without a closed register and a breed club willing to fund it. That is the practical difference between a type and a breed, and it is worth more to a buyer than any origin story.

The name form decides the literature, by a factor of nearly five

Searching the surviving decoy breed under its FCI name returns 5 papers and searching it under the name clinicians use, singular and plural together, returns 19, from the same database in the same session.

This is a research finding rather than a breed finding, and it is the most transferable thing on this page. A controlled PubMed audit on 9 September 2026, re-run on 17 September with the query translation line read for every query and controls returning 126 and 141, produced these counts.

Why this belongs on a page about an extinct type

Because it is how a false absence gets manufactured. If you search a historical name, get zero, and stop, you conclude there is no literature on decoy dogs. There is a great deal, under two other names, and the animal you would be reading about is the one still doing the job. A controlled zero on the names you thought of is still a zero on the names you thought of.

The same discipline applies to the registers. OFA holds this breed only as NEDERLANDSE KOOIKERHONDJE, code KOO; neither 'Kooikerhondje' alone nor 'Red Decoy Dog' appears anywhere in its 482-entry breed-code list. A search on the short name returns nothing and the breed is plainly there.

Red Decoy Dog price in India

There is no price in india for a Red Decoy Dog, and no price anywhere, because no living population exists and no register has ever held the name.

This is the strongest form of price absence on this site. For a rare living breed the answer is that no Indian market exists. Here there is no animal, so there is no market anywhere in the world, and any offer under this name is an offer of something else.

The surviving breeds are also unobtainable here

If what you want is a living decoy dog, Indian import law closes that route. DGFT Trade Notice 22/2022-23 of 19 December 2022 places dogs under ITC(HS) 01061900 as Restricted, and Policy Condition (7) allows import only for a pet dog with a valid pet book in the importer's name, for an R&D organisation with a CPCSEA recommendation, or for Defence and Police use.

What a quoted price under this name would be

• A different breed entirely, most plausibly a small red-and-white spaniel type sold under a romantic historical name.
• An auto-generated listing shell that exists identically for every breed name and stocks none of them.
• A converted foreign figure, testable by dividing the rupee number by 84.38 and by 74 and seeing whether it lands on a round dollar or euro amount.
• Merchandise rather than an animal, which is a documented mechanism on this site for breeds whose names double as ordinary words.

Bonbeno publishes no price under this name. What is real is what a small gundog costs to keep in India, which follows, and it applies to the surviving breeds rather than to a historical type.

What a small gundog costs to keep in India

The cost of ownership for a 9 to 23 kg gundog in India runs roughly Rs 3,500 to Rs 7,000 a month once food, parasite control, vaccination and routine care are counted, which makes it the cheapest dog in this cluster.

These figures apply to the surviving decoy breeds rather than to the historical type. The Kooikerhondje sits at 9 to 13 kg on the Dutch registry's page, since its FCI standard gives no weight, and the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever at 17 to 23 kg under FCI 312Federation Cynologique Internationale, so both fall well below the 60 cm hounds elsewhere in this batch and both are materially less expensive to keep.

Read the Vetic figures as one chain's list prices rather than a market average, since that chain quotes different course prices on different city pages on the same day. The NexGard figure quoted is for the 15 to 30 kg band and a Kooikerhondje-sized dog takes a cheaper one, so treat it as a ceiling rather than a cost.

Food is the smallest line in this cluster for exactly the reason the dogs are small. A 10 kg dog eats roughly 130 to 180 grams of a good dry food daily, which is a low three-figure monthly number, and even a 20 kg tolling retriever stays under what any 60 cm hound needs.

Suitability for the Indian climate, and the humidity result that surprises people

The Fens are more humid than any Indian city, at 84.66 percent annual relative humidity against Chennai's 72.39, so damp air is not what would trouble a decoy dog in India. Heat is.

This is one of the few homelands on this site where the grid cell is beyond argument. The Fens are flat and near sea level, which is exactly the terrain NASA POWER handles well.

Read the humidity column and the usual claim collapses. The Fens at 84.66 percent, Suffolk at 85.25 and Nova Scotia at 85.43 are all more humid across the year than Kolkata at 73.93, Chennai at 72.39 or Mumbai at 67.39. A decoy dog spent its working life in wet reed beds, and English marsh air is not drier than Indian city air. It is wetter.

What actually hurts is heat, and wet bulb is the measure

A dog sheds heat by evaporation, so the wet bulb temperature caps its cooling, and that is where the gap is. Ely peaks at 14.72 C in July and Nacton at 15.14 C in August. Kolkata peaks at 27.09 C in June and Chennai at 26.11 C in May. That is a gap of eleven to twelve degrees, and it is the whole story.

So the correct framing for any Atlantic, North Sea or fenland breed in India is not that the humidity will finish it. It is that the combination of heat with humidity will, because the dog arrives from a place that is just as wet and eleven degrees cooler. Yarmouth in Nova Scotia makes the same point for the tolling retriever, running 85.43 percent annual humidity against a 7.62 C annual mean.

Temperament, and what a job description tells you about it

The only temperament evidence for the historical decoy dog is a sentence about training, and it describes an animal working at distance on a silent hand signal, which is a high bar.

Payne-Gallwey gives one temperament requirement and one training observation, and both are worth reading closely. He asks that the dog 'should do his work cheerfully above all things, and be well rewarded for doing it, at the time', and records that 'One wave of the hand or arm is enough, if the dog is properly trained, to urge him on his career over the jump and round the front of each screen consecutively';.

Three things that sentence establishes

1. The dog worked silently. A barking dog flushes the ducks it is luring, so quietness was not a preference but a requirement of the job.
2. The dog worked at distance on a visual signal. No voice, no lead, no proximity, which is a demanding standard of trained response.
3. The dog was paid immediately. 'Be well rewarded for doing it, at the time' is a description of contingent reinforcement written in 1886, and it is exactly what a modern trainer would prescribe.

What the surviving breeds inherited

The Kooikerhondje's FCI standard asks for a dog that is good natured and alert but not noisy, faithful, easy-going and friendly, with a zest for working, and the Dutch registry's own breed page calls it sensitive to noise and harsh words, needing no harsh voice or handRaad van Beheer op Kynologisch Gebied…. The Toller's FCI standard calls it highly intelligent and easy to train, with a strong retrieving desire and playfulness essential to its tolling ability. That combination makes them trainable to an unusual degree and also means they do poorly with harsh handling. A sensitive dog bred to work on a hand signal shuts down under pressure rather than complying.

None of this makes either breed an easy pet in an Indian flat. A dog with high prey drive for waterfowl, real energy and a need for a job is a demanding animal wherever it lives. It does mean the temperament problem is workload rather than character.

One trait the decoy job did NOT select for is worth naming, because it separates these dogs from every hound in this batch. A decoy dog was not independent. It worked to a signal, in sight of its handler, on a route the handler chose, and a dog that made its own decisions was useless in a decoy pipe. That is the opposite of the trailing hounds elsewhere in this cluster, and it is why the surviving breeds are far more biddable than their working history might suggest.

Training approach and what these dogs resist

Train a decoy-type dog with reward timing and distance work, because the historical job was a silent hand signal at range and the surviving breeds still learn that way faster than they learn anything else.

The primary source is unusually helpful here. Payne-Gallwey's requirement that the dog be rewarded at the time and worked on a single wave of the hand is a training specification, and it maps directly onto modern practice.

1. Mark and reward within a second, because delayed reward teaches nothing and this type was selected on immediate contingency.
2. Build a hand signal early alongside the verbal cue, since these dogs read gesture unusually well.
3. Work distance deliberately rather than incidentally, sending the dog out and back over a fixed route the way the job did.
4. Socialise early to Indian street conditions, traffic, cattle, crowds and other dogs, at a distance the dog can handle.
5. Keep recall training live for the life of the dog, because a waterfowl drive does not fade.

The Indian constraint

The safe hours to work a heat-sensitive small gundog in most Indian cities are before dawn and after dark for four to five months of the year, which are also the hours of worst visibility. Plan the training year around the climate rather than against it, and treat a reflective harness and a light as basic equipment rather than an accessory.

Daily exercise requirement, and what the job actually demanded

A decoy-type dog needs sixty to ninety minutes of varied work daily, and the historical job tells you what kind: repeated short bursts on a fixed route rather than sustained distance.

The work was not endurance. Payne-Gallwey describes the dog running 'over the jump and round the front of each screen consecutively'; on a hand signal, appearing and disappearing to draw the ducks progressively up the pipe. That is interval work with a strong cognitive component, repeated until the birds are far enough in.

Replicate the pattern rather than the distance

• Set up a short fixed route with two or three turning points and send the dog round it on a signal.
• Use retrieves over water where genuinely clean water exists, since swimming loads the body without loading the heat.
• Hide objects and let the dog work the pattern out, because this type was selected for problem solving as much as for running.
• Rotate the route, because a solved pattern stops being exercise.

Grooming and ear care in Indian humidity

Groom a decoy-type dog twice a week and pay attention to the tail and the ears, because the defining feature of the historical type was a curly bushy tail and the surviving breed carries heavy ear furnishings.

The primary source specifies exactly one coat feature and it is the tail: 'with a curly bushy tail if possible';. That was not decoration. A well-flagged tail is what the ducks followed, so the feature the whole job depended on is also the feature that needs brushing.

The surviving Kooikerhondje carries a medium-length coat with distinct patches of clear orange-red on pure white and black hair tips on the ears that its standard calls earrings, and the tolling retriever carries a water-repellent double coat of medium length. Both mean feathering, and feathering in an Indian monsoon holds moisture against skin.

The ears are where the veterinary bill comes from

A drop ear with heavy furnishing over a warm canal in an Indian August is the likeliest source of an ear infection in either surviving breed. The coat colour on the Kooikerhondje makes this slightly easier to spot, since discharge shows on white hair, and that is the only advantage the colour gives.

1. Check both ears weekly by lifting the leather and looking rather than sniffing from a distance.
2. Dry the canal after every swim and every bath, which for a water-working breed means often.
3. Use a cleaner your vet recommends, and stop if the dog flinches.
4. See your nearby vet at the first head shake or odour rather than the third.

Ticks and a water dog

A dog worked in reed beds and long grass collects ticks, and the Indian tick-borne disease burden is heavy. A West Bengal series of 584 dogs screened at veterinary clinics found Babesia gibsoni in 76.54 percent and two or more pathogens in 72.9 percent of the 584 dogs screened. A Kerala series of 120 dogs found Babesia in 66.7 percent, peaking pre-monsoon between March and May. Both sampled clinic caseloads rather than the street, and that caveat belongs beside the figure. Run hands through the feathering weekly, because that is where ticks lodge.

Health issues, and where the real data is

The Red Decoy Dog has no health data of any kind, and the Kooikerhondje that inherited its job has some of the best screening data of any rare breed on this site.

The absence is total and it is not interesting on its own. A type with no population, no register and no name in any studbook cannot have health statistics, and no page should imply otherwise. What is interesting is the contrast with the breed that did get registered.

The elbow absence is a finding, not a gap

The breed has 324 hip evaluations and no elbow row at all. OFA's own threshold explains it: 'For hips, each breed must have at least 100 evaluations in the database. For all other databases, there must be at least 50.'; So more than 320 Kooikerhondjes have had hips scored and fewer than 50 have had elbows scored, which tells you what the breed's own community screens for.

What the literature covers

The Kooikerhondje's 24 papers cluster on inherited disease, which is what a small closed register produces. They cover type III von Willebrand disease across several papers, a hereditary inflammatory myopathy described in 2023, hereditary necrotising myelopathy linked to a novel IBA57 variant, and patellar luxationMandigers Paul JJ, Stehling Oliver. OFA now publishes a polymyositis DNA table for the breed as well, reading 65 tested, 63.1 percent normal and 36.9 percent carriers on 17 September 2026. The tolling retriever's 37 papers cluster on hypoadrenocorticism and an immune-mediated rheumatic disease complex.

Life expectancy, and why this page gives no number

No life expectancy figure exists for the Red Decoy Dog and none can, because there was never a population to measure.

Neither surviving decoy breed is among the 155 purebred breeds in the largest UK longevity study's supplementary tables either, so even they have no cohort median published there. Figures circulating for both come from breed-club surveys and registry estimates rather than from veterinary cohorts, and this page does not repeat them as measurements.

The useful thing a reader can take away is not a number. It is that the two breeds which inherited this work have measurable, published, testable health data precisely because somebody registered them, and the English type has none precisely because nobody did.

Feeding a small working gundog in India

Feed a decoy-type dog to a body condition score, because no standard exists for the historical type and the surviving breeds span 9 to 23 kg, which is too wide for any single chart.

Payne-Gallwey gives no weight, no height and no feeding guidance, only that the dog is about a third smaller than a fox. For the living breeds, a Kooikerhondje sits at 9 to 13 kg on the Dutch registry's page and a tolling retriever at 17 to 23 kg under FCI 312Federation Cynologique Internationale, which is up to a two-fold difference in ration between two dogs doing the same historical job.

• Feel the ribs with flat fingers and expect to find them under a thin cover, without pressing.
• Look down at the standing dog and expect a visible waist behind the ribs.
• Look from the side and expect an abdominal tuck rather than a level underline.
• Weigh monthly on the same scale and record it, because a trend beats a single reading.

A water-working dog has one specific feeding rule

Do not feed immediately before swimming or hard retrieving work, and do not feed immediately after it either. The general deep-chest guidance applies less strongly here than to the large hounds elsewhere in this cluster, since neither surviving breed is markedly deep-chested, but the timing rule is worth keeping.

One Indian-specific point on food availability. Small-breed formulations are widely stocked in Indian cities and cost materially less per month than large-breed ones, so a decoy-type dog is genuinely cheap to feed here compared with any of the 60 cm hounds on this site.

Month by month through the first year

Plan a decoy-type puppy's first year around the socialisation window and around building distance work early, because a dog bred to respond to a hand signal at range learns that best when young.

This timeline is generic small-gundog guidance honestly labelled, and it applies to the surviving breeds. No breed-specific developmental data exists for the historical type, and none can.

Register the dog when your municipality requires it rather than when you remember. Delhi's MCD charges Rs 500 for a new pet dog registration and Rs 500 to renew, with a late fee of Rs 100 a month, and Greater Chennai Corporation charges Rs 50 for a pet licenceGreater Chennai Corporation.

Where Indian law touches this dog

Indian law has nothing to say about a historical type and a good deal to say about the surviving breeds, and the clause that matters most is the one about coat and climate.

The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Dog Breeding and Marketing) Rules, 2017 apply to anyone breeding dogs in India. Three of their provisions reach a small feathered gundog directly.

• Second Schedule Part IV paragraph 21(1) bars keeping in outdoor facilities, without the attending veterinary practitioner's written approval, dogs not accustomed to the temperatures prevalent in the area or region in question, dog breeds that cannot tolerate them 'such as long-haired breeds in high temperature locations', and sick, infirm, aged or young animals.
• Second Schedule Part II paragraph 6(8) forbids tail docking, ear cropping, de-barking, de-clawing, branding, dyeing and any other mutilation, and any change of appearance by artificial means.
• Second Schedule Part III paragraph 8(10) requires breeding dogs to have been tested for genetic defects including hip dysplasia, progressive retinal atrophy, night blindness, hypothyroidism, entropion, ectropion, overshot and undershot jaw, wry mouth, two or more missing teeth and cryptorchidism.

A citable absence

Paragraph 8(10)'s list is illustrative rather than closed, since the operative word is including, so a defect being unlisted does not put it outside the clause. Worth knowing for these breeds specifically, because the conditions their own literature names, being von Willebrand disease, inflammatory myopathy and necrotising myelopathy, appear nowhere in the Indian list and are still reachable by it.

The Rules never mention deafness at all: the terms BAER and deaf appear zero times across the whole gazette, verified with a pattern allowing whitespace and hyphens between every character so the absence is genuine rather than an extraction artefact.

Head to head against the dogs you can actually get

The Red Decoy Dog cannot be compared on availability because it does not exist, so the useful comparison is between its two living descendants and the small dogs an Indian buyer can genuinely obtain.

The first three rows are the point. One never existed as a breed, and two exist as breeds and are not obtainable in India. The remaining two are what an Indian reader can actually bring home.

If the size and the biddability appeal

A Beagle is the closest available match on size to a Kooikerhondje and the furthest away on trainability, since a scent hound follows its nose and a decoy dog watches its handler. Be clear which of those two traits drew you here, because they point at different dogs.

If the water work appeals

A Labrador Retriever is genuinely available in India, genuinely loves water and genuinely retrieves, and it is the honest substitute for anyone drawn to the tolling retriever. It is also twice the weight, so the Indian heat calculation is harder rather than easier.

What readers get wrong about the Red Decoy Dog

The commonest mistake is calling it an extinct breed, and it is an easy mistake because the highest-ranking page on the Indian search does exactly that.

1. Calling it a breed. The 1886 primary source defines it in a glossary of decoy equipment as the piper, the dog used in decoying.
2. Giving it an extinction date. Wikipedia states the date is unknown, and aggregators supply one anyway.
3. Quoting the description short. The original reads 'A bright intelligent little fellow', and the circulating version drops the adjective.
4. Confusing it with the tolling retriever. The Canadian breed is a real registered breed at FCI 312 and is roughly twice the size the 1886 text describes.
5. Assuming Indian humidity is the obstacle. The Fens are more humid than any Indian city, at 84.66 percent against Chennai's 72.39.
6. Searching only the FCI name for the surviving breed. 'Kooikerhondje' returns 5 papers, 'Kooiker dog' with its plural returns 19, and every Kooiker form together returns 24.
7. Reading a zero as an absence. A controlled zero on the names you thought of is still a zero on the names you thought of.

The mistake that costs a dog rather than money

For anyone who does keep a surviving decoy breed in India, the risk is heat during work rather than heat at rest. These are small dogs with real drive and a strong retrieve, and they will keep going past the point of sense. Hall 2020 found 74.2 percent of triggered heat-related illness events were exertional rather than environmental, and a dog fetching in April sun is exactly that mechanism.

One historical mistake worth correcting gently, because it is repeated with confidence. Decoy dogs were not trained to chase or to flush. They were trained to be interesting, moving in and out of view so that ducks followed them out of curiosity. A page describing the decoy dog as driving birds has the mechanism backwards, and the mechanism is the only genuinely unusual thing about the animal.

Adoption and responsible sourcing

Adopt rather than pursue this name, because nothing can be sold under it honestly and neither surviving decoy breed has a lawful Indian supply chain.

No pedigree can exist under this name anywhere in the world. There is no standard to judge a dog against, no register to enter it in, and no club that recognises it. Any paperwork offered with a Red Decoy Dog is either empty or for a different animal.

What to do if the type appeals to you

• Read the Kooikerhondje page, which covers the breed still doing this job and the health data behind it.
• Read the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever page for the Canadian half of the story.
• Ask a municipal shelter or an established rescue for a small, biddable, high-energy young dog, which is the closest temperament match genuinely available in India.
• Consider an Indian Pariah Dog, which is heat-adapted, robust, free and available everywhere in India.

Bonbeno does not recommend breeders, link puppy listings or quote any price as an offer. This page reports what primary sources, registries and governments publish, and for this name the conclusion is that it belongs in a history of English wildfowling rather than in a search for a puppy.

What the pages ranking in India actually tell you

The Indian search results contain a direct contradiction between the top organic result and Google's own AI answer on the same page, and no page resolves it by opening the 1886 source.

The second row is the striking one. Google's own answer engine gets this right and the page ranking above it gets it wrong, on the same results page, in the same session. That is unusual enough to be worth recording, because this site more often documents answer engines laundering errors from ranking pages rather than correcting them.

What the People Also Ask box shows

Google India returned four questions and three are genuinely on-topic, asking what a decoy is for dogs, what red hunting dogs are called, and what breed a famous dog named Decoy is. Only the first is off-breed, being about Red Dog the Australian kelpie, and that is a homonym rather than noise. All four are answered verbatim in the FAQ, untidied.

The gap this page fills is one free book nobody opened. Payne-Gallwey's manual is out of copyright, fully scanned, and searchable, and its glossary answers in eight words a question the English-language internet has been treating as open: the piper is the dog used in decoying.

Compare with similar breeds

Red Decoy Dog sits in 3 Bonbeno groups. Each one compares it directly against the breeds it is genuinely an alternative to, on the same figures.