THEY’RE like a drug, you just can’t give them up,’ Charlotte Jenkinson tells me about the English setters with which she and her husband have shared their lives for the past three decades. She ought to know. Mrs Jenkinson’s parents, Maj-Gen and Mrs Richard Keightley, have been English-setter owners for more than half a century, since the Maj-Gen’s return from duty with the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards in Germany in the 1980s. For Mrs Jenkinson, English setters—‘incredibly affectionate, absolutely beautiful, irrepressible in their free-spiritedness and trustworthy’—have played a part in her life for almost as long as she can remember. Devoted to her current six-year-old, black-and-white or ‘blue belton’ setter Merlin, it’s not a situation she has any intention of changing.
In the third decade of the 21st century, the English setter, with a working history in these islands that can be traced back more than 500 years, is a breed in crisis. Last year, the Kennel Club registered
