ASHCROFT BEDLINGTONS

I frequently get asked how a Bedlington will get along with another breed of dog. I have seen them with an Old English Sheepdog, Vizlas, Doberman, Weimeraner. Having come to Bedlingtons from a sighthound breed (Borzoi), I am not as familiar with how they compare to other terrier breeds. After a recent inquiry, I asked Victoria Farrington to provide some insight to the interested party - they already had an Airedale and were interested in a smaller, lighter dog for the children. Victoria's stories of her Bedlington Hotspur, and her Airedale and Wire Fox Terriers are well loved among the breed list members, so I knew she had more to contribute than I could. I found Victoria's response very insightful, and have included it below.

I really hate to sound like I’m discouraging you because I love both Airedales and Bedlingtons but they really aren’t a good match without a fair amount of management and intervention. I did a lot of terrier rescue of all breeds, as well as a lot of training and showing terriers and I really don’t think there are any two breeds in the terrier group as different as an Airedale and a Bedlington. If you want that huge difference, a Bedlington may be the dog for you. If you love the Airedale and want more of the same, a Bedlington isn’t the dog you’re looking for.

In character, the Bedlington is much quieter and calmer and a lot more inward. Airedales are the most oafish of the terriers, and I mean that in the most loving way. They have no dignity and they could care less about body space and respect. It’s hard to offend an Airedale. Bedlingtons have a great deal of dignity. If you’re used to the rougher more outward oriented terriers, you can offend or hurt the feelings of a Bedlington. (I know because I’ve done it. For example, my wire fox terriers loved to be popped with an empty two liter soda bottle. I did it to the Bedlington one day and he was appalled and upset with me!) A stressed or unhappy Bedlington can practically disappear or drops its head and doesn’t respond to anything. Many terriers will tell you how they feel. Not so much with Bedlingtons, but they have a lot of opinions that are more subtle to read. Airedales are very outward vocal demanding dogs. A bored Airedale will shout at you, clack its teeth and bother you. A bored Bedlington will slink away and sulk or just feel bad. Airedales love chaos and novelty; Bedlingtons seem to prefer to know what’s going to happen next and can be hesitant about new things. An Airedale can wake up in the morning and go full bore all day long; Bedlingtons need some down time and love to snuggle up and be adored for a while. Bedlingtons need some peace in their lives to be happy; an Airedale doesn’t know the meaning of peaceful moments. Airedales have a lot of bounce and hardly ever hold grudges; Bedlingtons need to be treated with some respect and if you offend one you have to play up to them a bit before they forgive you. On a rainy Sunday morning, a Bedlington is the dog you want curled up next to you while you read the paper. An Airedale is bored by all the petting and snuggling and needs to go out and have some kind of physical exercise. Or at least those are the conclusions I’ve reached. Diane would know better about Bedlingtons in general as I know only a very small group of Bedlingtons that I’ve seen up close and in person. I’m more confident about my assessment of Airedales as I grew up with them, know a number of Airedale breeders and have spent time with more of them. We love the differences between them, but even after years of living with both breeds, my husband and I are continually reminded of how very different they are in almost every situation. It’s not always easy to see that both dogs are happy or secure.

And then there’s the matter of the physical mismatch. Airedales are 45-70 lbs., and they tend to be big physical dogs without a lot of sensitivity as to another dog’s body—lots of body slams, shoulder shoves, butt pushes, even paw swats. Bedlingtons are about 20 lbs., light on their feet and light in structure. I know a standard poodle, a whippet and a greyhound who all sustained some fairly serious injuries playing with an Airedale with no bad intentions at all on the part of the Airedale—they’re just physically overwhelming for a dog who isn’t either sturdy of build or confrontational in nature. Just the thought of an Airedale body slamming a willowy Bedlington or grabbing it by the neck can make me shudder. Unlike many of the other terrier breeds, that’s also more possible with a Bedlington because they’re pretty tolerant and don’t like to argue all day long with another dog. They may not tell off a dog who bothers them until it actually hurts them.

Adding a Bedlington puppy to a household with a young male Airedale could be a bit hairy for a while. You’d have to make sure he didn’t unintentionally hurt the puppy especially when it hit the teenaged years and was more likely to play hard and fast and/or start to assert itself, and you’d also have to see that he didn’t overwhelm the puppy before it felt confident enough to tell him to buzz off when it was annoying. Also, although our own Airedale is a female, I have a few good friends who are Airedale breeders and I have to admit that our male Bedlington has had some clashes with intact male Airedales. Bedlingtons don’t like to be pushed around by larger dogs, and while most Airedales are good natured enough to back off when a Bedlington tells them to, two males could be more of a problem than a male and female. I’ve only seen my Bedlington get mad a few times in his life—and he’s nine years old—but when he does, he doesn’t forget and he rarely forgives the other dog. (Unlike the wire hairs and the Airedale who can mount a fierce argument and then forget it as soon as they see a cookie.)

When we added our Airedale to the family, we had two wire fox terriers and the Bedlington was already an adult who could outrun her and tell her off. The bossy and fiery wire fox terriers enjoyed telling off the Airedale—there was a lot of flashing teeth and snarling as they put her in her place and told her not to bother them or run them over. The Bedlington didn’t seem to enjoy this, so either he was at her mercy or he got more peevish than we liked seeing him. I’d grown up with Airedales so we knew what to expect and we protected him from her exuberance, and we also lived on a lot of acreage so they were never in the kind of confined space where she could catch him and body slam him. In a small fenced yard, he’s just a target for her, so we had to play with them separately for a year when we lived in a rental house—he just didn’t have enough room to get away from her. Even now, they don’t play with each other much. If we throw a ball for him, she’s in a stay. Otherwise, she’ll run him down, run him into a bush or make him mad—which isn’t good for either one of them. At dog parks and off-leash areas, they play with entirely different dogs—she with the big physical dogs like labs, goldens, pointers, him with smaller dogs or those who don’t slam each other or step on his feet. (He gets very annoyed with dogs who step on him.) He plays with cattle dogs, Tervs and Malinois, so he’s not a wimp, but he doesn’t want to get battered in play, and that’s pretty much with Airedales do to each other.


Ours also get along well because we do a lot with them separately, so they’re not always stuck with each other. The Airedale jogs with my husband and does a lot of off leash running through the woods. The Bedlington is bored by jogging and can’t be trusted as much off leash, partly because he’s more independent and more focused on rodent hunting than she is, and also because he’s of the size that could be eaten by a coyote. He’s my agility and obedience dog and likes playing with his toys with a person, not another dog. She does a lot of bird retrieving, he digs for moles for literally hours. We have a six acre field and frankly I don’t take them out together because it’s hard to keep my eye on both of them and nearly impossible to play with both of them at the same time. He requires more supervision than she does, perhaps because he’s a male, perhaps because he’s more independent in nature and likes to go hunting alone in the woods, and because he’s not obsessed with us like she is. We’re rarely out of her sight and that’s her doing more than training, although we constantly reinforce it and do a lot of dog training in general.

Most of the Airedales I know are good family dogs because they are obsessed with their families; you don’t know what a luxury that is until you live with other terriers who really don’t give a fig where you are! I don’t know many Bedlingtons other than my own and I don’t see them at home, but the few I do know are more likely to wander away to check out something interesting and they’re so focused on chasing things—birds, squirrels, mice—that I don’t think they see or hear much when they’re on the run. They’re also shockingly fast when they’re running, and they can run and run and run and turn into a little blip on the horizon in ways that Airedales almost never do. The Bedlington did fur tracking at an AWTA Hunting/Working weekend a couple of years ago, and he scared all the Airedale judges silly because he took off like a shot through the woods and they couldn’t see or hear him. Unlike an Airedale who crashes around, pants and barks in the woods, a Bedlington can be nearly silent and move like lightning. If you plan to have your dogs off leash in or near the woods, the Bedlington can be a lot more difficult to trust and require a lot more training. We live on a heavily wooded 20 acre property and ours does earthdog so he gets a lot of practice, but you can’t expect the reliability from a Bedlington that an Airedale tends to just come with. They are definitely very trainable dogs, but they don’t just hang around and wait for you to do something interesting. If I put our Airedale and the Bedlington in the fenced yard and went in the house, she’d be out there staring at the door and he’d be checking the fence line to see if he could go somewhere more interesting. You also have to be more careful with open gates or holes in a fence if you have a Bedlington than you have to worry about with Airedales. For one thing, Bedlingtons can squeeze through all kinds of spaces an Airedale wouldn’t fit through, Bedlingtons can climb and jump easily and in unexpected ways (Hotspur leapt onto and then over a five foot fence as if it were nothing) and they’re just more likely to go walkabout without a shred of concern for where you are or how they’ll get home. They also seem to travel farther when they get loose. Lost Airedales tend to be found blundering around the neighborhood wagging their tails at people. Bedlingtons seem to get pretty far away, disappear for longer or get themselves into dangerous situations.

My guess would be that with three kids and a lot going on in your household already, it would be difficult to manage life so that it wasn’t hard on everyone. It can certainly be done but there are a lot of better matches for an Airedale that wouldn’t require so much supervision or separation—another Airedale, a lab or another sporting dog, a rottie, even a cattle dog or one of the more confrontational small terriers. Something that would enjoy all that jolly exuberance and what comes with it. I don’t know nearly as many Bedlingtons as I do Airedales, but I really can’t imagine many of them enjoying our Airedale any more than our own Bedlington does. He puts up with her. We make sure she doesn’t batter him out of sheer love for him. (And she does adore him. He’s a little frostier about her.)

I don’t mean to sound like a hypocrite since I love my own so much, but again we aren’t expecting them to interact all the time and we do separate things with them because this was our plan from the beginning and it suits our life. We’re starting to think about puppies ourselves, as our dogs are nine and seven years old, so we’re thinking a lot about how we’re going to handle daily life and keep everyone happy.

Sorry to go on so long, but this is something we put a lot of thought into when we added dogs to our family and it’s something I still think about a lot. Diane had a lot of good information about Bedlingtons specifically, and she’s definitely a source to trust.

And thank you Diane for even thinking of me. As I said in the beginning, I love both these breeds and I can’t imagine living without either one but I also hate to think of someone expecting them to get along like a house afire without being aware of the differences and difficulties. Oddly enough, although wire fox terriers are considered dog aggressive feisty little beasts who don’t get along well with any other dog, they’re a natural match for both Airedales and Bedlingtons in ways that Airedales and Bedlingtons don’t click. The happiest years of my life were spent with two wire fox terriers, an Airedale and a Bedlington, but I wouldn’t want to have just a young Airedale and a young Bedlington.

Victoria Farrington