Pointing dog breeds

The breeds

A pointing dog finds game by scent and freezes on it, and every breed here is filed that way by its own registry. Almost none can lawfully be bought in India, and each guide shows the search that proves it.

Ariège PointerA French pointing gundog that nearly died out twice, produces roughly ten puppies a year in France, and has never been recorded...Blue Picardy SpanielA French pointing dog separated from the Picardy Spaniel in 1938 on coat and pigment colour, with 84 French studbook...Bracco ItalianoItaly's oldest pointing breed, recognised by the FCI in 1956 and by the AKC only in 2022, read against Indian humidity, Indian...Braque DupuyA French pointing breed that the reference works call extinct, checked against the registries that would have to say so.Braque Francais type GascogneStandard 133 is the base text both French pointing breeds are written from, and the ear it demands is a listed fault on its...Braque Francais type PyreneesThe smaller and far commoner of the two Braque Francais breeds, read from FCI standard 134 as the list of ten departures it...Braque FrançaisOne name covers two separate FCI breeds. This guide separates them clause by clause and tests both against Indian heat, humidity...Braque Saint-GermainA rare French pointing breed with a documented royal-kennel origin story, sixteen puppies registered in France in 2025, and no...Braque d'AuvergneFrance's black-and-white pointing dog from the Cantal, read out of FCI-180 and the French studbook rather than copied from the...Braque du BourbonnaisThe rebuilt French pointer with a tail story that Indian buyers are being told wrong, and a home climate cooler than any Indian...BrittanyA 14 to 18 kg French pointing dog whose standard still prescribes a docked tail India outlaws, whose home region is cooler than...Burgos PointerSpain's own kennel club lists this breed as vulnerable, and its own breed club says the ancestry story told in English is...Ca Mè MallorquíMallorca's native pointing dog, named after a grazing lamb: about 200 alive, half of them unregistered, and four published...Cesky FousekWhat FCI Standard 245 says in the German that governs it, why the register and the Czech club disagree by a year, and why the...Drentse PatrijshondA 55 to 63 cm Dutch pointing dog whose breed association surveys every three-year-old and six-year-old in the country, publishes...English SetterA UK vulnerable native breed with 176 registrations left, ranked first of 129 breeds in the OFA thyroid register, and sold in...French SpanielFrance's oldest pointing dog, measured against Indian heat, with the one hereditary disease every ranking page leaves out.German Longhaired PointerA German gundog held by the FCI as Standard No. 117, filed under the Spaniel rather than the Braque type, bred pure since 1879,...German Roughhaired PointerThe rarest of Germany's four FCI pointing breeds, held as Standard No. 232, with 15 puppies registered in Germany in 2025 and an...German Shorthaired PointerA German hunting dog that has to pass a performance test before it can breed at home, sold in India by sites that hide the price...German Wirehaired PointerA German hunting dog that cannot breed at home until it has passed a field test, sold in India by two pages that show no puppies...Gordon SetterThe only black and tan setter, down to 93 UK registrations in 2025, carrying an rcd4 PRA carrier rate of 28.5 percent in 771...Irish Red and White SetterThe older of Ireland's two setters, recognised last by every register that recognises both.Irish SetterThe younger of Ireland's two setters, bred out of the red and white, and the one Indian sellers actually price.Large MunsterlanderGermany's black and white long-haired pointing dog, measured against Indian heat, Indian law and an Indian market that does not...Old Danish PointerDenmark's only native pointing breed, held to a hip screen by law and a DNA test by its own kennel club, with no Indian market...Pachón NavarroNavarre's hunting dog, legally recognised by its own regional government in 2006 and added to Spain's national canine annex only...Perdigueiro GalegoA Galician pointing dog that is a fully recognised Spanish breed at two levels of government, absent from the FCI entirely, and...Picardy SpanielA French pointing dog held by the FCI as Standard No. 108, accepted on a definitive basis on 8 December 1954, with 168 French...PointerBritain's oldest pointing breed, now on the Royal Kennel Club's at-watch list, and almost never what an Indian listing is...Pont-Audemer SpanielFrance registered eight Pont-Audemer Spaniels in 2025, down from nineteen. A curly-coated, topknotted French water gundog held by...Portuguese PointerAn Iberian gundog with no undercoat, a homeland August hotter than Bengaluru's hottest month, one paper in the entire clinical...PudelpointerA Poodle crossed to a Pointer in 1881, to a specification written down first. One of the clearest documented cases of a breed...Saint-Usuge SpanielA real breed by both tests and not an FCI one. The Société Centrale Canine published a written standard in 2003 and entered the...Slovak Rough-haired PointerA 57 to 68 cm grey wirehaired Slovak gundog with amber eyes and a moustache the standard insists on. Its breed standard also...Small MunsterlanderGermany's brown and white pointing dog, measured against Indian heat, Indian law and an Indian market that sells the book instead...Spinone ItalianoA large Italian gundog with no undercoat, a documented epilepsy problem and no lawful route into India.StabyhounFriesland's black and white pointing dog, measured against Indian heat, Indian law, and a gene pool its own club is now...VizslaA single-coated Hungarian gundog with no undercoat, priced in India by pages that give it a height of nine inches and a city...WeimaranerA German gundog whose own FCI standard permits a docked tail where the law allows it, sold in India by a page whose eight...Wirehaired Pointing GriffonA French wire-coated gundog with no Indian price, no McMillan lifespan row, a named recessive cataract gene, and a breed standard...Wirehaired VizslaA separate Hungarian breed in four registries and the same breed as the smooth Vizsla in the largest lifespan study ever run,...

Compare the breeds side by side

To compare these 42 breeds directly, read across the table rather than down the guides. Heat tolerance is a Bonbeno rating out of 5 for Indian conditions, and the reasoning behind each one sits on the breed's own page.

What matters in this group

The points below are what the evidence on these 42 guides actually supports, not what the category is assumed to mean.

• What puts a breed on this page is a filing decision, not a shape. The FCI holds its pointing breeds in Group 7, with Section 1 for the continental dogs in braque, spaniel and griffon types and Section 2 for the British and Irish pointers and setters. The Cesky Fousek guide reads its own classification line plainly, Group 7 means a pointer and Section 1.3 means a griffon-type continental pointer. A breed with no FCI number belongs anyway when a national registry files it the same way. The Saint-Usuge Spaniel has a written standard and a Livre des Origines Francais entry since 8 January 2003, with 58 puppies registered in 2025, and the Societe Centrale Canine's own standard prints Group 7, Section 1.2, with working trial. The Ca Me Mallorqui sits in the Real Sociedad Canina de Espana's Grupo 11, Perros de Muestra Continentales, Tipo Braco, recognised by the Balearic government in 2002 and the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture in 2004. An extinct breed belongs too. The FCI accepted the Braque Dupuy on 29 June 1955 as standard 178, its status field now reads Cancelled, and it posts zero registrations in all 57 French studbook editions from 1969 to 2025. It stays here because its guide's verdict is extinct breed, not type.
• The line between this group and the spaniels and retrievers is the utilisation clause, and the Brittany guide draws it in one sentence. A spaniel flushes game; the Brittany points it, so FCI-95 files it with the pointing dogs, not the spaniels, and calls it the smallest of the pointing breeds. The French Spaniel points and retrieves rather than flushing, which is why it sits in Group 7 despite its name. The English Pointer's job is narrower still, find and point at distance, and the AKC traces it to 17th-century Pointers that pointed hares for Greyhounds to course, before wing shooting existed. A dog bred to hold a point until a Greyhound arrives is a dog bred to be motionless under enormous excitement. The point is not taught. The Pointer guide states that you do not train it into the dog and cannot train it out, and the Burgos Pointer's parent club records the opposite failure, individuals that have never made a point in their lives, even on quail, blamed on Sabueso Espanol blood in the breed's formation. Retrieving is the job the market wants instead. The Drentse Patrijshond's club paper puts roughly 95 percent of modern hunting as retrieving, not pointing, and names the Labrador and Golden Retriever as the breeds Dutch hunters switch to.
• With working trial sits on almost every classification line here, and it is the buyer's most useful warning. The Cesky Fousek guide reads it as the FCI refusing to award the breed's international title on looks alone. Germany goes further. A Deutsch Kurzhaar cannot breed there until it has passed a field performance test, proved itself in real hunting and been X-rayed clear of hip dysplasia, and the German Longhaired Pointer's autumn breeding test scores searching, pointing, water work and retrieving under judges. The Vizsla's utilisation clause asks for field, forest and water work, its guide and the Weimaraner's budget two hours of real work a day, and the Kennel Club rates the Bracco Italiano and the Brittany at more than two. India offers none of the work that absorbs this. The Braque Saint-Germain guide states that India has no field trial circuit for continental pointing breeds at all, and the Braque d'Auvergne guide adds that upland bird hunting is not a legal recreational activity here, so the working brief has nowhere to go. Exertion triggered 652 of the 879 heat-illness events with a recorded cause in the largest UK study, 74.2 percent, so the guides converge on scent work as the substitute, because twenty minutes of nose work tires a pointing dog more than an hour of pavement.
• Most of these breeds are counted in dozens, by their own studbooks. France registered 17,777 pointing dogs across 32 breeds in 2025. The English Setter led on 5,086 and the Brittany followed on 3,793, and the French breeds fall away fast, the Braque Francais type Pyrenees at 623, the French Spaniel at 236, the Braque d'Auvergne at 159, the Blue Picardy Spaniel at 84, the Braque du Bourbonnais at 61, the Saint-Usuge Spaniel at 58, the Braque Francais type Gascogne at 35 and the Braque Saint-Germain at 16. The Ariege Pointer's club counts around 10 births a year. Germany registered 1,198 Shorthaired, 382 Longhaired and 15 Roughhaired Pointers in 2025, the last a breed whose entire approved breeding population is 47 dogs on one web page. Spain registered 309 Burgos Pointers in five years and lists the breed as vulnerable; about 200 Ca Me Mallorqui are alive, half unregistered. The Netherlands produced 92 Drentse Patrijshond puppies in 2024 against the 260 a year the breed needs to replace itself. The British pair are shrinking at home too, the English Setter at 176 UK registrations in 2025 and on the vulnerable native breeds list, the Pointer at 321 and at watch. The Braque du Bourbonnais was rebuilt from about six dogs registered in 1973, after ten years with no French registrations.
• The health evidence splits this group in two, and the split does not follow price. A handful of breeds are screened in the tens of thousands. The German Shorthaired Pointer records 3.7 percent dysplastic hips across 23,618 OFA evaluations against 14.2 percent for all breeds, the Vizsla 6.7 percent across 19,841, the Brittany 13.8 percent across 23,789. The English Setter ranks first of 129 breeds in the OFA thyroid register, and 4.5 percent of 447 UK puppies tested were deaf, with the risk 4.6 times higher when neither parent had a hearing result. The Drentse Patrijshond's Dutch club surveys every three-year-old and six-year-old in the country, 726 dogs in the 2022 round, which is how its epilepsy rate of 1.4 to 2.2 percent is known against 0.62 to 0.82 in dogs generally. Then there is the rest. Fifty-three eye examinations are the entire world screening record for the Braque d'Auvergne. The Braque du Bourbonnais, the Burgos Pointer, the German Roughhaired Pointer and the Slovak Rough-haired Pointer have no OFA row and no paper in PubMed, and the Burgos, Roughhaired and Slovak guides each prove the absence with a control search that returned results. The Roughhaired guide states the consequence plainly. A buyer of that breed is buying with less measured evidence behind it than almost any other FCI-recognised dog.
• For an Indian buyer supply decides, and the guides measure it rather than assert it. The Ariege Pointer guide searched India's main dog marketplaces and found a pointer shelf of three breeds, the German Shorthaired, the German Wirehaired and the plain Pointer. The German Shorthaired Pointer guide rates Indian availability 2 of 5, present but scarce, on three marketplace listings against 454 Labradors the same day, with published bands of Rs 25,000 to Rs 70,000 and no verified transaction behind them. The English Setter's market is one directory listing in Erode that states the puppies are not KCI registered. The Vizsla and Weimaraner guides record bands of Rs 40,000 to Rs 1,00,000 and Rs 30,000 to over Rs 1 lakh and treat every figure as a claim, not an observation; the top Weimaraner seller's eight listings held no Weimaraner. Most other price sections end with no listing, no breeder and no rupee figure to divide, and the reason is legal. DGFT Trade Notice 22/2022-23 makes dogs a Restricted import, permits entry only as a personal pet, for CPCSEA research or for Defence and Police use, and states that trading or breeding applications shall be duly rejected, so no lawful supply chain can form. The extinct Braque Dupuy is the limit case, with nothing to buy, adopt or import.