The Terriers of Scotland and Ireland is one of two companion volumes about the terriers of the British Isles. It is a terrier social history that examines, in considerable depth, the origin of the various breeds as well their working and companionship qualities.

In addition to today’s kennel club breeds, Cummins devotes considerable attention to the extinct Blue Paul Terrier and Clydesdale or Paisley Terrier.

Richly detailed, scholarly, and well researched, The Terriers of Scotland and Ireland is the first book written exclusively about these breeds since 1923. 

The Terriers of England and Wales is the second of these volumes. As with the first volume, Cummins explores not only today’s kennel club breeds, but also to the extinct Old English Black and Tan Terrier and White English Terrier as well as the Yorkshire Terrier and Jack Russell Terrier. Also discussed are such rare but highly esteemed working breeds as the Plummer, Fell, Patterdale, Lucas, and Sporting Lucas Terriers.

Bryan Cummins is a cultural anthropologist who conducts ethnographic fieldwork in the eastern subarctic and in rural Europe. He has an Honours BA from Trent University, an MA in education from Concordia University, and an MA and PhD in anthropology from McMaster University.

His anthropological research is primarily in the areas of land use and land tenure, relations with the State, resistance, and government regulation and control of traditional subsistence activities. Cummins’s fieldwork has been primarily with the Cree and Algonquin in Ontario and Quebec and with shepherds in the French Pyrenees. His archival research has taken him to Ottawa/Gatineau, Winnipeg, The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., The British Museum and The Imperial War Museum in London, and to France.

In addition to his anthropological research and publications, he has conducted extensive research in the area of ethnocynology (the study of dogs within their cultural contexts) and was a regular columnist and feature writer for the Canadian Kennel Club’s magazine Dogs in Canada.

He is also the owner of Bryan’s Books, one of the largest rare, antiquarian, and out of print dog book businesses in the world.

Among his many books are “Only God Can Own the Land”: The Attawapiskat Cree (2003), Faces of the North: The Ethnographic Photography of John Honigmann ( 2004), First Nations, First Dogs: Canadian aboriginal ethnocynology (2002), and Bear Country: Predation, Politics and the Changing Face of Pyrenean Pastoralism (2008).

One of his books, Colonel Richardson’s Airedales: the making of the British War Dog School, 1900 – 1918,was the basis for the documentary Dogs of War on the BBC TV series, Inside Out, broadcast in 2006. His ethnographic film, Attawapiskat Goose Hunt, was broadcast on Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in Canada in 2000.

He taught for McMaster University’s Department of Anthropology for over 20 years and now teaches part-time for Trent University where he has been nominated for Excellence in Teaching Awards seven times.