Show Notes
Craig Koshyk is a photographer, writer, hunter, and historian of hunting dogs. His podcast and magazine; Hunting Dog Confidential is heralded as a top resource for hunting dog enthusiast who want to know what lies beneath the surface of these great breeds we hunt.
Heath and Craig take a deep dive into the history of our hounds, where they came from, how they got their names and how they were bred. Listeners will be drawn in to the conversation as Craig lays out how the hounds came to North America and what their functions and use was in colonial America.
On this episode of The Journey on the Houndsman XP Podcast Network, instead of looking ahead, we take a look at the past. After all, how can we get where we’re going if you don’t know where we’ve been?
Resources:
Old Ben:
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/det.4a20195/
Theodore Roosevelt hunting with Hounds:
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.37603/
Craig Koshyk’s Book:
https://projectupland.com/product/pointing-dogs-volume-one-the-continentals/
Hunting Dog Confidentials podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hunting-dog-confidential/id1511588147
Show Transcript
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The Houseman XP podcast Network is taking you on the journey. Your host, master trainer, Heath Hyatt, will combine his decades of experience as a homan and as a professional trainer that will light the path forward and make our PACS lighter on this lifelong journey to become better hunters and hounds men.
There are no shortcuts. So lace up those boots and grab a dog leash. The journey begins now.[00:01:00]
Hey guys, the journey on Hounds XP is teamed up with Gow Wild. Gow Wild is a social media platform that was made for Hunters by Hunter. . If you guys and gals have listened to any of the other podcasts that I've been on, you know what a huge outdoor enthusiast I am. I love being in the woods, my hands.
There's nothing more exciting than hearing the thunder of the spring gobbler. I love fishing for trout and the brooks and the streams, and I love being on the river chasing that ever elusive fish of a thousand cast. The Musky Go Wild is the place that I can post my trophies, hunts, and memories without being censored.
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On this episode of the Journey, we are going back to school [00:03:00] guys. Yes, we're going back to history class and not the history that you think of, but we are gonna learn the history of the hound, where it originated, how it got stateside, and what our forefathers actually used and implemented the hound. I think this is gonna be a surprise when you start learning little tidbits of history on the hound, and it may not be exactly what you think it is, but today we have a very special guest with us.
He is a historian, he is an author. He is a photographer. He runs his own podcast and magazine, which is called Hunting Dog Confidential. He has wrote numerous articles for Gundog magazines across the world. Some of them are Gundog Central Dogs Unlimited Project Upland. We have Craig Kosik with us [00:04:00] today who is a historian and he studies and researches and travels to learn the history of the dog.
To say he's a dog nut probably is not doing justification, but we're gonna learn the history today and Craig's gonna take us back in time and we are gonna learn things that we may or may not have known a lot of the stuff I hadn't known. So we're gonna jump right into this and we are already talking dogs.
Nordic dogs. And what we love to do is really go down the rabbit hole of the culture of those dogs. Where were they created? Why were they created? Who developed them? Where are they now? How are they used? What can we learn from them to teach us about our own dogs. So yeah it's something do confidential.
It's a podcast on a magazine. Yeah. So tell the listeners and tell me too, because what, tell us a little bit about your [00:05:00] background. What got you into the love of dogs and researching and studying dogs the way that you do? Many years ago my wife and I lived in apartments and condos.
We lived here in Canada and in Quebec and then in Europe for a little while. And we were back and forth and we never had room for a dog. Cause we didn't have a yard and a fence. But the minute we got a yard and a fence, I got a dog. And I had I, had the good luck of getting a decent bird dog.
I got a weer runner, and he was an excellent hunting dog. But one of the things I soon realized was, number one, I'm not a good dog trainer, and I never learned how to train a dog properly. But number two, I didn't really know much about these dogs. I could pronounce the breed name. I knew they came from someplace in Germany, and friends of mine had other breeds of BirdDogs.
They had German short hairs or German wire hairs, and I really didn't know much about them. Now, this is pre-internet days. This is in the 1990s. And I'm a bookworm. I'm a, I'm an artist actually by profession. I'm a, I've also taught science and [00:06:00] math and photography and things like that.
. But I'm a book worm mainly. And so I figured I better learn more about my dog. I better learn more about all kinds of dogs. So let's go to the library. So I did I went to the library and I would. Take up breed books and sort of dog encyclopedias. And then I started noticing that there was a lot of contradictory information.
There was a lot of missing information and there were a lot of questions. The more I read, the more I wanted to know. And so I thought there must be a book somewhere that sort of explains all of this stuff to me, that explains all these breeds and where they came from and why they came from there and how they got here.
And sure enough, there, there wasn't one, I just, I could not find a single book like that. Again, pre-internet days, you have to rely on libraries and magazines and things. So I decided I'll just write one , crazy as it seems. I said, I'll just sit down and I'll write a book. I'll, but I'm not gonna write it just from stuff that I'm regurgitating from other sources.
I'm gonna actually go and see these dogs and I'm a professional photographer, or was at that time, [00:07:00] And I figured I'll go, if I wanna learn about French dogs, I'll go to France. We love traveling, so we went to France and photographed dogs and spoke with the breeders and club members there.
And same thing in Germany and Spain and Italy and all over Europe. And it just ended up being a ginormous project. It took me 11 years to create my arte just over 10 years to create my first book, which is Pointing Dogs Volume One. And it examines all of the breeds that came from Europe, all of the pointing dogs.
And now actually I'm just like the other day I finished writing my second book. It took me another 10 years to do volume two, which is on British and Irish breeds pointers and setters. . And so researching all these dogs and doing all this travel, I've seen all of these various pointing breeds and all of their native lands, and I've learned a heck of a lot, I've learned a heck of a lot about dogs, of course, but also about different approaches to training and different approaches to using the dogs, different ways to hunt with them where they came from, their history their background, their culture, [00:08:00] especially the culture.
I can tell you German dogs are like German people. French dogs are like French people. They share so many things. And so when we look at our dogs, we're looking at ourselves in the mirror in a certain way. So that's my background. And it's always a pleasure to talk dogs with anybody.
And you're right, hounds, that's not my world. I know something about it. I've read a ton about it, especially the history books. And I've spoken to a number of Hounds men. , what I can share is that common ancestry they have with the pointing dogs, cuz you go back far enough and they all came from mainly the main source and a lot of the early American history of the pointing dogs is related to an intertwined with the history, the early American history of Hounds and how they were first used, how they first got here, and how they were first used here, and then how they've developed since then.
Yeah, and like I said, we, I mean my great-grandfather [00:09:00] run Fox dogs. And if you go back in the tree and walker line, I think the Fox dog was one of the things that started establishing the tree in Walker. But my granddad run, he run Fox dogs and he run running dogs and of course that was back in the seventies and up into the eighties when he finally.
Stop. But that was the only part I remembered in my life. In my lifespan, but yeah. And you like to bird hunt too, don't you? I do indeed. Yes. Yeah. I know when we talked, you said you were going out and and do some hunting, and now that you have all this knowledge on where these dogs derive from and the training methods and like everything that you've accumulated over all these years studying them how does that, how does your perspective or how does that change what you do or how you do things?
[00:10:00] Yeah, it really has. First of all, the biggest change is that I used to hunt without dogs, obviously, before I had it I grew up in a hunting family. My, my parents are, my grandparents are both sets of grandparents are immigrants. So my mom's family came from Iceland, and my father's family came from Ukraine.
And so to put food on the table for their growing families, and they had large families. They lived at the south end of Lake Winnipeg here in Manitoba. They hunted. My mom to this day won't eat a wild game because she ate it every day of her life for the first 20 some years of her life and and now she wants, store bought food. But, I grew up in a hunting family, so for most of my life, until I was, I guess in my late twenties I hunted without dogs. Once I got dogs you know what changed is the fact that I'll never hunt without a dog. , if I drive out to a hunting field and I forgot my gun at home.
I'll take up my camera and I'll go hunt my dog. But if the opposite, was true, if I arrived there and I have my gun and my camera and I left my dog at home, I'm turning around and going home. . That's one of the things I, [00:11:00] my wife and I hunt for because, and with our dogs. The other thing I guess is that I have adopted.
Ways of using my dogs that are, that I've learned from other cultures in other ways. And the, I guess the easiest and the quickest example I can give you is that in North America, most of your listeners, all of your listeners who have bird dogs, they'll understand this in North America a pointer or a setter or whatever kind of point dog, you got slams on point, boom, it's got a bird somewhere out there.
Now that dog doesn't move, it's on point. And us as the handler or as the gunner, we're gonna walk out in front of that dog and we're gonna try and flush that bird. So it's the handler that actually flushes the bird in most European countries. They don't do that. The dog points, the handler comes up next to the dog, and then together they move slowly towards the bird until the bird is flushed, at which point.
We shoot in some other countries, they will actually come up next to the dog and then give 'em a command and then the dog will rush in and flush the bird at [00:12:00] which time you, you'll take your shot. So I've started to do that now simply because of the types of birds we hunt, a lot of sharp tail grows and they run.
And I've been sometimes 20, 30, 40 yards in front of my dog on point trying to figure out where the bird is. He knows, the dog knows exactly where that bird is. He can smell it. I can't. So that's one of the things I've done. We've also changed the way that we treat and deal with, after the shot.
In other words, Once the bird is in hand or, whatever we're hunting, we were hunting rabbits. The other hairs sh snowshoe hairs. We butcher it differently. Now we cook it differently and we treat it differently. Again, growing up in a hunting family, as a kid, you saw as much game as you could legally and you put it in the freezer cuz winter was coming.
And winter's long and food is expensive. So you put all, the deer and the moose and they all go in the fridge and they all go in the freezer cuz winter's coming and you didn't shoot a sniper. You didn't shoot a woodcock cause that same shotgun, shell could shoot a goose or shoot a big old duck.
So you didn't waste a shell on [00:13:00] small game. But once we started traveling throughout Europe and learning some of their cultures and some of their ways of doing things, we realized that, no, you know what? We don't really need that much meat for. We can go and buy it at the local Piggly Wiggly. What we need to do is shoot the game that we have here, learn to cook it as best we can and serve it with the best bottle of wine we have and honor it and, eat it during the season and in a sort of a different way.
So yeah, those are some of the things that have changed simply because of, my journey through dogs. And you know what you, I love the saying you, you hunt four with and because of the dogs Yep. Like that. I chase bear and raccoon some, but I can't imagine, and I can't deer hunt with dogs in the area that I'm at, and I've never done it.
I've run a lot of off game, but not on purpose just putting it out there , , but I can't imagine. Hunting bear with without my dogs. That's, [00:14:00] it's just a part, it's just a part of me. And when you said that, I'm like, that's why, that's right. Like he, he's hit the nail right on the head.
This is why I do what I do. And it's four cause and width and without width, there's no sense. If I didn't, if I didn't run hounds, like I wouldn't be out there hunting bear. I wouldn't be doing it. So I'm kind had an interesting conversation with a person a little while ago, and they're heavily into the show side of their particular breed of dog and they don't hunt with their dogs at all.
They just love showing them and, good on 'em. Shows are fun. If you're into that, the sort of a thing that, it ripples the economy and it's a, it's an activity for the whole family. So I, I understand people get an enjoyment out of it, but. The, it came down, our discussion finally came down to the fact that, I don't really know shows, I don't do shows.
I'm a hunting person. And I believe that the breed that I have should always remain a hunting dog. And they said come on if all of a sudden, you could no longer hunt, do you think your breed should go extinct? And I [00:15:00] said, with all honesty. Yeah, a hunting dog is hunting dog.
And if hunting suddenly, ceased to be then our hunting dogs really have no real reason to be, there's lots of great companion dogs and other sorts of dogs. I wouldn't say that our dogs would go extinct, but they would certainly change it to something. A hunting dog hunts.
, a dog is what a dog does. And so that's the point that I'm at. I won't hunt without 'em, and I won't hunt with a dog that doesn't hunt. My sister's got. One of the most beautiful little dogs. She's a little mix of, who knows? Hines 57. And she's a wonderful dog. She's not a hunting dog, and I love that dog to death, but she does what she does.
She's a companion dog, she's a lap dog, and she's fantastic at, and my dogs are hunting dogs. Now they're also, they like to cuddle and they like to be lap dogs too, but they're primary purpose in this life is to hunt and to put a smile on a hunter's face. And that's why I have 'em. And that's what we do.
And they love it like they live. That's what they live. . [00:16:00] They are genetically programmed to do what they do. . And so again, the same discussion with the show oriented person, she said hunters don't care about the health of their dogs. And I said it's true that in certain circles a lot of hunters won't do, some of the tests that a lot of show people do, cuz they're all about the genetic tests and the hips and the blood and the elbows and this and that and the other thing.
Fine. I understand the reasons for that. But I asked her, what about mental health? What about the mental health of that Labrador retriever down the road that the lady doesn't let swim because it'll ruin its coat. You've got an animal, which every fiber of its beings says, jump in the water every, it's hardwired to want to jump in the water and fetch something to you.
That's how it's been selectively bred over hundreds of years. And now you're saying to that thing, yeah, no, you can't do it. You take a border colly and put 'em in a backyard with nothing to hurt. . It's almost torture for these poor things, really. And then if you breed a hunting breed long enough and it loses the instinct [00:17:00] to hunt, you're breeding a defective version of that dog.
You are breeding a dog that has a mental illness for that dog, appointing dog that doesn't point is not healthy, is not mentally healthy. You've got coonhounds. The voice is a really, important part. If all of a sudden you got a line of these dogs that had no voice and didn't want a trail, and didn't want a tree and didn't wanna hunt, you'd think there's something wrong with these dogs.
Yeah. No matter how many blue ribbons they're gonna win. There's something mentally wrong with those dogs. Yes. And so really it does come down to a certain appreciation of what are we doing with our dogs and why are we doing it? And it comes down to people who have hunting dogs who hunt, get it.
people who don't. Yeah. Yeah. It's very true. Very true. Yeah. And I, if my dogs didn't yeah, just everything you're saying is resonating with me and who I am and what I stand for. So Craig, what, let's [00:18:00] get into the history a little bit. Take us back and, educate us on what you know.
Let's, yeah let's zoom in and focus in on Hounds. , we can go all the way back to Roman times. We can go back to pre Roman times. One of the examples I use is if you've ever seen that movie called Gladiator. , it's a pretty good movie.
It's about a Roman soldier or whatever. There's a couple of scenes in there where they unleash dogs of war. These are big moister dogs. , just these big massive type dogs. Those dogs were also used, or variations of those dogs were also used in hunting. You'll see pictures of greyhound looking dogs on Egyptian pyramids.
We can go way, way back. You go all the way back to cavemen and they were using dogs to hunt because let's. dogs are faster than us, so they can run faster for shorter periods of time than we can. , they are stronger in certain ways. Their jaws are stronger and they're, they're just a they can smell away better.
They can hear better, they can see better in certain situations than we can. So they're just a, an aid to us and we a, we help them. This is [00:19:00] a symbiotic relationship, dogs. , we didn't domesticate dogs domesticated themselves. That's a whole other episode we could talk about.
, but no, cavemen took a wolf puppy outta the cave and domesticated it. They, over thousands of years, they domesticated themselves simply because humans settled down and threw a lot of garbage , around their encampments and dogs, the tamer ones the braver ones, the ones that got closest, fed the best.
And so eventually they evolved themselves into the domestic dog. Anyway, we can fast forward a few thousand years because when we talk about hounds and if you want to get into a period of time and a place where if we went into a time capsule and, space shuttle of some sort and zoomed you back to a certain period of time where the dogs look like, they look like now and they work in the way that they work now that you would actually recognize them would be.
Would be 15th 16th century France and England. Now, you wouldn't be able to understand the language because English was far different at that time. But you would get what these guys are doing with their [00:20:00] dogs. And the dogs would look very similar to what they look like today. And these are the hounds, the French call them running hounds.
The English would call them various, like harriers and beagles and things like that. Or the forerunners from these dogs. They called them hounds as well. And what give them those dogs? What? Give them that name. Oh, what? Give them the name Hound. What was it that. That dog picked up that name.
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Guys, I've been using this product for the last six months and it has been a game changer for me. [00:21:00] If you're looking for something to help with the overall health of your dog, go to work so well.com and give this product a try. It is highly recommended by Hounds Man XP here on the journey. So the word hound is quite old.
It comes from an old German word, which comes from an old Greek word. We can go all the way back to Indo-European languages. And up until about the 14th century hound, or in old English, they would say was a word they used for all domestic canines. Within that group of Hs or hounds, you would have dogs, especially dogs that look like mastiffs or bulldogs.
Those were called dogs. Okay? So any dog running around the street was called a hound. But the one, the butcher had you call that one a dog. So dog was a subset of hounds, but everything changed by the 16th century. For some reason, hound went outta use [00:22:00] and dog became the general term. Anything with four legs, that was a dog, was a.
and then, even the French used it they just put another G on the end and they call it a dog, d o g E. And a lot of different languages adopted that word dog and hound went into decline and it only became relevant for certain types of dogs, like sight hounds and running hounds and blood hounds.
So hound is used to be a general word, and a dog was a specific one. And it flipped meanings in the 16th century, huh? To me. Sitting there and listening to that at it, it should stand for hunter. , that's what Hound should stand for, is Hunter . Yeah. And but there's a really interesting, what I like about the word hound too, is how it, it changed meanings, so I'll give you a little story. So again, hound was the old English term for all dogs. Specific types of dogs in there were called dogs. So the butcher had a [00:23:00] dog, everybody else had a hound. Then it flipped. Now everybody's got dogs. And that guy down the street, he's got a hound. You come to the US or in America and in American history by the time it got to America, the word hound not only had fallen out of favor.
Now no longer was it this word that described a whole, like every kind of dog. It was a certain kind of dog. And it was also used as a slur. It was, people would be called, oh, you're such a dirty hound. And it took on a meaning and an American pop culture, the meaning was. , it ended up meaning like a jilo, it meant it ended up meaning like a hound.
You, you could say, oh, he's a dirty hound. When you call someone a dirty hound, what are you saying? You're actually saying that he's a man who lives off of the the earnings of a woman. And that's where you ain't nothing but a hound dog comes from, you know that Elvis song?
. Yeah. It's one of the most famous songs actually that was voted as the number, like in the top five most important songs ever recorded in America. [00:24:00] But did you know that Elvis Presley didn't record it first? It was actually recorded by a woman named Big Mama Thornton. And the reason I tell this story is because it really encapsulates what happened to the Hounds in America.
So we were in France and in England, and they were breeding different types of hounds and using 'em for different types of hunting. And we can get back, I'll explain exactly how they were doing it, but once it came to America, they were. Formed in ammo, gams. They were crossbred, they were changed. They were developed into their own local varieties.
That song Hounddog, was Big Mama Thornton, who sang at first this big African American woman. The song was written by two Jewish guys, and the guy who recorded and arranged it was Greek. So basically that song is like a melting pot of the American culture, right? It's a Greek immigrant recording this song written by two Jewish guys, sung by an African American woman about a hound, an old English word, which now in America means a dirty dog, a dirty guy, a guy that's not , on the up and up.
And so [00:25:00] I just, that story to me has always resonated, and every time I hear that song, you ain't nothing but a hound dog. And I encourage your listeners, go to YouTube, type in Big Mama Thornton and watch her version of Hound Dog. It's quite a cool version of the song. . But let's go back to France.
Let's go back to France and England. All right. We're in our, we're in our time machine and we're zapped back to, 1550 and we're somewhere in France or somewhere in England, and they're running around with their dogs. And what are they doing with them? They have very formalized hunts.
And all dogs, just like cultures are divided. They're divided by geography. You've got English dogs, you've got french dogs, you've got crosses between the two that are called Anglo frown, say dogs, they still exist today. They are half bred dogs. They are dogs that are mixes there. There's no, there was no shame then.
There's no shame now they are absolutely half breed type dogs. So they're divided by [00:26:00] geography. Some are in France, some are in England, some are in between. They're divided by. But they do. Some of them run and simply chase deer. Other ones lie in, wait. And as that deer comes zipping by, cuz he's been chased by another one, they grab the deer.
Other ones are there to kill it, to seize it and pull it down or to bay it or to bark after it. They have other ones that are there just to track the deer. They have ones that are silent, ones that are that bark that bay and they have dogs for the rich and they have dogs for the poor. And the dogs for the poor are the ones that they're not supposed to have.
But they end up getting 'em anyway. cuz they breed them to the rich man's dog. And so there were laws that you couldn't have a greyhound, like a pure greyhound. So you bred the Greyhound to a colly and you got a lurcher and that was okay. It was a poacher's dog. . So all those dogs back in Europe.
what happens when the Europeans first, literal years after Columbus,[00:27:00] came over, what did they do? They started bringing everything over. They brought their ships over, and of course they brought enough to eat. They probably bought some horses and some pigs, some of which are still wild and running around to this day.
But they brought dogs and some of the first dogs they ever brought over were hound dogs. They brought sight hounds, they brought lurchers, they brought long dogs, they brought mixes of them. They brought KES. They brought just basically any kind of dog that they were using. They even brought some really early sort of primitive type bird dogs over here.
And so once those dogs came to America, we saw similar things play out. Geography played a role. Some of those dogs went north. Some of those dogs went south. The types of hunting played a role, the types of game. Some of those dogs were bred for squirrels. Some of 'em were bred for bear. Some of 'em were bred for coyotes and wolves out in the west.
And class played a role. Some of 'em were for [00:28:00] rich people. Some of 'em were for not so rich people. Washington had Fox Hounds, and I guarantee you some of the poor people within a few miles of Washington's place had, descendants of his fox hounds. They got 'em somehow. And basically that's how the hounds came to America and came to North America, was with European settlers who brought them and their traditions and their ways of hunting brought them here.
And then Americans, they modified them to suit their local game terrain and traditions. And I know that, Fox sounds, were. In my mind and I, my perception may be a little wrong because I don't know the history as well as I should or I definitely don't know it as good as you do. But it seems the Fox sounds was probably some of the original dogs that we used in the States, cuz that, is that correct?
Or did we do something else that I'm missing out on? [00:29:00] Fox Hounds were no yes, I should say that. Yeah. W if you look at all the various hounds that are being used today, all the treeing dogs and some of the ke dogs and stuff like that, they will trace back to those first Fox hounds, cuz those are the ones that were, Fox hunting.
Developed a little bit later. Again, if we went back to 1500 in France and England, you wouldn't see Fox hunting. You would see them using, horses. They were mounted and they were hunting in a similar way. They were dashing across the landscape or through the forest in pursuit of game.
But the game wasn't Fox, the game was probably deer. , or bore, or in some cases rabbit, but mainly it was deer and stag and things like that. . So the same sort of principles applied in that. Those early running hounds were fox hound, like that's where the fox hound came from. It was only a little bit later on that, that the British really started to fox hound Fox has something to do or something to actually pursue.
And there is some claim that it was for,[00:30:00] it was a environment than you wanted to, predator control and things like that. But basically it's a little bit later, but it wasn't around the time. It was a big deal by the time Lafayette was here and advising Washington it, it was all the rage at that time.
That was the main sport and it was also the sport of high society. It was where you got a lot of political favors and some discussion and, that sort of thing. It was just a, it was just a great chance for everybody to meet and in fact, they didn't really kill a lot of foxes. To this day there are a lot of fox hunting in a lot of fox hunting still done, and they don't kill a lot of fox.
But yes, you are correct in that most of the treeing breeds and most of the hound breeds we have in the states will trace back to those original imports. But there are older. introductions of hounds. The very earliest hawk is Albert Hawk weld talks about the earliest pointers in America, probably or may have come from Spain.
And they would've come in Spanish America when the Spaniards were in Florida. We're talking the earliest, we're talking the mid 15 hundreds. They came over and I mean , they wanted to [00:31:00] take the riches. They came here, they were looking for the fountain of Youth, and they were also looking for a whole lot of gold and silver.
So they brought men and weapons and horses, and they brought dogs and they brought big. Big ass mean dogs. They brought hounds with them yes. To help them hunt, yes, to help them, protect them in the wild, but also to really dominate the locals. They came in here with some pretty massive war type dogs and so there is speculation that some of that blood got.
all of the lines of the domestic and hunting dogs that we have here in North America. And so even before Washington's time, even before that time when the Spaniards are here, and certainly in the 16 hundreds, other dogs would've come and they would've been of the of the sight hound variety lurchers and long dogs, those sorts of things.
Dogs, stag hounds and things like that people would've used. There's some unbelievable stories, in the online and some of the archives here and of these guys coming over from Europe and, with a couple of [00:32:00] packs of these stag hounds and going out west and hunting, bus buffalo wisdom, like actual bison and antelope and elk and things like that out in the west.
It was a thing that they did. So do you have any history on when we. Started putting the more tree. And you've referred to the K dog a couple times. Is there a history what is the history about bringing in the treeing dog to the running dog? Do you know any of that? Yeah. So treeing is more or less an American phenomenon.
There's not a lot of treeing done in Europe. There is in certain areas in Scandinavia and Finland and Sweden nor Norway, they do a type of treeing. They'll use little dogs. They're spits dogs. They look like huskies or malamute. , sort of small racy malamutes. . And those dogs will tree.
But what they do is they tree birds. They'll tree black grouse [00:33:00] and capric caley. And it's very similar. You're walking around with your gun these cases with a gun and the dog. You let a dog out and they're typically hunted alone with one hunter, and you let 'em out and they just run off.
And when they find game, which could range, sometimes it's an elk or what they call an elk. It's a moose. We call it a moose. They'll bark at a moose and the moose will just have a standoff with the dog. And obviously you hear it barking. You go up and you have, you shoot your supper.
The treeing part of that is for cap kaley and black gros, which are very territorial birds. And those birds will stand their ground until that dog gets a little bit too close and it's barking at its face off, and then they'll just hop into a tree. . So there was some treeing, but again, in, in the classic traditional French and English hunting with packs of dogs and, sniffing out the one particular stag you want to have, the treeing wasn't the big thing that became a North American thing.
And mainly because of the raccoon, which didn't exist, which did, they didn't have in Europe. They didn't have beasts like raccoons that would go into a tree or, mountain lion. . So most of the early coon [00:34:00] dogs were fox hounds imported from Europe and mixed with other hound blood with other, types of hounds.
. But the, those types of dogs often had trouble finding raccoons when they went up the trees, so you get this dog from Europe, it comes from, 50 generations of dogs that have hunted bore and rabbit and deer, and all of a sudden it's hunting something and it climbs up into a tree.
It doesn't. Necessarily have the reflexes or the instinct to, to look up and figure , or maybe it does, it didn't know what to do. So breeders here, they started selectively developing and selecting their dogs for treeing ability. The ability to follow the scent to the base of a tree and then stay there until the hunters came.
It was probably part training, but a lot of selective breeding as well. So coonhounds existed as a distinct type, but by the mid 18 hun, or up until the mid late 18, sorry, let me say that again. Coonhounds existed as a distinct type by the mid 18 hundreds. You would have a dog, it's called a coonhound.
Everything B before then was a [00:35:00] European import, or a cross from a European import that may or may not have treed. But by the mid to late 18 hundreds, you had dogs that could do that. . And listen, 1885, a raccoon pelt. sold for about 25 cents in 1885. I don't know the exact amount, but I have a feeling that'd be like 50 bucks today.
, right? It wasn't, not, it was a good decent amount for, raccoon pelt. And up until about World War I, I don't know where you're at. Are raccoons still, are there still a lot around in your neck of the woods? Yes. And in fact, I would say the majority of hound hunters are running coon dogs.
I, I think the coon hound. Yeah. But are raccoons the actual game, but the actual game that they're running raccoons themselves Yes. As the population of raccoons still very high. Yes, it is. And when it so back in the nineties the mid to late nineties we kept all of our. and we took those to the trading post, or I did, and that's how I got the money to feed my [00:36:00] dogs throughout the year is right.
Selling, selling the first to the guys at the market. And back then, a good pelt would bring you anywhere from 15 to $20. Now, and I haven't done this in years, so I may be misspeaking, but from my knowledge, like the coon hides and stuff are, they're are way down and people aren't fooling with it like they used to.
But yes, the coon population, especially in, we, I'm in the western part of Virginia is really good. And then I know the guys out, like in Indiana and Illinois and Missouri and Ohio, like they have, they've always had a good coon population. Yeah. For the Hounds, I think one of the things that got them up and running was the fact that Coon populations were huge.
And, it probably ensures their survival to this day. There's still a lot of 'em around. They still, the dogs still have a use. You can still, even though the price of furs is down a bit, you can still at least cover some [00:37:00] of your costs. Up till about the first World War there were even efforts to poison raccoons because there were just so many of them.
They were destroying crops in certain areas. . And in the 1920s and thirties, and I think it was in response to that overpopulation, to encourage people to hunt raccoons. There was a raccoon fur coat, fashion trend that was started all in the 1920s and all the way up to the Great Depression.
You could just think of these old movies, like an old football movie or something, you go to the old football game dressed the head to toe and a raccoon coat. , it was a trend back then. And Hunters sold to pelts, but also they were a staple protein in some of the diets in some of the people in the region.
People ate a lot of raccoon. Now, again, they brought dogs that had never hunted raccoon. In fact, they didn't really hunt, animals that ran up trees. . But they used those properties. They used those talents and those capabilities that had been selectively bred into those dogs over hundred of hundreds of years, and then developed them for their own needs in, in the us.
Yeah. So [00:38:00] then can you break down when the breeds, so there's six different they've added the Leopard Kerr into the hound registry for U kc. The six breeds of hounds, which you're looking at your black and tan, your red bone, your walker, your English, your blue tick and then your plot dog.
Do you know when that started breaking up and having the separate breeds itself? Yeah, first of all, we have to go back to, understanding what a breed is. Up until about 18 80, 18 90, and even in the early part of the, 20th century, the word breed and the words breed strain type line were interchangeable.
You would hear guys talking about, oh, breed of setter, and Mr. Breed of pointer. , or a line or a strain. They would interchange those words. But it was only when breed registries like the U KC or the A [00:39:00] K C or the F D S B, the American field, various organizations got together and said, okay, a, a breed of a dog is a specific group of dogs that share these particular traits and have an official name, and they have an official breed standard, and they breed true. In other words, we don't cross them with other breeds. So all of the different, hound breeds in the states probably started as what we would call a land race.
Now, a land race, again, that was another one of those words that people would mix up. They would call it a race or a breed, or a type or a strain or a line. And it meant basically the same thing. It just meant this kind of dog. And earlier I was saying, Dogs and hunting cultures are divided by geography, by class structure, by time by traditions.
They're also divided by official standards and official sort of reasoning that this is my dog and this is the type of dog I have, and I can no longer breed to that type, otherwise I'll have a mutt. But that didn't really come in until the, like I [00:40:00] say, the 1880s. 1890s. In the us. Prior to that they were called land races or they would've been a land race.
Now, what is a land race? A land race is simply a group of dogs that develop in a certain area and breed, more or less true, not because people want them to breed true, need them to breed true, or some registry says they must be br true. They do it because the next town over is 50 miles and most people don't go more than 10 in their life because they are isolated geographically from each other.
So there were probably types of hounds developed in one. , do you call a valley a hauler where you're at , what do you call a valley? Yeah, we call her. Do you? Yeah, that's that Appalachian American slang. It's a hauler. . Yeah, A hauler. Okay. Yeah. But you can imagine, you've got 50 families over a, or 500 people or a thousand people living over a 50 mile area in one hauler.
And the next hauler is way over the other side of that mountain. And rarely do people ever go there. So the dogs you have in one [00:41:00] hauler are gonna develop in their own way. And the dogs three haulers over are gonna develop in their own way, simply because when you have a really good bitch and you wanna find a good dog to put on her where you going?
You're going next door, you're going down the road, you're going maybe to the next village. You're not going two haulers over to, to actually get it. So these land races developed. So even before we had official breed standards, even before we had breed clubs and, and official names, those.
Quote unquote breeds of dogs existed. And the bigger ones, the, and I'm sure there are a lot of 'em that are lost. There is the July hound. Have you ever heard of a July hound? Yes, I have. , in fact, I've owned, okay. I've had some crops. Oh, is that right? Dogs? . Yep. July intrigue.
. Yeah. July. Yeah. So there's speculation that the July hound was put into pointers in America. But the July hound isn't the recognized breed by the uk. Like it's not in the list of the seven. I'm just looking here for my list. I've got that list somewhere, but there's six different breeds recognized by a K C and I believe seven listed by the [00:42:00] Ukc.
Yes. Cor, correct. . Yep. Yeah. And I don't think the July hound is in there. No. But the, and the July hound, why is it a July hound? Cuz the guy got it in July, and it became a really, it was a really fast fox hound, probably from Ireland. And there's a whole story.
There's a plaque up somewhere in. I guess in Georgia, some town in Georgia has a plaque up to the someone will correct us on that of the July hound. But like I say, there's these land races. Each hauler probably had their own local version of a treeing type of a dog. And once standards came in and once these clubs came in and once official names and groups got together to officially, rubber stamp their breed, this is what it is, this is what it looks like, here's what it's supposed to do.
Bingo, we've gotta breed. They ended up with six or seven of 'em. I guarantee you there was 20 of them. , but some of 'em just didn't make it. In fact, there probably still are some, if you go into some of the deepest haulers in your neck of the woods or somewhere around there, you'll probably find land races of dogs.
I know for a fact that there are certain people in your area or in the southern states that are creating Turkey [00:43:00] dogs , that are simply breeding this to that and mixing and matching their own type of dog. And then coming up with something that breeds. Probably fairly true. You know what I mean?
Like at least it's got a specific type and it does a specific thing. , so that's basically the long answer to a very interesting question. Where'd they all come from? They were all around. It was the system that developed after them. The system didn't develop them. The system identified them, some of them, but didn't identify others that have probably gone the way of the dodo.
Some have probably gone, some are probably still out there. You could probably still find some of these really old strains that never quite made it to the status of breed. Yeah, I, and I would say that in some secluded areas that you're exactly right now that I think about it in that context.
So when I first did my first book, I was, during the history of the pointer, right? And everybody, when you, anything you read on the history of the pointer, you're gonna come back to a point where it says, it comes from the [00:44:00] old Spanish pointer, which is now extinct. So that's what I would always read.
The old Spanish pointer now extinct. And you would occasionally hear about the old Spanish double nosed pointer, which is now extinct, double nosed pointer, and always had, which is now extinct in its name or in the description. So I was writing my first book and I wrote a chapter on the old Spanish pointer, and I was almost finished until I, this is now the Internet's fired up and I'm doing some research and I'm talking to folks that I know in Spain and everything, and they said, have you heard of this guy?
His name is Carlos, have you heard about this guy? He's , he's a specialist in the old Spanish breeds. Here's some pictures of his dogs. And they sent me these pictures and lo and behold, it was an old Spanish pointer, a double nose pointer. Its nose is like a, the end of a double barrel shotgun.
, like it had a cleft nose. And what he did was the breed was quote unquote extinct. But he did his thesis for his doctorate. He was a veterinary student and he did a thesis. And what he did is he went to all the old hillside towns in all northern [00:45:00] Spain. He went into all the valleys and all the hills and looked for some of these old dogs.
And sure enough, he found them. He found this extinct dog. He found a number of them, and he found more and more, and he bred them together and he started selectively breeding them. And he resuscitated that old forgotten breed. He's bred over 3000 of these dogs over the last 20 years. He reinvigorated or revived this entire breed of dog simply by going into the old hills and finding these old little villages and the two or three dogs that are here, and the four or five that are over there.
You could probably do that in the States if some veterinary students out there listening, , uhhuh, . Here's a project for you. Yeah, there you go. So let's get into the big game side of it a little bit. What, yep. What do you have on that? Again, so I'm just gonna just gimme two seconds here. I just want to, cuz I have a really great story about a guy that went to the States here.
Yeah, here we go. Okay. Okay. So big game hunting again. You gotta [00:46:00] go from the east coast further west, right? So all of these dogs that are arriving from Europe, the majority of them, the vast majority, especially in the early days, are coming onto the East Coast. So they're, arriving in anywhere from, New York to Florida all along the coast, and they're moving inland.
And what are they finding inland? They're finding coons, they're finding squirrels. They're finding possum they're finding bear, yeah. They're finding some deer. But it's all heavily forested areas. There's the old story that, you know, back in the day, a squirrel could go from, let's say mar land all the way down to Virginia.
, or Maine to Virginia and never touch the ground. Cause you could go from one tree to the next. You know what I mean? It was that heavily forested, right? Yeah. And so these dogs come and they become forest specialists. They become treeing specialists, they become dogs that are used for whatever they're locally hunting.
As America expanded out west all of a sudden, different hunting opportunities are coming out, are coming up. You've got these opportunities now to hunt well, bison, antelope, elk, [00:47:00] deer, different mule deer different type of game is presenting different types of opportunities.
And while you've got this strain of dogs, used to hunting coons at night and treeing them, there ain't no trees out there. What are they gonna do with them? You've gotta now come up with different types of dogs. So more imports probably followed, and more hybrids and more mixing. And these are where lurches and long dogs come in.
And Alerter is a sight hound, like a greyhound bred to almost anything else. Some sort of a terrier or some sort of a colly. And then you've got a alerter, a long dog is when you've got two Sighthounds. You've got a Greyhound mixed with a Saluki. You've, you've got an Afghan hound and another, type of a gaze hound, right?
A bozo or something. And those are called long dogs. And there's a fabulous story about a guy named George Gore. He came in from Ireland in 1854. He brought what he called stag hounds. So a stag hound back then would've been a larger type of a greyhound with a shaggy coat. So Gore of Ireland [00:48:00] brought 14 stag hounds and three dozen greyhounds, and he went to what would be today near Miles City, Montana.
It's in Eastern Montana. And legendary Frontiersman. Jim Bridger guided the hunting party and they shot, or they took with those dogs, Buffalo deer, antelopes, and other animals. Custer had his own long dogs and lurchers. He had greyhounds and stag hounds. His wife, Libby said that those dogs used to share the tent with him and or with her and Custer.
But by, the early or the mid 18 hundreds, it was military men, all these guys that are going up pushing the frontier, right? Explorers loose. And Clark had their dogs with them. But really it was, these generals and sergeants and colonels that were going out, to Fort Dodge or fort this and fort that.
They would've had dogs with them. And the dogs they would've taken with them would've been dogs that were ideally suited for the type of type of game that they had. So here's another quote that I have in 1869, a quote from [00:49:00] one of these fellas says, everyone here at Fort Sill in present day, Oklahoma owns dogs, stag hounds, wolf hounds, and rabbit hounds.
That's Wilbur ent.
Yeah. And here's another one. The fort was home to the Kyowa Comanche agency. The post interpreter's name was Horace p Jones kept stag hounds as a means of entertainment on Sunday afternoons, traveling by wagon or horseback soldiers. Their women and other post spectators would follow Jones onto the prairie to watch the hounds pursue deer, jackrabbits, coyotes, and wolves.
Nye described Jones as being a wildly, widely recognized figure with his stag hounds. Huh? Do you have any history on Monague Stevens? Probably, but I don't have it at hand. Yeah. So he was in the late, he was in the late 18 hundreds. And he actually wrote a book called Meet Mr. Grizzly. He was so far ahead of his time with the scenting abilities of [00:50:00] the, and he used, he run bloodhounds and now Oh yeah.
In the hunting world now nobody, I'm not gonna say nobody. The majority of people, they run one of the six breeds or seven breeds. If you want to put in the leopard ke and or mixed up between one of the six breeds is what most people run. The bloodhound is not a very common hound that you see people actually hunting with today, which is like from then, from, like I said, the late 18 hundreds to now it's so much different than the way they did things.
But yeah, that's a really good book. And there's some good information on him. But yeah, so we've brought these dogs and what you're telling me, especially back then, A lot of those dog, those stag hounds were still sighthounds. They were mixes, they were hybrids, right?
. There's an example here. Oliver Hartley, in his book, a hundred Dogs of [00:51:00] America he refers to a Minnesota Wolffer a type of dog. He averaged 35 wolves a. And he quoting here, he pinned his faith in the long-eared variety of hounds with features of strength, endurance, good tongues and stares.
He had been advised that the best dogs for coyotes were part English blue, i e greyhounds, and Russian stag i e bozos. He wrote that the English blue were very fast and the stagger long-winded with the grit to make a good fight. He wrote that another admirer of capable dogs is the one half scotch stag hound or the Scottish deer hound and one half Greyhound.
But he said that if you're gonna do coyotes, if you're going after coyotes, you're gonna want to get some English bulldog in there, or a quarter bloodhound and one half foxhound. So they were really open to mixing whatever they could. , in Australia they would mix dingo into some of their stag hounds, , they would they whatever was there, and to this day, and I'm sure some of your listeners understand this, or you might even [00:52:00] know this, there's the Nebraska Coyote Hound. You know about this one, huh? No, but we have one of our guys Seth Hall out in out west. Now he is a sight hound fanatic, but go ahead cuz he's gonna love this
So the, so there's one, a record of a Nebraska coyote hound. Now I say coyote, I dunno, some people say coyote hound. 29 inches at the 29 and a half inches at the shoulder and weighing 90 pounds. American coyote hound men were, they created this by breeding one good one to the other.
And so every year there's a number of them around the country, but the largest one of these sales and races, they have a sight hound, sail and race, or a coyote dog is in a place called Holridge, Nebraska. Every fall around the first weekend in October, you can go there and see as many as 400 stag hounds.
And of that 400, about 98% of them are for sale. So yeah, the Nebraska Coyote Hound, or the American Stag Hound, and these are dogs that have been specifically bred and selected[00:53:00] to go after the game that's there. But really, no matter what the breed is, no matter what the type of hound we're talking about here in America, they were developed by people to solve a problem to solve or to help them solve a problem.
In other words, there's that. Thing over there that I want either to sell its fur or in my belly, or both. , how do I go and get it? Also I might need it to protect me. I might need it for predator control as well. There was a lot of recreational hunting going on, officers and wealthy foreign sportsmen, they were, watching these dogs doing, they were having contests and everything, but as settlers and ranchers moved into the great plains their cattle, their hogs, their sheep, listen the wolves and the coyotes and the bobcats and mountain lions were after them as well.
So they needed dogs to not only, for sport and for fun, but they needed them to help them protect their livestock and to kill those predators. And so really you can't get more western or Midwestern American than that. These hybrid melting pot type dogs that take the best traits of all these dogs imported from [00:54:00] somewhere else, and then refine them into a beast that does exactly what you need it to do.
where you are on the types of things that you're exposed to every day. . Yeah. And you know what you just said, in Monague Stevens' book, that's what he did with his hounds is if you were a farmer and you had your sheep or cattle or something getting tacked by a grizzly or a wolf or a mountain line, that he would go out and track 'em down and harvest that animal to keep it from hurting your livestock.
And yeah. And one of the, when you mentioned tracking, that's one of the things and you also mentioned bloodhounds, and that might be one of the things that, happened here in America or that one of the divergences from Europe. all your dogs. Let me ask you all, do your, all of your dogs I call it give tongue.
They or they ba is that what you say? They give tongue or what do you say? Or mouth. Yeah. They're, they give they, they're open mouth dogs. So that means when they hit the odor, it's kinda like a beagle. When they hit the [00:55:00] odor, they open on the track and let you know. Here it is now.
Okay. Some of the dogs, which is what most hounds men prefer? I definitely preferred the, when my dog's given a certain type of mouth. I can tell you the age of the track. So an example would be my old dog, if he's given a long ball, a big long ball, and there's a big long pause between opening, that means that track's really cold.
And if those balls start getting shorter and less time in between them, which is just common sense. That lets you know that track is a lot better. So I can tell you, hey, this is a good track, or this is a track that we're gonna spend a lot of time on and we may not catch it. So yes, open mouth or open trailing dogs.
That's what we are you're saying is, open tongue or whatever. Yeah. Giving so open. Yeah. So they open when they smell that scent. And you can tell. Now could you, can you tell your dogs from your neighbor's dogs, [00:56:00] the different voices? Ab absolutely. . Yeah. Like I was saying earlier, in one hollerer, I bet you there was a certain type of voice that was preferred for whatever reason.
They liked it that way. They liked it higher, lower, whatever. Or all the dogs shared a common genetic heritage, so they had a similar voice and in the next haul or over, they might have had a different voice. It's the same, when we go back to France in England. But one of the things they did there, and I'm unaware of it here, you might correct me if I'm wrong here.
Do any hounds men here select dogs that do not open? Is that of any use to you whatsoever? I cannot speak for me, but I have heard, and you Cat and co cat and Bobcat guys, y'all chime in here, but I've heard that a lot of the guys that are Bobcat hunting want their dogs a little bit tighter so they catch the cat quicker.
And that's just what I've heard from a couple people. Sure. So that's an observation that people make, right? You got a bunch of dogs and all of them open, but [00:57:00] this one doesn't. So what do you do with that one that doesn't? Do you get rid of 'em? Do give 'em away, whatever, or do you find another use for them?
It's the same as how pointing dogs came about, right? You've got all dogs, all predators will pause before they jump on something. It doesn't matter. You'd be a, a cat or a dog or you with a fly on your hand. You're gonna, you're gonna pause before you swat it, right? That's just the pausing behavior.
, they noticed that some would pause an extra long time. The brilliant idea was, Hey, let's use that and then select for it so that they're pausing indefinitely. And that's how pointing dogs came about. When you're observing a bunch of hounds and 99 of 'em open, but one doesn't what do you do with the one who doesn't?
What the French. And English did, and others, the Germans too, a lot of Europe they do have a use for it. And in fact, those dogs are the ones that became the ancestors of all pointing dogs. Short-haired pointing dogs. So there's these dogs called leash hounds, l e a s sh, like a leash. Because they were hunted on leash and leash dogs.
What they were specifically selected from a [00:58:00] pack of hound dogs. . And they were specifically selected because they didn't open up, because they were quiet. Now, why would you want a quiet hound? Your king is out there. Again, this is rich people. Your prince is out there and there's a lot of deer, and they're the only ones that have the right to get on horseback and chase deer.
. And they're in the forest and there's hundreds of deer, thousands of deer around, and they have the right to go anywhere they want. So it's not actually that difficult for them to, and they got packs of hounds, they've got all kinds of huntsmen helping 'em out. So it's not actually that difficult to get a deer.
Any deer, if they were hungry, they could get a deer in 10 minutes. So it wasn't about getting a deer, it was about getting the deer. They had guys out there all year round looking at the stags, and they would classify them just like we do today with scores of their antlers. I got a X number of point deer.
They would choose one particular stag and then one day they'd come and they'd go, okay, Mr. Prince, Mr. King, whoever you are, we found the deer. Or we've identified a deer. He's bigger than the one your neighbor got. If you get him, you got bragging rights for the rest of the year. And so they'd go, okay, let's go get that one [00:59:00] specific deer.
How are you gonna get one specific deer? You would use the dog that doesn't open. He's got a outstanding nose just like all the dogs in his pack. And he can track, just like you were saying, he can go on a cold track, he can go on a hot track, but he's on a leash. And now what you do is you send one guy with that one dog to trace that one deer and you find where he is bedding.
And in order to find where he's betted down you better be real quiet and you better be real, soft and gentle on your approach to that deer. So it took a well-trained deer or well-trained dog with a really good trainer to do that. And that was called a leash hound. And those leash hounds would.
go all the way and find that stag where he is beded down. And then they would back away slowly and come back to the camp and go, okay, I know where he is at now let's round up the posse, , let's get the big old hounddog. Let's get the ones that are gonna open. Let's get the, the dogs that are gonna run it down and go after that one stag.
And so eventually leash dogs became their own thing. They would breed leash [01:00:00] dogs to other leash dogs, and they became their own thing. And you know what those leash dogs did? Once they were on that end of that trail and they saw or smelled, probably didn't see it, they would smell it, bed it down, they would stop and point it.
So there's that long pause. So now you're selecting dogs to have an extraordinary nose. You're selecting dogs to be quiet. You don't want a pointing dog to bark. And you're selecting dogs to have a long pause. So eventually that hound the leash dog became the pointer over hundreds and hundreds of years.
But it seems that what you're saying is that maybe only in North America, only some cat guys, some, Bobcat or mountain Lion guys are selecting or actually want dogs that don't open up. Yeah. And and to give you little hindsight on my dogs, so I've got three dogs that are three quarter treeing walker, one quarter running Walker.
So I have running dogs in my hounds[01:01:00] which I'm using for treeing game. And two of the three are tight mouth, which is exactly what, so when you sayre saying tight mouth means they don't open a lot. . Now when the games jump at all, like at all? No. No. When the game is, like, when the game is jumped when the bear gets out of the bed and is running they very open mouth.
But from the time that they smell the track to the time that they jumped him, . They don't say a whole lot. You'll get a bark here and there. You'll get a bark here and there, and that's it. Now I have got another dog that will open as soon as she smells the track and she will open continuously until it's to that point.
Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. . Yeah. It's fascinating. I, a friend of mine, she lives in Germany and Germans, they actually want their they're the only ones that want their pointing dogs to, to open when they're on a track. They have to open on a track and on site. If they see something running and they're chasing [01:02:00] it, they have to open to be allowed to breed in certain breeds.
, years ago she fell in love with Cocker Spaniels. and in England, cock spaniel are used to hunt birds here too, and they're not supposed to bark. In fact, if you're in England and your cocker spaniel barks, you're gonna get some serious side eye from the people around you.
It's just not supposed to be what they're supposed to do. But my friend, she, she got these cockers and started breeding them, and sure enough, 20 years later, she has cocker spaniels that work like hounds. She has cocker spaniels that she leaves, she'll let 'em off into the forest, she'll stand at the end, and they'll go out there and they'll chase bore or deer back to her so she can shoot them, and the entire time they're barking their heads off.
So it's a it's a trait you can select for. And in Hounds, obviously, it's one of the most important traits. Not only do they bark, but how do they bark? And the pitch and the rhythm that they bark. , but also the other way you could select against it, because now you've got a dog that still has everything that hound does, all that grit, that Fantastic knows [01:03:00] all of the talents that it has.
but it allows you to hunt if you want to or if you need to silently, which is really cool too. Like I say, all those dogs, they all came over from Europe with the Europeans who came here, but they've been adapted to the various, local conditions of the terrain and the game that they're after.
. Yeah, it's interesting. We know that most dogs derive from, from the same animals. And then how do you get these thousands of breeds that we have nowadays? The dogs are the most plastic, the most malleable creature on the planet. They're fascinating.
If you take a chihuahua and a Great Dane and you put 'em on an island and come back a thousand years from now, you'll basically have coyotes. , they'll, they won't be a coyote, but it'll be a wild dog and it'll look like a coyote. They will revert back.
The only thing that keeps them the way they are is us. You let 'em all go, they'll all just revert to the basic prototype dog that you'll see head around, garbage tips in India or south America. , basically ke [01:04:00] dogs. But, and that's why I say, and that's why, in our podcast, in our magazine, that's why we're so fascinated in hunting dog culture because hunting dog culture is human culture.
It basically shows us and teaches us about who we are and where we came from and about our differences in similarities. Like I say, if you went back 500 years to England, you would recognize some, you wouldn't be able to understand a word they said, but you would sure as heck have a lot in common with what they're doing with their dogs.
. Yep. Greg, I. Craig, I appreciate your time and I know the listeners are gonna be picking up all kinds of information from what you've told us. Is there anything about the Hound that you wanna leave us with or your research or what you've found that that you think that we should know?
Yeah, I think that you should know that you should be proud of your dogs and you should be proud of what you've done. What the hounds men and women of, north America, I should say, have done with their dogs. It's always curious to me again, who specializes in pointing dogs that America has never developed its own pointing [01:05:00] dog.
We have some of the best pointing dogs in the world. Americans breed the best pointers and setters in the world, yet they don't, there's no such thing as an American setter or an American pointer, officially . , right? They do exist. For all intents and purposes they've been bred here for so long that they are American, but we still call 'em English setters and Irish setters and Gordon Setters, and we still, call German short hairs and German wires.
We still call them by those names. We've never, north Americans have never developed their own brand or their own specific named Pointing Dog, but they have, with the Hounds, . , the, they're as American as rock and roll. They're as American as, you ain't nothing but an old hounddog.
It, it really is the melting pot idea of America and the genius of Americans and American hunters to, to take this raw material that they got from overseas and develop it into their own local varieties and local types. And like we were saying, your own little land race in one hauler over to the next and to come all the way forward so that they're still thriving to this day and that people like yourself and people that you're [01:06:00] associated with are just so passionate about their breeds.
Yeah. That's the one thing I should, I would want everybody to know is be damn proud of what you got and about what you've done with these dogs. They're, they're unique in the world. Yes. Yeah. And it's a lifestyle for most of us and. Like you said in the very beginning of this, what I do is for them because of them and with them, and that's how I spend the majority of my time is with a hound.
Good on you. It really is, I can't think of a more, exciting type of a lifestyle. And also the fact that, Kun men or hounds men are not, they're not as it's almost like this like a hidden treasure in a way. You know what I mean? Like it, I speak to some people in France, they have these really cool French hunting breeds or pointing breeds that nobody's ever heard about.
do you guys not realize what you have in your hands? [01:07:00] Do you not realize just how precious this treasure you have in your hands really is because they're very unassuming people and they just, oh yeah, this is my dog and we love 'em. We do this and that. And I find H hound men to be the same way. You know what I mean?
They're just, they're happy with what they do. They stick to their own kind. They're doing their own thing. They're not out there blowing their own horn. Which is cool, which is, cuz you don't want people in your face, bragging to you and doing all sorts of things. But sometimes I just wanna remind them that what they have is absolutely precious.
What they have is, again, it's unique. It's just something that's super cool. And I really hope that they appreciate it for what it is and to give themselves credit for what they've done with these breeds and with these dogs. Yeah. And to carry it on from, as long as, as history has you've followed it back into history.
That's, that is quite the the achievement or the feat. That we've actually been able to do that. Oh, you've done it And improved on them and created your own kind. Really. Yeah. It [01:08:00] doesn't get any better than that. Yep. All right, Craig, for the, for us on Hounds Man XP and the Journey the We Leave every episode with, thank you for helping us teach, train, and learn and definitely learn about the history of the dog and the hound and where it comes from.
So thank you. It's been my pleasure. Thank you very much.
