The Retriever, Dog, & Wildlife Blog

Posted in working dogs | Tagged cur, mountain cur | 11 Comments

11 Responses

1. on February 9, 2013 at 9:05 am | Reply massugu

   Were there particular types of dogs that went into developing these curs–say coon hounds, sight hounds and terriers or bulls, or some similar mix?

   
   
2. on February 9, 2013 at 12:36 pm | Reply kittenz

   I think probably that hounds – coonhounds, foxhounds, probably some beagles, maybe even a bloodhound here and there; collies (farm collies & English shepherds, not show collies); feists (both straight- and bandy-legged) – those are the main source of our cur dogs. But back in the day, people bred from good dogs that would work, and didn’t pay too much attention to whether they were a “breed”. So there were probably a lot of others that went into the mix, too, including the occasional bulldog.

   
   
   • on February 9, 2013 at 12:38 pm | Reply retrieverman

     I also think German dogs play a role, especially the farm pinschers, which every German settler had. In West Virginia, German ancestry is pretty high among the people, so i think we’ve always underestimated the German influence on our dogs.

     
     
     • on February 9, 2013 at 3:37 pm | Reply Alaskan wolfhound

       Some of my best memories are of hunting squirrels with my dogs as a boy and young man. I received my first rifle on my 8th birthday, a Remington Targetmaster single shot .22 that was old even when I got it. That old rifle was as tall as I was. I don’t think I was allowed to hunt alone with it until I was around 10 years old or so, and by that time I was an excellent shot with it. One of the common tests of marksmanship my friends and I practiced was to set an empty .22 casing on top of a fence post, and then move two post away and shoot it off (since fence post are usually set about 15 feet apart this meant we would be about 30 feet away from the target casing). You were not considered a good shot until you could hit the shell casing every time using open sights; no scopes. So by the time I was hunting on my own squirrels were easy targets.
       There were two ways I used to hunt squirrels, the most productive being to find a good “squirrel woods” (usually a stand of nut trees), and sit down and wait. Soon the squirrels would start coming out to see if you were gone, and you could pop them off as they appeared. But I found this type of hunting boring, so would walk continuously through the woods, moving from one stand of mast trees to the next, and rustling up squirrels as I went. You don’t need a dog for this type of hunting, but the hard part about hunting this way without one is the squirrels usually know you’re there before you see them (your first sight of the squirrel is usually of it running hell-bent for a tree). And once the squirrel knows you’re there it continuously circles around the tree to keep the trunk between you and it.
       The way the guys in the video are hunting squirrels with a dog is much the way we hunted raccoon. We’d move into an area likely to have raccoon and send the dogs out with the command “hunt”. When the dogs trees a coon they would bark “tree”, and you’d go to where they were barking (baying, if you had hounds), and shoot the coon, usually out of a tree. This type of hunting is done at night, of course.
       I preferred to hunt squirrels with dogs a different way. I’d move through the woods with one or two dogs ranging one to two hundred yards ahead of me, but keeping within sight and under voice control, until they see a squirrel, almost always before you do. They’d chase the squirrel, which quickly runs up the nearest tree, and you could then get a clear shot because if you positioned yourself near the tree and stood still the squirrel quickly forgot about you and focused on the dog(s). As the dogs moved around the tree to keep an eye on the squirrel, the squirrel would circle the trunk to keep it between itself and the dogs, and move around to where you had a clear shot.
       One of the worse things that can happen when you are hunting is to wound an animal and have it escape, and while squirrels usually are content to simply climb a tree and hide in the branches or against the trunk to escape a ground predator, if you miss the instantly lethal head shot and wound a squirrel, it will fall to the ground, only to quickly scramble up the tree again, but this time it will head for a hole in the tree (or in a nearby tree, which it reaches by leaping through the branches from one tree to another) where it will hide (probably to die later), and you will never get another shot at it. When hunting with dogs you don’t have to worry about that. If you miss a killing shot, and only wound a squirrel, it usually falls right into the dogs jaws; it never escapes to die a slow death.
       My two childhood “squirrel dogs” (also woodchuck dogs, coon dogs, and all around hunting and hiking companions and friends) were a collie-husky cross named King, and Tramp, a 35 lb. dog that looked like an Airedale but was colored like a dark red collie with white markings.
       With these two dogs and my trusty old .22 I could always count on filling my bag limit of squirrels (embarrassingly to say now, sometimes several times a day). Sometimes these dogs would mark a tree as holding a squirrel but I couldn’t see it (they hunted silently, and would simply sit at the base of a tree and look up to where the squirrel was hiding, or move around the tree if the squirrel was circling the trunk, this silent hunting would have made them poor “coon hounds”). They never lied, though, and if they said a squirrel was in a tree, there was always a squirrel in that tree. Often I would have to back up until I was far enough away from the tree that I could see into the top branches without looking up through the lower branches and leaves, and then look for a lump that didn’t belong on a branch, or the tip of the squirrel’s tail fluttering in the breeze.
       One time they marked a leaf-less hickory tree as holding a squirrel, but no matter how hard I searched I could find no sign of one. Even though I knew the dogs would not lie, and would not mark a tree if the squirrel had gone into a hole (they knew when it was a waste of time), I was about to give up and move on when I noticed what looked like a small gall at the tip of a branch very near the top of the tree; un-noticed at first because of many nuts still on the tree. Stepping back and taking aim, I fired and was rewarded by a red squirrel dropping to the ground.
       All the grey squirrels shot were taken home and eaten (from my childhood hunting days to my late teens I provided at least 50% of all the meat eaten in our house through hunting; we not only ate the traditional game: venison, rabbits and grouse, but such unlikely fare as raccoon, woodchuck and even porcupine), but we didn’t eat red squirrels, finding they had a rather ‘turpentine’ taste due to their diets. So all red squirrels killed were fed to the dogs, though they knew they had to relinquish any squirrel that fell to me before I would return the reds to them as a reward.
       In his book, DOGS, Raymond Coppinger talks about teaching dogs to hunt, but it has been my experience that almost all dogs, at least the ones that haven’t been so selectively bred to be nothing but lap warmers that they have lost all natural instincts, have the ingrained instinct and desire to hunt; killing something being the greatest thrill in the world to them. All that is required is to refine their training so they hunt what you want the way you want them to.
       Tramp eventually became a neighborhood scourge, hunting on his own at night (we followed the then common practice of simply opening the door and letting the dog loose to its own devices when it asked to go out), and leaving dead cats on our front steps to be found in the morning. After we moved to the farm he became a stock-killer, killing the chickens and attacking the hogs we kept, and my step-father declared he must go. My uncle had a friend who hunted bobcats, and this guy offered to take Tramp as a fighter, the dog that would run with his hounds, and then move in to fight the bobcats that his hounds had cornered, and hopefully take the punishment the cats would dish out before they were dispatched rather than the hounds.
       My uncle took Tramp home to his farm, planning on delivering him to his friend the next day, and since it was summer when his dairy cows were out to pasture all night, he simply tied Tramp in his cow barn for the night.
       My uncle had a thing for yellow cats (what my mother, and her mother before her called ‘Marmalade cats’), and most of his barn cats were of this color. The next morning when my uncle went into his barn in preparation to do the morning chores (feeding and milking his cows), he found Tramp had chewed through the rope tying him, and had slaughtered most of his treasured yellow cats.
       My uncle was tempted to shoot Tramp on the spot, but controlled himself and turned him over to the bobcat hunter. The last I knew (many, many years ago) he had developed into an exemplary bobcat “hound”.
       King went on to become a great all-around farm dog, and taught Lobo much, including how to hunt squirrels before he died at 14 years old. Lobo, in turn, taught his son, Blanco all he knew. As I look back on my days of squirrel hunting, I realize it was not so much the hunting, but the partnership with my dogs that I treasured most.
       I see a strong physical resemblance between the cur dog in the video and Sophie, my (smaller) black Patterdale terrier. Though I no longer hunt, I know Sophie could be an excellent squirrel dog, trained to hunt either like the one in the video, or the way I used to hunt.
       Whatever people settled an area no doubt brought the dogs of their home country with them. The German pinschers would certainly be a reasonable ancestor for the dog in the video. These Kentucky curs were no doubt produced by the people simply hunting the best dogs they had available, and family members passing on the sons and grandsons of their favorite hunting dogs to succeeding generations of relatives and friends until a line of recognizable type was developed.

       DAC

       
       
       • on February 9, 2013 at 3:42 pm | Reply retrieverman

         You might like this story, which I transcribed from my grandpa:

         http://retrieverman.net/2009/07/09/jiggs-the-feist/

         
         
         • on February 9, 2013 at 3:58 pm | Reply Alaskan wolfhound

           A great story about an apparently great little dog. We as a community don’t have that type of relationship with our dogs any more.

           DAC

           
           
3. on February 9, 2013 at 3:49 pm | Reply Anna

   I see a lot of curs & fiests. My favorite fiest which I recently met was a Rat Terrier/Whippet cross. She was an awesome little dog, & absolutely beautiful, a perfect physical machine.

   
   
4. on February 9, 2013 at 5:40 pm | Reply kittenz

   I think you’re probably right. And probably some corgi types too.

   
   
5. on February 11, 2013 at 10:12 am | Reply Nora

   And, believe it or not, Italian Greyhound. Treeing a squirrel, my male IG doesn’t look (or act) much different from a feist.

   BTW, a friend of mine had a dog that looked a lot like the one shown. They were told she was a “mountain feist.”

   
   
6. on February 11, 2013 at 12:46 pm | Reply kittenz

   We had several feists during my childhood. The two feists I remember best were Pierce and Rex, litter brothers owned by my dad & his older brother in the early 1960s. They resembled medium-sized spitz types in build: tall and short-backed, pricked ears, with tails that curled across their backs when excited but were carried gaily, sort of like a beagle’s, most of the time. Both were mostly white tricolors, with colored heads & a few body patches, and with coats sort of like those of short-coated GSDs. Dad didn’t refer to them as any specific kind of feist, except that they were “straight-legged”, as opposed to “bandy-legged” (dwarfed). They were top-notch squirrel dogs; squirrel was an important part of our diet during the lean years of the early 1960s. Dad also used Pierce to hunt rabbits for the table, and grouse. When we moved to western Michigan in the mid-1960s, we took Pierce with us. Nobody there had ever heard of a “feist” or seen a dog like him before. They assumed he was “some kind of terrier”.

   There were no deer or turkeys to speak of here in eastern Kentucky in the 1960s; it was extremely rare to see one and any sighting was the talk of the neighborhood for months. No elk – they were reintroduced in the 1990s. No bears. It’s hard to convince younger people of that, because now, a scant 50 years later, deer and turkeys are so numerous that they are becoming nuisances in some places, and bears and elk are plentiful enough that they have hunting seasons for them now.

   We had a couple of curs in those days (not at the same time). One was a big burly yellow dog with a black face. I don’t recall whether he was bobtailed or not; I was very young when we had him. The other was a very dark dog who looked black at first glance but was actually brindle. Dad called them mountain curs. They were sort of all-purpose hunting and watch dogs. We weren’t allowed to play with the curs because Dad considered them dangerous to children. They never seemed particularly dangerous to me.
   I never obeyed the rules not to pet them (I just didn’t do it when Dad was around). They were tied up or kept in a pen during the day and turned loose at night. They hunted for themselves and often brought home possums or other small animals that they had killed. The cats stayed in the barn or the smokehouse at night because those curs would as soon kill a cat as they would anything. They loved to hunt, or maybe they just loved to kill things.

   He had coonhounds too, but they were for hunting raccoons only; he did not allow them to hunt what he called “trash” (i.e., anything other than coons).
   Dad didn’t kill ‘coons but hunted them only for sport. Sometimes the dogs would kill one if they could corner it on the ground, but of course, with coonhounds, most of the excitement is in the treeing of the coon. Occasionally they would shoot the coon so that the dogs could tear it; it was thought that if they weren’t allowed to have the ‘coon once in awhile, the dogs would lose interest in hunting them and start to run trash. Sometimes young coons were either orphaned by the dogs or separated from their mothers & those young coons were brought home to the kids to be pets. At least, ours were pets; I guess some hunters kept them in cages to use them to train their dogs. We never ate raccoons; Dad said they reminded him too much of dogs & he would not eat them.

   Also, when I was a young child, up until about my mid-teens, a lot of people here, especially the older men, kept foxhounds. The way they hunted foxes here was not the same as they do down in Virginia, with large packs of hounds and horses. Here, each man had maybe a brace or a small pack of foxhounds. They were about the same size as coonhounds, but more lightly built. There were different varieties of foxhounds, just as there were different varieties of coonhounds. Occasionally you’d see a solid black or white foxhound, but I don’t recall ever seeing a solid black or white coonhound. Most of the foxhounds were tricolor, a few were black & tan, and quite a few were solid red or red with black mask. Often the solid colored foxhounds and black & tans had Irish markings; coonhounds rarely. The men would take the foxhounds, on leashes, back to the ridgetops, and turn them loose to run the fox. Mainly they chased gray foxes; we did not see many red foxes here until fairly recently. They never killed the foxes, and some of the foxes were local legends because they gave the dogs such a good run before they treed or got away i into the rocky tops of the mountains. The men just sat around a campfire (& I suspect maybe passed a jug around), listening to the hounds run. I used to live deep up in the head of a small, narrow hollow, and I could hear the hounds run at night, especially in the spring and fall. Many a night I fell asleep next to my open window, listening to the music of the hounds.

   
   
7. on February 11, 2013 at 3:08 pm | Reply Alaskan wolfhound

   Kittenz, sounds like we had similar childhoods, but I was up north here in northern New England. It must have been wonderful to lie in bed and listen to the music of the fox hounds baying in the hills. One of my favorite movies has always been ‘The Voice of Bugle Ann’. I loved it when I would spend summers on my sister’s farm in Connecticut and could hear the whip-poor-wills calling out in the woods. We didn’t have whip-poor-wills around my area of Vermont, and they sounded so exotic to me.
   You never heard the terms feist or cur in our part of Vermont when I was young unless you read it in a hunting magazine. The scent hounds around here in the 50s and 60s were either ‘coon dogs’ or ‘rabbit dogs’, unless they were referred to by breed. My childhood best friend’s father raised beagles, so we spent a lot of time hunting rabbits. I never used a shotgun, just that old Remington single shot .22 I had. The mixed breed dogs back then that would have been feist or cur types down south were just called mutts around here, though no doubt the majority of dogs I remember from my childhood as ‘terriers’ would have been called ‘feist’ in the southern states. One of the best coon dogs I ever knew of around here was a little elkhound. Her owner hunted her alone and always got more coon than the guys hunting ‘coon hounds’.
   In the mid-70s the price of coon hides sky-rocketed and a lot of men took up coon hunting. I was working in a bar about 8 miles from where I lived, and I always came home via a back road called the ‘Plank Road’ (it had once actually been made of planks) to avoid any state police patrols, since I’d usually had a drink or two after work. I always had Blanco, my big malamute, shepherd, husky cross with me (he’d sleep on the roof of my truck all night while I was working), and one night/early morning as I drove home along Plank Road four big raccoons crossed the road in front of me together. I hit the brakes and Blanco, who always rode standing on the roof of my truck (something that would have most people up in arms today), sailed off over the hood, hit the road running, and caught one coon before it got to the ditch. The squalling the coon made as Blanco killed it scared the other three up different trees, and after he’d finished off the one he’d caught, Blanco went off into the thicket at the side of the road and found the trees each of them had gone up. He was silent when treeing anything, but would stand on his hind legs with his front feet on the truck and look up into the tree to tell me something was up there. I took my flashlight and found Blanco at the first tree and shot the coon with the .22 pistol I always carried in the glove box. Blanco mauled the dead/dying coon, and then went on to the next tree and repeated his performance. After I’d shot the other three coons I threw all four of them into the back of the truck and headed home. They were all prime males weighing over 20 lbs. each.
   Before I went to bed I laid each coon on the lowered tailgate of the truck on its belly, and smoothed its fur out. The next morning they were stiff, but looked good because of the care I’d given them the night before. I took them to the local fur buyer, and he gave me $125.00 for the four of them, and I didn’t even have to skin them (I never liked skinning coon; too greasy, and though my mother ate them, I felt like your father, and didn’t like to eat them for the same reason). Not bad money at the time for a few minutes excitement on the way home from work.
   I killed many coons in the following years; either hunting them in the traditional way with the blue ticks I had, or just driving around the back roads after work waiting for a coon to cross in front of me. Blanco never lost one. People in my area have been making a little extra money and just getting by like that for as long as I can remember, especially when I was a kid. They hunted for meat and hide money, and the dogs they owned all played a part in it, but got little credit. They weren’t thought of as anything special; that’s just what dogs did.
   I now have a little black Patterdale terrier, and I can see possible Italian greyhound ancestry in the breed. As a matter of fact, I can see more similarity in her phenotype to small greyhounds than I can to the majority of terrier breeds.

   DAC

   
   

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