From Hunter-Trader-Trapper (1908):
Let me give you boys a pointer on breeding coon dogs. Take a large Irish water spaniel bitch and breed her to a large black and tan fox hound, then take a large bitch from this litter and breed her to a dog from a part blood hound and part black and tan fox hound. You will find that you have got a coon dog that will give plenty of tongue and is not afraid of the water, and has a spaniel nose with good feet and spread enough, with plenty of sand in his craw to kill any coon that runs.
Eugene W. Griffin, Huron Co., Ohio.
Mr. Griffin doesn’t tell us what the dog looks like.
In those days, experimentation and innovation were the key.
Not the malaise of the closed registry system and its religious tenet of blood purity for blood purity’s sake.
See related post:
There is quite a lot of experimental breeding going on here in the UK producing assistance dogs for an increasing variety of needs. However, there is now little need for further hunting dog innvovation given that the purposes for which such dogs were bred are now banned.
So called ‘designer dogs’ seem to be the most active front of experimental breeding. No surprise. The main focus is house pet / lap dog. Not all puppy mill breeding. There are plenty of morkies, shi-poo’s, spoodles, malti-pom’s etc. in the local paper, and many are home bred and raised. (You also see the occasional lurcher or hunting cross…today there’s litter of catahoula x Afghan pups, hound x’s for hunting are regulars).
I find this is an interesting post because it was amongst the fraternity of old-time coon hunters that I first became interested in the breeding of dogs. In the late 50s, when I was first allowed to tramp behind those hound-men on their night hunts, I could barely keep up with the even the older men who could still move through the woods in the dark like they were teenagers (up here in Vermont, hunting coon with hounds is not like how they hunt fox with hounds farther south, where the hound-men sit around a campfire telling stories and sipping moonshine and listening to the music of the hounds as they trail a fox for miles. Up here you hit the woods running, following the sound of your hounds on trail or baying tree, until you come to the tree where the coon has taken refuge. You got a workout if you had a good night hunting coon). My payment for being allowed to follow-along on these hunts was too haul the coon carcasses back out of the woods. But I loved the hunts, and once the hunt was over I loved listening to the stories the old-timers told about various famous local hounds in the past.
These stories usually included a rather in depth account of the mixed ancestry of each dog. At that time a hound being registered meant very little to these seasoned hunters, and they usually spoke of purebred, registered dogs in disdain, often punctuating their narratives with the term “them show dogs” as an expletive. It was probably during this phase of my dog centered education that I came to believe that cross-breds were superior to purebreds, and couldn’t help but note that many of the best ‘coonhounds’ , both in the past and present, often had a touch of farm shepherd in them. It seemed the basic tenet was to take a typical southern hound, and breed it to a working farm dog to “put some brains in em.”
That’s how we do it in West Virginia. Also, there is some evidence that the blueticks and other coonhounds are actually more from New England than from the South (at least originally). West Virginia is a weird place. The forests and all that we have here are more associated with the Northeast than the pine forests of the South. And we have small farms which are not very productive. If we had been blessed with intelligent leaders, maybe we would have had an industrial revolution like New England did.