July 23, 2024 • 42 mins
On tomorrow's episode we're talking about the foundations of the legendary bear hound breeds we run today. Lifetime houndsman and host of the 'Gone to the Dogs' podcast is back giving us a history lesson. Make sure to check it out and share it with your fellow houndsmen!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Welcome to the Bear Hunting Magazine Hunt Cast. With me
Koby Morehead, We're gonna nerd out on bears hunting and
the outdoors. We'll tell stories, talk biology, tactics, gear, and
the fight to protect the pursuits that we hold dear, So,
grab your bino's, lace up your boots, load up your barrels,
and gather the hounds sweet venture on this journey together.
(00:40):
Welcome one and all back to the Bear Hunting Magazine Huntcast. Today,
we're joined again by none other than lifelong houndsman and
host of the Gunde of the Dogs podcast, mister Steve Fielder.
Steve wrote an article in the January February twenty twenty
three issue of Bear Hunting Magazine about the foundations of
(01:01):
all of the hound breeds that are typically ran on
bear today. As we found out in the last episode,
Steve was a part of the Dog Registries for over
thirty years and he definitely knows some history behind these breeds.
And one of the things we'll figure out inside of
this spoiler alert is that a lot of the breeds
(01:23):
have quite a bit in common as far as recent ancestors.
All Right, without further ado, let's get into it here, Steve.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
You know, I talked about the breeds and pretty much
put them in alphabetic order as we would discuss them.
Let's say, if I were giving a presentation on breeds
at one of the kennel clubs. And you know, the
bear hunters have adapted their hounds basically from the various
(02:02):
breeds of coonhounds. And you know, whether even now used
to see a lot of the big game hunters hunting
dogs that are what we call crossbread or a mixture
of these coonhound breeds. There are six breeds, and just briefly,
(02:23):
you know, the black and Tan, the blue tick, the
English coonhound, the plot hound, the redbone, and the tree
walker were the six fundamental breeds. The first breed that
was recognized and by the kinner clubs and law was
a dog that basically was the dog of the colonists,
(02:45):
the settlers. And this was a dog that they called
the black and tan simply because it was a black
dog with tan or reddish points along its legs and
the sides of its head and so forth, but predominantly black.
And these came, you know, from the Talbot and Saint
(03:06):
Hubert hounds and all that dated all the way back
to the after the Norman invasion in the eleventh century.
There they came from from France and then from England
and they were brought to this country and they quickly
adapted to trailing. You know, the game animals that were
(03:27):
here in Europe there were no raccoons to tree. Many
of the fur bears that we have in this country
were not existent there, but they were easily adapted. And
you know, they were kind of like the bedrop breed,
but they've gone through an evolution. You know. They were
a large breed, a heavy boned, deep voiced, but not
(03:52):
very quick on trail. As I said in the article,
black and tens are not really the most popular of
breeds for bear hunting. But I've done some articles about
some really incredible black and tan bear dogs. I remember
doing one about a dog that marrolled money up in
(04:15):
Wisconsin and Minnesota that was a tremendous bear dog. Some
of the dogs that I've written about even lately, the
Luther Dog of Scott McLoughlin's I think that's coming out
was a black and tan colored dog.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
I feel like it's time for you guys to get
a little treat. I'm going to read a little bit
out of this current July August twenty twenty four issue
of Bear Hunting Magazine Legendary bear Hound, Part fifty six.
Scott Maclothin's Luther Great bear dogs don't always come from
(05:00):
royal beginnings with grandiose pedigrees. Sometimes from the most humble
beginnings greatness arises. It's true about the hound named Luther.
He was a half curR, half walker. He looked like
a pure bred black and tan. Scott McLoughlin said when
describing his bear hound of a Lifetime. You should get
(05:24):
the current issue of Bear Hunting magazine. And this is
a shameless pluck, but seriously, you hound guys, just check
out the cover of this magazine and you'll be sold.
All Right, I'm done, Let's get back to Steve.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
The but I contained you know, in my dad's experience,
one of the earliest bear hunters that once he got
the fever ed started a bear hunting with a group
of hunters over in eastern Virginia, and a guy named
Arden Smith had a dog named Sounder, and he met
(06:11):
the UKC and AKC standards for a purebread black and tan,
you know, and he was that cold nose, which is
a trade of the black dog. You know, he was
a dog that you could free cast in the mountains,
which means, you know, you turn him loose, you lead
the other dogs, and when he would find a track
(06:34):
and make progress on it, then you could release dogs
to help him with it. But Sounder was quite a
producer of good bear dogs, and he looked like a
purebread black and tan. But when you looked at a
little of pup city sired, they were all colors. Red tick,
(06:54):
blue tick, solid red, you know, black and white, spotted
like a walker dog.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
So yeah, I get the feeling. Mister Steve is just
now hitting his rhythm. Let's get on and start talking
about some blue dogs. I feel a lot of you
Western guys are waiting on this one, and just a
heads up, it's a little more complicated than just a
(07:20):
cut and dry. If it's black and tan, it's black
and tante.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Well, blue ticks are one of the most popular of
the breeds. There's something about a blue tick. Man. Once
they get a blue tick, they are absolutely they sign
up for life. You know. There's just something about those
dogs that there's the selves to these guys, and you know,
(07:55):
to go back in the history of the breed, there
were three breeds that we recognized today. There were at
one time lumped within a single breed, and we're going
to talk in a minute about the English coonhound. Well,
the blue tick was one of those. And the English
coonhound typically has what we call a red tick pattern,
(08:19):
and it's really just little specs of hair on a
white background, and some of them are more dnse than
the others, and it kind of in the case of
the blue ticket, gives that blue tick look. But before
I get too deep in the weeds here, those three breeds,
(08:40):
the blue tick, the tream walker, and the English, in
the mid forties were separated out into individual breeds. So
it was at that time, around nineteen forty six that
the blue tick coonhound was recognized by United Kennel Club.
And they also descended from the foxhounds that came from England,
(09:04):
and the General Lafayette gave some of these blue tick
colored foxhounds to George Washington, who was a fox hunter,
of course, and they generally traced their background back to
(09:24):
these French hounds, the big and there's a breed called
the blue Gascon, which is a taller bigger houndier as
we say, breed, you know than the American blue tick
are the one that you know, we typically recognize. But yeah,
(09:47):
blue ticks have been known for the ability to trail
and when you go back and look at the early
successful lion hunters, dry ground lion hunters in this country, uh,
the the kind of dogs that the Lee Brothers of
(10:07):
Arizona uh hunted and so forth. You know, there was
a lot of blue tick influence in in those dogs.
Blue ticks are very popular, they're they're not, but you know,
the ones that are used in raccoon hunting and in
competition have been bred to be much quicker afoot, you know,
(10:29):
speedier dogs than the old original ones were pretty much
you know, meticulous trailers. You know, they didn't worry too
much about uh when they got that lion track jumped
or that bear track jump. But when you know, they
were more useful in the fact that they could smell
(10:50):
it when the other dogs could not. You know. But yeah,
the blue tick is is, you know, has been just
one of the the h go to breeds or or
anchor breeds for most anybody that especially hunts mountain lion
on dry ground or bear out in the Huntred with
(11:15):
Calvin Redhouse out in the Navajo Nation. And you know
he has some blue tick and type dogs in his back.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
You know, Lafaye given Washington some blue dogs. I really
like that. Founding father and founding helmsman. That's something that
you'd teach in schools. Well, just like in pool, got
(11:44):
us sometimes put some English on it. Let's see what
Steve has to say about the English.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Well, the English breed was first registered by UKC back
in nineteen o five, and they were called English fox
and coon hounds. Was in the forties that people with
the foxhound influence in the English dogs that came out
of the Kentucky hounds, the Walker family and various ones
(12:18):
and all they wanted to have their own separate breeds,
and gentlemen named Lester Nance of Indiana pursued this idea
with the United Kennel Club to separate out and call
these foxhound type coonhounds walker dogs after the Walker family,
(12:40):
and that's how the term tree and Walker came. But
they were originally English coonhouns or registered as such, as
were the Blue Ticks. And so when they all separated
out and there were three separate breeds the English coonhound
was the one that, you know, it was kind of
the foundation of these other two breeds. But they had
(13:01):
a more flexible standard as far as the colors of
the dogs. You know, the dogs could be blue tick color,
they could be red tick color, they could be white
with red spots, white with black spots, virtually any hound
color except solid colors. They didn't want them to look
(13:22):
like black and tans. They didn't want them to look
like the red bone, which we haven't talked about yet.
But they were more concerned with the ability of the
dog than they were in trying to create a uniform
hound that someone could you know, glance at and say
(13:43):
that's an English coonhound. But yeah, there were always one
of the most popular in coon hunting. There's been a
lot of outstanding English coonhounds down through the years. And
I did a story for you in the Legendary bar
(14:07):
Dog series about the Armstrong Hounds over in western Virginia.
I did an article about the dog, a dog named Trey,
and he was an outstanding bar dog and he belonged
to Buck Armstrong. The Armstrong family were known for many
(14:30):
years as having top bear dogs that were very dedicated
bear hunters. I really enjoyed the opportunity to do the
story on Trey the English dog, because I had heard
of the armstrong dogs from my earliest memories as a
(14:51):
kid going on the bear hunts with my dad, and
I knew, you know, people, and I saw offspring of
these dogs in action, and they were tremendous sounds. And
so to be able to do a story about one
of these sounds in this dog tray, which was a
(15:12):
phenomenal dog in his own right, you know, he had
had all the all the tools, as we say. But
so the English, you know, they're kind of a potpourri breed.
You know, you got a lot of different colors and
things like that, but they're pretty much descended down from
(15:33):
the English fox hounds that came to this country with
the earliest colonists. You know, if you.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Guys know Steve Fielder, you know there's one particular breed
that is close to his heart. Steve was raised by
die Hard plat Man, and boy, if he doesn't get
excited when you fell in that it's time to start
talking about some rendell dogs. It's hard to be good
(16:03):
their Steve. Whenever I's hold, let's talk some plot hounds.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Well, how long do we have here? You want to
get you want to have lunch catered in. But yeah,
the plot breed is of the six recognizable breeds or
the standard breeds that these bar dogs come from. All
(16:36):
of them trace their roots back to the English foxhounds,
except the plot hound. And the stories vary, and you know,
two hundred years or nearly two point fifty is a
long time and a lot of twists and turns in
the road can happen. But the legend was, and as
(17:01):
John Jackson called it, the saga was that, you know,
the plot dog came from Germany, brought to this country
in at about seventeen fifty by a couple of boys.
Actually two boys left Germany, where their father was a
(17:21):
gameskeeper there, and brought some dogs with them. One of
the boys died on the past passage over the other one,
Johannas or Johanna's Plot, is credited with bringing the dogs
to America. Came into Philadelphia, migrated down to North Carolina
(17:45):
and then later onto the mountains of North Carolina. And
that's where these dogs were used, you know, primarily for
bear hunting. And so the plot dog, unlike the foxhound
route and so forth. He basically was bred from his
earliest days for big game and that's what most of
(18:08):
them are used for. They're not the most popular breed
in terms of numbers in the registries, but they are
extremely popular with a good number of bear hunters, especially
in the East. Now, I don't think the plot hound
(18:32):
perhaps caught on as well out west as a bear
dog as they did in the East, and I rather
think part of that may have been due to the
nose factor. There were kind of two basic lines of Plots.
(18:53):
If you go back into the Plot family, John Plot,
the elder brother to vaunt On Plot, who was the
youngest h John like the shorter eared, quicker, harder fighting
type dog, Von Plot like the bigger dog, perhaps the
(19:17):
colder nosed, houndier looking dog. But the Plot got a
bad rap when they were first, you know, introduced to
the country in about the mid forties, at of being
you know, aggressive, too aggressive, aggressive with other dogs and
(19:40):
so forth. We never found that to be true in
all the years my father was a breeder for fifty
years and all, but that was the rep that they got,
kind of like what pit bulls carrying in some circles
and I think it was that part of it was
the color, you know, that brindle color, and they do
(20:03):
have a fierce look from their eyes. And when they
get you know, there is a gentline hide transformation from
being the couch dog to the to the bear dog.
You know, they are absolutely turned the switch on and
they don't turn it off until that game is down
(20:27):
or up the tree or they're led away. But you know,
they are vicious fighters on game, and they have a
super treeing instinct. They like water, they're quick to learn
or you know, and they're open trailing. You know, their
voices tend to be run more towards what we call
(20:48):
a chop voice, which they cut the barks off in
short links, rather than drawing them out, which we call
a ball mouth b a w L. But yeah, plots
would probably be in the be lost to the mountains
(21:09):
of North Carolina had it not been for guys like
Dale Brandenburger, a coon hunter and Illinois a farmer that
went out and bought stock and brought them back and
began to rent run ads in the coonhal magazines about
the dogs, and then they became immensely popular. But my
(21:32):
favorite breed always will be I guess you know. The
old sin is you ought to dance with the one
that brung you, you know, And so that's kind of
where I am. I still love a plot dog, I
love them all. I love all hounds deep down, but
the plot will always have a special place with me.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
It's great to see someone sticking with their first love
no matter what happens. I'm sure that Steve will love
plots more than all other breeds of the day. He
does well, we're moving right along inside of her breeds,
and next up we're talking about a breed that was
made famous by a story from right here in the Ozarks.
(22:22):
If you know the story, you already know where we're
headed here.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Steve, what grade school kid in America doesn't remember reading
the story of Depression in the Ozarks and Billy, with
its two pups that he ordered, Old Dan and Little
(22:48):
Anne where the red fern grows, probably did more to
promote the red Bone coon hound than anything and continues
to do so. The Red Bone, in my estimation, is
one of the most beautiful of all the breed. It's
one of the oldest. Uh. You know, way back in
(23:10):
the early days of UKC they registered the black and
Tan the Red Bone and the tree Walker. But the
early red bones were not that trademark solid red color.
They were a black dog with red legs, perhaps white feet,
(23:33):
white in their chest, and just through selective breeding down
through the years, you know, they became the solid red
dogs that that we have. You know, I did an
article and I slay his name all the time, but
Bill Derrazuski is a professional main guide that hunted red bones,
(23:58):
and we did an article about his redbone. It was
called the dog was called McDonald's Rooster Cogburn. I guess
that was named after John Wayne movie and the dog
was owned by mac McDonald who was a client of Bills.
But anyway, rooster was quite an impressive bear dog. And
there have been several others. Uh. There's a guy named
(24:24):
Connie Gibson in North Carolina that has hunted a predominantly
an exclusively redbone packed on bear for many years. So
the Redbone, you know, was a coon own of course,
as we knew, and from reading Wilson Rawls's account in
(24:45):
Where the Redbern Grows but also adapted well to bear hunting.
Uh there, you know, it depends on the strain. But
you know, they're smart, and they're have all the traits
that the other hound breeds have, but they have been
(25:08):
more popular with the coon downs and the coon hunters
than they have with the bear hunters. But red bones
are typically good tree dogs and they are are good
trail dogs. The only problem that the red dog has
suffered down through the years, it's probably altered its ability
(25:33):
somequa is the fact that they're so beautiful and that
so many people acquired them just from reading the book
and actually didn't earnestly breathe them, you know, for hunting,
and so it's kind of like the Irish I won't
say that to that extreme at all, but the beautiful
(25:56):
Irish setter was once a great bird dog, and because
of its beauty and the fact it was taken into
the show ring and bread for that instead of hunting
quail or pheasants or whatever. You know, it became hard
and probably still his heart to find a classic Irish
(26:19):
setter that you can take out to the field and
have a good day shooting birds. But breadbones, I would
rank them kind of the middle of the road. You know.
They're not on the high end, they're not on the
low end. They're just a good, solid, steady hound. And
if you get a good one, you've really got a
good dog. And if you go back and read the
(26:43):
story of Rooster of Matt McDonald's, was just that kind
of dogs. Yeah dog, he said, you know that he
could go out and cold trail a track that no
other dog could even smell. And you know, and a
lot of times, says we said earlier, he was the
only dog under the tree, you know, so he had
(27:05):
the complete package.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Redbone's just too pretty for their own good. Well, next up,
we're talking about a hound that takes me back to
my childhood. For a long stint inside of my elementary years,
we were die hard coon hunters and there was hardly
a night I feel like I went to school fully
charged from all the coon hunting we were doing. And
(27:35):
that hound belonged to this next breed. And we're gonna
go a little bit longer today to stick with us.
We just got a few more breeds to go.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Oh, yes, the dream walker. You know, I did an
article for a hound magazine for a few years there,
and I called it. It was about the dream walker
coon hound. The publisher had wanted some content that focused
on training walkers and I called it the America's Choice
(28:07):
or America's choice. It is the most popular of all
the hound breeds. About nineteen forty five, after World War Two,
when all the boys came home, they got involved and
created a competition for coonhounds that they called the Night Hunt,
(28:29):
and the early winters of those events, although the redbone
coonhound at the very onset of those events was the star,
they really were popular. But as Tom went along the contests,
(28:50):
when the rules were written, it favored the dog that
was fast, the dog that had the speed, that the
one that could hunt out to find a track the fastest,
run that track to the tree the fastest. And then
they were a little bit short on the treeing instinct
(29:11):
in the early years, But through perseverance, the breeders spread
more tring ability into the dogs, and the walkers became,
you know, early winners of world championship events and so forth,
and just you know, year after year just built upon
(29:33):
that base and became the most popular of all the breeds.
And when I was a kid, i say, or a
young hunter up into my twenties, you rarely saw a
tring walker dog in a bare pack, especially in the Appalachians. Rare,
(29:54):
But now you see guys that are hunting entire packs
of a tree walker dogs and so there's been a
you know, kind of an evolution there. And I think
you know, Kirk Rogers was a guy that I mentioned
in this article that you've referred to a professional main guide.
(30:16):
You know, it has built his entire pack upon what
we call house bread treeing walkers. That was the work
of a breeder named Joe House. But uh, and there's
a lot of other other guys out there that are
hunting strictly walker packs now. But the same thing on
(30:38):
bear that has uh that distinguished them as coon dogs
was their speed, their h and they're determined, you know,
a tree walker dog going back to those old foxhound
routes where they would run a red fox all night long,
(30:59):
from from sundown to son up. You know, that kind
of of heart and determination and the athleticism. You know,
it's made them a natural. At first, they kind of
got a bad rap about not having the grit that
they needed. And in terms of bear dogs, that's something
(31:22):
we haven't talked about very much, Kobe, but there's a balance.
You know, you can have too much grit in a
bar dog you're gonna spend a lot of time in
the vet or worse, you're gonna spend a lot of
time in a breeding pen, breeding more dogs or buying
(31:46):
more dogs to replace the ones that had too much grit.
A good bear dog is an intelligent bear dog. He's
a smart fighter. He's a a boxer. He's not a
TV wrestler, you know. He and you know, one of
(32:08):
the best bear dogs that we had, and I think
I wrote a story about her at one point, was
a female named Julie. And she never got a she
would never get a mark on her, you know. She
she was just very very smart. Bade a bear very
close on the ground, but was more like a mosquito
than she was an alligator. You know, she is harassed
(32:33):
a bear, and I think they just said, man, this
is enough of this. I'm going up a tree. But
but yeah, the walkers are great anything you use them for.
A lot of guys are running them and some of
them are crossing them, you know, with other breeds and
so forth. But one of the older breeders there, one
(32:56):
of the guy that was really responsible for them being
name eamed tree Walker Leicester Nance. His dogs have excelled
as bear dogs. Some of them were taken out west
early on, and you know, and have done very well.
So the nance in a n CE bread walker dogs
(33:20):
are well known as bear dogs.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
All right, we're gonna speed walk into this next one.
We're gonna be talking about some Merle colored dogs, and
then after that we're gonna be moving right on to
our last type of hound, and that is the crossbred hound.
But first here's Steve talking about the American leopardhound.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
A couple of bear dogs in our hunting party, and
I mentioned him in this article, were owned by a
fellow named Jimmy Thomas, a hit purchased from Richard mcduffy.
Richard was from North Carolina, or at least he lived
there for many years and later moved to South Carolina.
(34:12):
But he bred these leopard dogs. And basically when we
talk about leopard there murle colored dogs like you would
see in a Catahula catalog maybe, or like you would
see in h oh all kinds of breeds. You see
(34:34):
the Meurle coloration and the Shetland sheep dogs and various ones.
It's more of splotches of black on a background with
you know, they're very colorful they're beautiful dogs. They can't yeah.
Now they can come black and tan color and maybe
(34:57):
solid yellow to look like old yellow. But the popular
color and the most common is this murle color. And
it can be a red murle, more of a liver colored,
or it can be a blue murle which leans more
toward the bluish castle like a blue tip. But they're
(35:21):
very beautiful dogs. But I had the opportunity to hunt
with two that came from Richard mcduffy. I'm not sure
if they were brothers. The big reddish murle dog was
called stub and as some of them do, these leopard haounds,
(35:41):
some of them do have a natural bobtail, and so
he got his name from his tail. And the other
one was called Rattler, and he had the blue murle pattern,
which kind of looked more like one of those old
timber rattlesnakes you know that we had back in back
(36:03):
in the Appalachians. But they were both good bear dogs,
coal trailers, ran hard, ran up front with the other dogs.
Uh you know, uh, tenacious on a bade up bear.
So yeah, that breed. I don't know how many people
are concentrating on hunting leopard hounds on bear, But I'm
(36:28):
sure that's.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Do you know where they came from, what kind of
some of their history.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
You know, they say that basically that the Spanish conquistadors,
you know, had dogs that were like this, and then
they crossed them with some of the native Mexican dogs,
you know, and that these dogs you know that came
(36:56):
from Mexico were used for hunting bear. But they they
weren't recognized by UKC in until nineteen ninety eight, and
they were typically called leopard curves, but UKC calls them
the American leopard hound. But I did get to spend
(37:16):
some time with Richard mcduffy, this long time breeder. There's
another fellow named Lamar Meeks that was a longtime breeder,
and so you know, there were pockets of these dogs
around the country. I think maybe several of them, you know,
(37:37):
down in Louisiana in the cane breaks where they hunt
the hogs, you know, with dogs, and through across the South,
and you probably find more of them that way. You
don't see them very often in the coonhound events, so
I know they're not being used in any great numbers
(37:59):
as coonhound. I would say the same is probably true
with the bear dogs. They're out there, they're being used
by some hunters.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Do you know what kind of traits would would be
something that a bear hunter would seeing that breed that
would make them want to try them out?
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Well, I think probably the thing that would attract a
bear hunter more to the leopard dog would be his
grit and his tenacity. Although you know, I've read the
stories and all about some of the dogs that do
(38:45):
have strong noses and are able to coltrail, but typically
people associate and I say associate because you know, I
may be wrong in this, but the leopard hound kind
of fits over here more in the what we call
cur dog category, uh. And I think that's why UKC
(39:10):
was careful to name the dogs that they went after,
the registered leopard hounds, to distinguish them from that leopard
curve deal. So most guys on the street, so to speak,
would classify the leopard as a cur dog. But really
(39:32):
there's been a concentrated effort to preserve those with hound
traits and breed them to others with those same traits
to establish, you know, a leopard colored hound, and that's
what that's what we see.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
I think it'd be cool to see more than more
of those pop up. And yeah, they're a pretty dog.
I love that Merle pattern.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Gorgeous.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
I'm always drawn to they really are. There is one
more breed that we can visit for a second, the
cross breed.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Yeah. And if we're talking bear dogs, especially in the
West and in other areas of the country, even in
the groups that I hunt with over in Virginia, the
crossbread dog is the you know, the type dog they hunt.
(40:26):
And I think that comes more from just breeding. What
we typically said in the old addage and breeding coonhouses,
just breeding coon dog to coon dog, meaning the best
to the best, you know, And that was the breeding
tool for many years, and it proved to be a
(40:46):
good one, but it wasn't always good and it didn't
always produce results. I'm a guy that likes to breed
along family lines, you know, a family of dogs within
a within a breed. You know. The old bear hunter
in Virginia, Lance Hunting holds a couple of degrees in
(41:11):
animal science and genetics and things like that. He always said,
you know, you family breed to establish your line, you
outcross to get your outstanding individuals. But if you can
outcross to a family bread line of dogs other than
(41:33):
the one you had. Then that's the icing on the cake.
So a lot of these breeders, you know, Lance was
able to establish a long line of really good bear dogs.
And the foundation was breeding a black and tan female
to a treeing walker male, and so that's being done.
(41:56):
And then out in the West Oregon, Mike Kemp has
had much success in breeding the running hown, the running
foxhowl into you know, coonhound breeds and producing dogs that
do very well in bear hunting. Of course they're crossbread dog.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
Thank you for listening. The Bear Hunting Magazine Hunt Cast
is recorded by Bear Hunting Magazine and produced by Mountain
Gravity Media. Be sure leave us a five star review
on iTunes and keep guarding the gate.
Welcome to the Bear Hunting Magazine Hunt Cast. With me
Koby Morehead, We're gonna nerd out on bears hunting and
the outdoors. We'll tell stories, talk biology, tactics, gear, and
the fight to protect the pursuits that we hold dear, So,
grab your bino's, lace up your boots, load up your barrels,
and gather the hounds sweet venture on this journey together.
(00:40):
Welcome one and all back to the Bear Hunting Magazine Huntcast. Today,
we're joined again by none other than lifelong houndsman and
host of the Gunde of the Dogs podcast, mister Steve Fielder.
Steve wrote an article in the January February twenty twenty
three issue of Bear Hunting Magazine about the foundations of
(01:01):
all of the hound breeds that are typically ran on
bear today. As we found out in the last episode,
Steve was a part of the Dog Registries for over
thirty years and he definitely knows some history behind these breeds.
And one of the things we'll figure out inside of
this spoiler alert is that a lot of the breeds
(01:23):
have quite a bit in common as far as recent ancestors.
All Right, without further ado, let's get into it here, Steve.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
You know, I talked about the breeds and pretty much
put them in alphabetic order as we would discuss them.
Let's say, if I were giving a presentation on breeds
at one of the kennel clubs. And you know, the
bear hunters have adapted their hounds basically from the various
(02:02):
breeds of coonhounds. And you know, whether even now used
to see a lot of the big game hunters hunting
dogs that are what we call crossbread or a mixture
of these coonhound breeds. There are six breeds, and just briefly,
(02:23):
you know, the black and Tan, the blue tick, the
English coonhound, the plot hound, the redbone, and the tree
walker were the six fundamental breeds. The first breed that
was recognized and by the kinner clubs and law was
a dog that basically was the dog of the colonists,
(02:45):
the settlers. And this was a dog that they called
the black and tan simply because it was a black
dog with tan or reddish points along its legs and
the sides of its head and so forth, but predominantly black.
And these came, you know, from the Talbot and Saint
(03:06):
Hubert hounds and all that dated all the way back
to the after the Norman invasion in the eleventh century.
There they came from from France and then from England
and they were brought to this country and they quickly
adapted to trailing. You know, the game animals that were
(03:27):
here in Europe there were no raccoons to tree. Many
of the fur bears that we have in this country
were not existent there, but they were easily adapted. And
you know, they were kind of like the bedrop breed,
but they've gone through an evolution. You know. They were
a large breed, a heavy boned, deep voiced, but not
(03:52):
very quick on trail. As I said in the article,
black and tens are not really the most popular of
breeds for bear hunting. But I've done some articles about
some really incredible black and tan bear dogs. I remember
doing one about a dog that marrolled money up in
(04:15):
Wisconsin and Minnesota that was a tremendous bear dog. Some
of the dogs that I've written about even lately, the
Luther Dog of Scott McLoughlin's I think that's coming out
was a black and tan colored dog.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
I feel like it's time for you guys to get
a little treat. I'm going to read a little bit
out of this current July August twenty twenty four issue
of Bear Hunting Magazine Legendary bear Hound, Part fifty six.
Scott Maclothin's Luther Great bear dogs don't always come from
(05:00):
royal beginnings with grandiose pedigrees. Sometimes from the most humble
beginnings greatness arises. It's true about the hound named Luther.
He was a half curR, half walker. He looked like
a pure bred black and tan. Scott McLoughlin said when
describing his bear hound of a Lifetime. You should get
(05:24):
the current issue of Bear Hunting magazine. And this is
a shameless pluck, but seriously, you hound guys, just check
out the cover of this magazine and you'll be sold.
All Right, I'm done, Let's get back to Steve.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
The but I contained you know, in my dad's experience,
one of the earliest bear hunters that once he got
the fever ed started a bear hunting with a group
of hunters over in eastern Virginia, and a guy named
Arden Smith had a dog named Sounder, and he met
(06:11):
the UKC and AKC standards for a purebread black and tan,
you know, and he was that cold nose, which is
a trade of the black dog. You know, he was
a dog that you could free cast in the mountains,
which means, you know, you turn him loose, you lead
the other dogs, and when he would find a track
(06:34):
and make progress on it, then you could release dogs
to help him with it. But Sounder was quite a
producer of good bear dogs, and he looked like a
purebread black and tan. But when you looked at a
little of pup city sired, they were all colors. Red tick,
(06:54):
blue tick, solid red, you know, black and white, spotted
like a walker dog.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
So yeah, I get the feeling. Mister Steve is just
now hitting his rhythm. Let's get on and start talking
about some blue dogs. I feel a lot of you
Western guys are waiting on this one, and just a
heads up, it's a little more complicated than just a
(07:20):
cut and dry. If it's black and tan, it's black
and tante.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Well, blue ticks are one of the most popular of
the breeds. There's something about a blue tick. Man. Once
they get a blue tick, they are absolutely they sign
up for life. You know. There's just something about those
dogs that there's the selves to these guys, and you know,
(07:55):
to go back in the history of the breed, there
were three breeds that we recognized today. There were at
one time lumped within a single breed, and we're going
to talk in a minute about the English coonhound. Well,
the blue tick was one of those. And the English
coonhound typically has what we call a red tick pattern,
(08:19):
and it's really just little specs of hair on a
white background, and some of them are more dnse than
the others, and it kind of in the case of
the blue ticket, gives that blue tick look. But before
I get too deep in the weeds here, those three breeds,
(08:40):
the blue tick, the tream walker, and the English, in
the mid forties were separated out into individual breeds. So
it was at that time, around nineteen forty six that
the blue tick coonhound was recognized by United Kennel Club.
And they also descended from the foxhounds that came from England,
(09:04):
and the General Lafayette gave some of these blue tick
colored foxhounds to George Washington, who was a fox hunter,
of course, and they generally traced their background back to
(09:24):
these French hounds, the big and there's a breed called
the blue Gascon, which is a taller bigger houndier as
we say, breed, you know than the American blue tick
are the one that you know, we typically recognize. But yeah,
(09:47):
blue ticks have been known for the ability to trail
and when you go back and look at the early
successful lion hunters, dry ground lion hunters in this country, uh,
the the kind of dogs that the Lee Brothers of
(10:07):
Arizona uh hunted and so forth. You know, there was
a lot of blue tick influence in in those dogs.
Blue ticks are very popular, they're they're not, but you know,
the ones that are used in raccoon hunting and in
competition have been bred to be much quicker afoot, you know,
(10:29):
speedier dogs than the old original ones were pretty much
you know, meticulous trailers. You know, they didn't worry too
much about uh when they got that lion track jumped
or that bear track jump. But when you know, they
were more useful in the fact that they could smell
(10:50):
it when the other dogs could not. You know. But yeah,
the blue tick is is, you know, has been just
one of the the h go to breeds or or
anchor breeds for most anybody that especially hunts mountain lion
on dry ground or bear out in the Huntred with
(11:15):
Calvin Redhouse out in the Navajo Nation. And you know
he has some blue tick and type dogs in his back.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
You know, Lafaye given Washington some blue dogs. I really
like that. Founding father and founding helmsman. That's something that
you'd teach in schools. Well, just like in pool, got
(11:44):
us sometimes put some English on it. Let's see what
Steve has to say about the English.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Well, the English breed was first registered by UKC back
in nineteen o five, and they were called English fox
and coon hounds. Was in the forties that people with
the foxhound influence in the English dogs that came out
of the Kentucky hounds, the Walker family and various ones
(12:18):
and all they wanted to have their own separate breeds,
and gentlemen named Lester Nance of Indiana pursued this idea
with the United Kennel Club to separate out and call
these foxhound type coonhounds walker dogs after the Walker family,
(12:40):
and that's how the term tree and Walker came. But
they were originally English coonhouns or registered as such, as
were the Blue Ticks. And so when they all separated
out and there were three separate breeds the English coonhound
was the one that, you know, it was kind of
the foundation of these other two breeds. But they had
(13:01):
a more flexible standard as far as the colors of
the dogs. You know, the dogs could be blue tick color,
they could be red tick color, they could be white
with red spots, white with black spots, virtually any hound
color except solid colors. They didn't want them to look
(13:22):
like black and tans. They didn't want them to look
like the red bone, which we haven't talked about yet.
But they were more concerned with the ability of the
dog than they were in trying to create a uniform
hound that someone could you know, glance at and say
(13:43):
that's an English coonhound. But yeah, there were always one
of the most popular in coon hunting. There's been a
lot of outstanding English coonhounds down through the years. And
I did a story for you in the Legendary bar
(14:07):
Dog series about the Armstrong Hounds over in western Virginia.
I did an article about the dog, a dog named Trey,
and he was an outstanding bar dog and he belonged
to Buck Armstrong. The Armstrong family were known for many
(14:30):
years as having top bear dogs that were very dedicated
bear hunters. I really enjoyed the opportunity to do the
story on Trey the English dog, because I had heard
of the armstrong dogs from my earliest memories as a
(14:51):
kid going on the bear hunts with my dad, and
I knew, you know, people, and I saw offspring of
these dogs in action, and they were tremendous sounds. And
so to be able to do a story about one
of these sounds in this dog tray, which was a
(15:12):
phenomenal dog in his own right, you know, he had
had all the all the tools, as we say. But
so the English, you know, they're kind of a potpourri breed.
You know, you got a lot of different colors and
things like that, but they're pretty much descended down from
(15:33):
the English fox hounds that came to this country with
the earliest colonists. You know, if you.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Guys know Steve Fielder, you know there's one particular breed
that is close to his heart. Steve was raised by
die Hard plat Man, and boy, if he doesn't get
excited when you fell in that it's time to start
talking about some rendell dogs. It's hard to be good
(16:03):
their Steve. Whenever I's hold, let's talk some plot hounds.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Well, how long do we have here? You want to
get you want to have lunch catered in. But yeah,
the plot breed is of the six recognizable breeds or
the standard breeds that these bar dogs come from. All
(16:36):
of them trace their roots back to the English foxhounds,
except the plot hound. And the stories vary, and you know,
two hundred years or nearly two point fifty is a
long time and a lot of twists and turns in
the road can happen. But the legend was, and as
(17:01):
John Jackson called it, the saga was that, you know,
the plot dog came from Germany, brought to this country
in at about seventeen fifty by a couple of boys.
Actually two boys left Germany, where their father was a
(17:21):
gameskeeper there, and brought some dogs with them. One of
the boys died on the past passage over the other one,
Johannas or Johanna's Plot, is credited with bringing the dogs
to America. Came into Philadelphia, migrated down to North Carolina
(17:45):
and then later onto the mountains of North Carolina. And
that's where these dogs were used, you know, primarily for
bear hunting. And so the plot dog, unlike the foxhound
route and so forth. He basically was bred from his
earliest days for big game and that's what most of
(18:08):
them are used for. They're not the most popular breed
in terms of numbers in the registries, but they are
extremely popular with a good number of bear hunters, especially
in the East. Now, I don't think the plot hound
(18:32):
perhaps caught on as well out west as a bear
dog as they did in the East, and I rather
think part of that may have been due to the
nose factor. There were kind of two basic lines of Plots.
(18:53):
If you go back into the Plot family, John Plot,
the elder brother to vaunt On Plot, who was the
youngest h John like the shorter eared, quicker, harder fighting
type dog, Von Plot like the bigger dog, perhaps the
(19:17):
colder nosed, houndier looking dog. But the Plot got a
bad rap when they were first, you know, introduced to
the country in about the mid forties, at of being
you know, aggressive, too aggressive, aggressive with other dogs and
(19:40):
so forth. We never found that to be true in
all the years my father was a breeder for fifty
years and all, but that was the rep that they got,
kind of like what pit bulls carrying in some circles
and I think it was that part of it was
the color, you know, that brindle color, and they do
(20:03):
have a fierce look from their eyes. And when they
get you know, there is a gentline hide transformation from
being the couch dog to the to the bear dog.
You know, they are absolutely turned the switch on and
they don't turn it off until that game is down
(20:27):
or up the tree or they're led away. But you know,
they are vicious fighters on game, and they have a
super treeing instinct. They like water, they're quick to learn
or you know, and they're open trailing. You know, their
voices tend to be run more towards what we call
(20:48):
a chop voice, which they cut the barks off in
short links, rather than drawing them out, which we call
a ball mouth b a w L. But yeah, plots
would probably be in the be lost to the mountains
(21:09):
of North Carolina had it not been for guys like
Dale Brandenburger, a coon hunter and Illinois a farmer that
went out and bought stock and brought them back and
began to rent run ads in the coonhal magazines about
the dogs, and then they became immensely popular. But my
(21:32):
favorite breed always will be I guess you know. The
old sin is you ought to dance with the one
that brung you, you know, And so that's kind of
where I am. I still love a plot dog, I
love them all. I love all hounds deep down, but
the plot will always have a special place with me.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
It's great to see someone sticking with their first love
no matter what happens. I'm sure that Steve will love
plots more than all other breeds of the day. He
does well, we're moving right along inside of her breeds,
and next up we're talking about a breed that was
made famous by a story from right here in the Ozarks.
(22:22):
If you know the story, you already know where we're
headed here.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Steve, what grade school kid in America doesn't remember reading
the story of Depression in the Ozarks and Billy, with
its two pups that he ordered, Old Dan and Little
(22:48):
Anne where the red fern grows, probably did more to
promote the red Bone coon hound than anything and continues
to do so. The Red Bone, in my estimation, is
one of the most beautiful of all the breed. It's
one of the oldest. Uh. You know, way back in
(23:10):
the early days of UKC they registered the black and
Tan the Red Bone and the tree Walker. But the
early red bones were not that trademark solid red color.
They were a black dog with red legs, perhaps white feet,
(23:33):
white in their chest, and just through selective breeding down
through the years, you know, they became the solid red
dogs that that we have. You know, I did an
article and I slay his name all the time, but
Bill Derrazuski is a professional main guide that hunted red bones,
(23:58):
and we did an article about his redbone. It was
called the dog was called McDonald's Rooster Cogburn. I guess
that was named after John Wayne movie and the dog
was owned by mac McDonald who was a client of Bills.
But anyway, rooster was quite an impressive bear dog. And
there have been several others. Uh. There's a guy named
(24:24):
Connie Gibson in North Carolina that has hunted a predominantly
an exclusively redbone packed on bear for many years. So
the Redbone, you know, was a coon own of course,
as we knew, and from reading Wilson Rawls's account in
(24:45):
Where the Redbern Grows but also adapted well to bear hunting.
Uh there, you know, it depends on the strain. But
you know, they're smart, and they're have all the traits
that the other hound breeds have, but they have been
(25:08):
more popular with the coon downs and the coon hunters
than they have with the bear hunters. But red bones
are typically good tree dogs and they are are good
trail dogs. The only problem that the red dog has
suffered down through the years, it's probably altered its ability
(25:33):
somequa is the fact that they're so beautiful and that
so many people acquired them just from reading the book
and actually didn't earnestly breathe them, you know, for hunting,
and so it's kind of like the Irish I won't
say that to that extreme at all, but the beautiful
(25:56):
Irish setter was once a great bird dog, and because
of its beauty and the fact it was taken into
the show ring and bread for that instead of hunting
quail or pheasants or whatever. You know, it became hard
and probably still his heart to find a classic Irish
(26:19):
setter that you can take out to the field and
have a good day shooting birds. But breadbones, I would
rank them kind of the middle of the road. You know.
They're not on the high end, they're not on the
low end. They're just a good, solid, steady hound. And
if you get a good one, you've really got a
good dog. And if you go back and read the
(26:43):
story of Rooster of Matt McDonald's, was just that kind
of dogs. Yeah dog, he said, you know that he
could go out and cold trail a track that no
other dog could even smell. And you know, and a
lot of times, says we said earlier, he was the
only dog under the tree, you know, so he had
(27:05):
the complete package.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Redbone's just too pretty for their own good. Well, next up,
we're talking about a hound that takes me back to
my childhood. For a long stint inside of my elementary years,
we were die hard coon hunters and there was hardly
a night I feel like I went to school fully
charged from all the coon hunting we were doing. And
(27:35):
that hound belonged to this next breed. And we're gonna
go a little bit longer today to stick with us.
We just got a few more breeds to go.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Oh, yes, the dream walker. You know, I did an
article for a hound magazine for a few years there,
and I called it. It was about the dream walker
coon hound. The publisher had wanted some content that focused
on training walkers and I called it the America's Choice
(28:07):
or America's choice. It is the most popular of all
the hound breeds. About nineteen forty five, after World War Two,
when all the boys came home, they got involved and
created a competition for coonhounds that they called the Night Hunt,
(28:29):
and the early winters of those events, although the redbone
coonhound at the very onset of those events was the star,
they really were popular. But as Tom went along the contests,
(28:50):
when the rules were written, it favored the dog that
was fast, the dog that had the speed, that the
one that could hunt out to find a track the fastest,
run that track to the tree the fastest. And then
they were a little bit short on the treeing instinct
(29:11):
in the early years, But through perseverance, the breeders spread
more tring ability into the dogs, and the walkers became,
you know, early winners of world championship events and so forth,
and just you know, year after year just built upon
(29:33):
that base and became the most popular of all the breeds.
And when I was a kid, i say, or a
young hunter up into my twenties, you rarely saw a
tring walker dog in a bare pack, especially in the Appalachians. Rare,
(29:54):
But now you see guys that are hunting entire packs
of a tree walker dogs and so there's been a
you know, kind of an evolution there. And I think
you know, Kirk Rogers was a guy that I mentioned
in this article that you've referred to a professional main guide.
(30:16):
You know, it has built his entire pack upon what
we call house bread treeing walkers. That was the work
of a breeder named Joe House. But uh, and there's
a lot of other other guys out there that are
hunting strictly walker packs now. But the same thing on
(30:38):
bear that has uh that distinguished them as coon dogs
was their speed, their h and they're determined, you know,
a tree walker dog going back to those old foxhound
routes where they would run a red fox all night long,
(30:59):
from from sundown to son up. You know, that kind
of of heart and determination and the athleticism. You know,
it's made them a natural. At first, they kind of
got a bad rap about not having the grit that
they needed. And in terms of bear dogs, that's something
(31:22):
we haven't talked about very much, Kobe, but there's a balance.
You know, you can have too much grit in a
bar dog you're gonna spend a lot of time in
the vet or worse, you're gonna spend a lot of
time in a breeding pen, breeding more dogs or buying
(31:46):
more dogs to replace the ones that had too much grit.
A good bear dog is an intelligent bear dog. He's
a smart fighter. He's a a boxer. He's not a
TV wrestler, you know. He and you know, one of
(32:08):
the best bear dogs that we had, and I think
I wrote a story about her at one point, was
a female named Julie. And she never got a she
would never get a mark on her, you know. She
she was just very very smart. Bade a bear very
close on the ground, but was more like a mosquito
than she was an alligator. You know, she is harassed
(32:33):
a bear, and I think they just said, man, this
is enough of this. I'm going up a tree. But
but yeah, the walkers are great anything you use them for.
A lot of guys are running them and some of
them are crossing them, you know, with other breeds and
so forth. But one of the older breeders there, one
(32:56):
of the guy that was really responsible for them being
name eamed tree Walker Leicester Nance. His dogs have excelled
as bear dogs. Some of them were taken out west
early on, and you know, and have done very well.
So the nance in a n CE bread walker dogs
(33:20):
are well known as bear dogs.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
All right, we're gonna speed walk into this next one.
We're gonna be talking about some Merle colored dogs, and
then after that we're gonna be moving right on to
our last type of hound, and that is the crossbred hound.
But first here's Steve talking about the American leopardhound.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
A couple of bear dogs in our hunting party, and
I mentioned him in this article, were owned by a
fellow named Jimmy Thomas, a hit purchased from Richard mcduffy.
Richard was from North Carolina, or at least he lived
there for many years and later moved to South Carolina.
(34:12):
But he bred these leopard dogs. And basically when we
talk about leopard there murle colored dogs like you would
see in a Catahula catalog maybe, or like you would
see in h oh all kinds of breeds. You see
(34:34):
the Meurle coloration and the Shetland sheep dogs and various ones.
It's more of splotches of black on a background with
you know, they're very colorful they're beautiful dogs. They can't yeah.
Now they can come black and tan color and maybe
(34:57):
solid yellow to look like old yellow. But the popular
color and the most common is this murle color. And
it can be a red murle, more of a liver colored,
or it can be a blue murle which leans more
toward the bluish castle like a blue tip. But they're
(35:21):
very beautiful dogs. But I had the opportunity to hunt
with two that came from Richard mcduffy. I'm not sure
if they were brothers. The big reddish murle dog was
called stub and as some of them do, these leopard haounds,
(35:41):
some of them do have a natural bobtail, and so
he got his name from his tail. And the other
one was called Rattler, and he had the blue murle pattern,
which kind of looked more like one of those old
timber rattlesnakes you know that we had back in back
(36:03):
in the Appalachians. But they were both good bear dogs,
coal trailers, ran hard, ran up front with the other dogs.
Uh you know, uh, tenacious on a bade up bear.
So yeah, that breed. I don't know how many people
are concentrating on hunting leopard hounds on bear, But I'm
(36:28):
sure that's.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Do you know where they came from, what kind of
some of their history.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
You know, they say that basically that the Spanish conquistadors,
you know, had dogs that were like this, and then
they crossed them with some of the native Mexican dogs,
you know, and that these dogs you know that came
(36:56):
from Mexico were used for hunting bear. But they they
weren't recognized by UKC in until nineteen ninety eight, and
they were typically called leopard curves, but UKC calls them
the American leopard hound. But I did get to spend
(37:16):
some time with Richard mcduffy, this long time breeder. There's
another fellow named Lamar Meeks that was a longtime breeder,
and so you know, there were pockets of these dogs
around the country. I think maybe several of them, you know,
(37:37):
down in Louisiana in the cane breaks where they hunt
the hogs, you know, with dogs, and through across the South,
and you probably find more of them that way. You
don't see them very often in the coonhound events, so
I know they're not being used in any great numbers
(37:59):
as coonhound. I would say the same is probably true
with the bear dogs. They're out there, they're being used
by some hunters.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Do you know what kind of traits would would be
something that a bear hunter would seeing that breed that
would make them want to try them out?
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Well, I think probably the thing that would attract a
bear hunter more to the leopard dog would be his
grit and his tenacity. Although you know, I've read the
stories and all about some of the dogs that do
(38:45):
have strong noses and are able to coltrail, but typically
people associate and I say associate because you know, I
may be wrong in this, but the leopard hound kind
of fits over here more in the what we call
cur dog category, uh. And I think that's why UKC
(39:10):
was careful to name the dogs that they went after,
the registered leopard hounds, to distinguish them from that leopard
curve deal. So most guys on the street, so to speak,
would classify the leopard as a cur dog. But really
(39:32):
there's been a concentrated effort to preserve those with hound
traits and breed them to others with those same traits
to establish, you know, a leopard colored hound, and that's
what that's what we see.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
I think it'd be cool to see more than more
of those pop up. And yeah, they're a pretty dog.
I love that Merle pattern.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Gorgeous.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
I'm always drawn to they really are. There is one
more breed that we can visit for a second, the
cross breed.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Yeah. And if we're talking bear dogs, especially in the
West and in other areas of the country, even in
the groups that I hunt with over in Virginia, the
crossbread dog is the you know, the type dog they hunt.
(40:26):
And I think that comes more from just breeding. What
we typically said in the old addage and breeding coonhouses,
just breeding coon dog to coon dog, meaning the best
to the best, you know, And that was the breeding
tool for many years, and it proved to be a
(40:46):
good one, but it wasn't always good and it didn't
always produce results. I'm a guy that likes to breed
along family lines, you know, a family of dogs within
a within a breed. You know. The old bear hunter
in Virginia, Lance Hunting holds a couple of degrees in
(41:11):
animal science and genetics and things like that. He always said,
you know, you family breed to establish your line, you
outcross to get your outstanding individuals. But if you can
outcross to a family bread line of dogs other than
(41:33):
the one you had. Then that's the icing on the cake.
So a lot of these breeders, you know, Lance was
able to establish a long line of really good bear dogs.
And the foundation was breeding a black and tan female
to a treeing walker male, and so that's being done.
(41:56):
And then out in the West Oregon, Mike Kemp has
had much success in breeding the running hown, the running
foxhowl into you know, coonhound breeds and producing dogs that
do very well in bear hunting. Of course they're crossbread dog.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
Thank you for listening. The Bear Hunting Magazine Hunt Cast
is recorded by Bear Hunting Magazine and produced by Mountain
Gravity Media. Be sure leave us a five star review
on iTunes and keep guarding the gate.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.