Hunting in North America
THE United Kingdom is certainly considered to be the mother country of organised hunting, but man’s genetic love for sport and hunting was soon exported to the New World. The earliest recorded importation of hounds to America was to Maryland in 1650, where Colonel Robert Brooke arrived with his wife, 10 children, 28 servants and a pack of hounds from England.
Colonel Brooke died five years later, but all his eight sons and all of their sons kept hounds that were descended from the Colonel’s original pack. They hunted the fox, on horses by day and on foot at night. Many of the well-known strains of American hound are descended from the original Brooke family pack.
In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the woodlands in Virginia were being cleared to grow tobacco and the economy of this area was flourishing. Fine houses, racehorses and foxhunting were the obvious signs of wealth. More hounds were imported from the UK and the sport well and truly formed a solid base in North America.
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