FIELD & STREAM has long celebrated the bond between hunters and their dogs. Our photo editor discovered these pictures dating from the ’30s to the early ’70s in our files. They show a very different era of hunting, when whitetails and turkeys were scarce in most places, and hunting, for a lot of people, involved bird dogs, retrievers, or hounds. These pictures show the bond between dogs and hunters, and the qualities that make us love dogs so much.
CRIME-FIGHTING HOUNDS
Some hunting dogs hunt people. This trio is all smiles in the picture, but Kentucky’s Captain Volney (V.G.) Mullikan and his bloodhounds were relentless on the trail. Mullikan caught more than 2,500 escaped criminals throughout the Southeast in the early part of the 20th century. He and his most famous dog, Nick Carter, were big enough stars that crowds gathered to watch them work. Their longest chase was 50 miles after some bank robbers.
The caption doesn’t say if one of the bloodhounds pictured here is Nick Carter, but it shows a pair of dogs bred to be self-propelled noses. They are big and powerful, built to stay on the trail until they reach its end. They have low-set, droopy ears that brush the ground, stirring up scent particles. The jowls, wrinkles, and dewlaps all catch and hold some of those particles, too.
Bloodhounds were originally used to hunt deer and wild boar, and in France they