Fox Hunting - The Mystery of Scent

By Hugh B. C. Pollard

"Fox Hunting - The Mystery of Scent" is a detailed treatise on scent, being an exploration of the mysteries of scent in relation to fox hunting and hounds. This volume will be of considerable utility to modern readers with a practical interest in hunting, and it is not to be missed by collectors of vintage sporting literature. Contents include: "The secretion of scent", "The diffusion of scent", "the Scentometer", "Adverse factors", "The Secret of scent", "Scent and local conditions", "How we smell", "How Hounds smell", "Scent in other animals", etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in a modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Country Book
• Release date: Dec 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473348011

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

"Who shall decide

When doctors disagree,

And soundest casuists doubt like you and me?"—Pope.

THE question all hunting people ask is: What kind of a scent are we going to have to-day? On this depend the day’s prospects, and it is a far more serious uncertainty than the chance of not finding a fox.

If we review the literature of the past, we find a rather narrow field of general observations, many of them mutually contradictory. A good deal of the eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century observation came from slow hunting with a different type of hound from those of to-day, and a great deal of it came from experience with harriers. The time of day of their hunting was different from ours, and there is also reason to suppose that minor cycles of climatic variation influence what one might assume to be the normal standards of hunting opinion in those days. There were dry spells which lasted as a rule thirteen or fourteen years (1701 to 1714, 1737 to 1750), and wet spells which recurred at intervals of fifty-odd years. The wet spells were shorter, but cover the periods 1763-1768, 1821-1832, 1872-1883.

William Somerville, who was born in Warwickshire in 1677 and died there in 1742, would thus have done most of his hunting in a period when rainfall in England was below the average to-day. The time of Delmé Radcliffe embracing the earlier third of the nineteenth century was on the whole a wetter period than the average to-day, but it was apparently not so extraordinarily far from normal as the long dry spells of the first quarter of the eighteenth century.

In general, we find in hunting literature surprisingly good observations and evidently surmises which come very near the truth. But there is no agreement, and in the end we come to the expressed agnosticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scent had become a thing which Masters admitted to be a complete mystery.

It is not to be supposed that the scientific age of the late Victorians made no attempt to reconcile scent conditions with weather conditions. They studied their barometers and instruments, but the glass was found to be of little value as a guide.

The problem was too complex, and ideas based on the simpler physical conceptions of those days were bound to fail.

In the main, we have two inter-connected problems to consider. Firstly, is it possible to lay down a simple and reliable system of direct reading of the local atmospheric conditions which will tell us what conditions of the diffusion of scent we may expect? Secondly, can we explain the incredibly swift spread and diffusion of scent under favourable conditions?

In the past no instrumental reading was reliable, and it was quite impossible to explain the diffusion of scent in ordinary terms.

My position is that it is now quite possible to take a simple observation of the thermometer reading of air temperature and the relative humidity of the air as recorded by a wet-bulb thermometer or other hygroscope, estimate the direction and degree of the wind and the amount of cloud in the sky, set a series of dials to those values and add up the percentage of chance of scent given by the figures on the dials. It is, in fact, a very simple scent-calculating machine.

So much for my first claim. The instrument is simple, and it has worked with considerable accuracy for three seasons, and has been tested in various countries. It works well.

My second claim is a hypothesis or theory which accounts for the immediate development of a relative vast volume of scent from an infinitesimal amount of scent secretion. So far as I am aware, nobody has yet attempted to reconcile this obvious phenomenon with an explanation in accordance with possible scientific thought. There has never been any idea mooted that fox scent was one of the complex chemical compounds which spread out almost instantaneously into a layer only one molecule thick on a damp surface. The simplest image is possibly the drop of petrol on a puddle which spreads to an iridescent film on the surface of the water.

If we accept the theory of fox-scent secretion behaving in a manner very similar to this simple instance, but having probably a far higher spreading power, we get a new idea of the mechanism of scent diffusion and little is left of mystery. For the first time, we have a theory of scent which squares with ordinary natural laws and behaves in practice as it should in theory.

It is not yet a matter which can be demonstrated beyond doubt, for we are still unaware of the exact chemical identity of fox scent. We do, however, know that the simpler chemicals of the chain to which we believe fox scent to belong actually behave in this manner. This is proved.

The succeeding chapters of this book explain in greater detail the principles involved and the simple instrument. This the reader can test for himself, and it will save him and his animals waste of time and energy on bad days and give him true ground for optimism on good ones. Most people will probably be content with the practical effect, and not bother too much about theory, but those who care for ingenious speculations will find entertainment in the latter, and it may add to the interest with which they watch hounds work in the field.

Scenting conditions will always be beyond our control, but there is no reason why we should not understand them.

When scent is good and hounds running we do not have time to speculate, but on poor or indifferent days one can still get a lot of interest out of the un-ravelling of clues in the oldest detective story in the world: The probabilities are … you say to yourself—and then you see your surmise confirmed or confounded.

You will never be always right, but the more you learn about conditions of scent diffusion the more interesting will become that not very dynamic form of hunting which is such a familiar feature of our English country life in the earlier part of the season.

CHAPTER I

THE SECRETION OF THE SCENT

The rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nature.

THERE is no scientific agreement about the organs of scent. Nearly a century ago Mr. Smith in his Diary of a Huntsman had a shrewd idea that pad scent was quite a different thing from body scent. For this he was ponderously taken to task by Delmé Radcliffe in The Noble Science of Fox Hunting. Actually the balance of probability seems to be with Smith. The fox tribe have scent-glands in between the toes as well as much larger anal glands at the root of the brush. Both glands secrete a strong foxy odour perceptible to the human nose, but it is not established that the secretion is identical, and it is possible that there is a difference which a hound’s nose can discern.

Similar glands exist in most of the Canidæ and their function seems to be to establish personal identity. The behaviour of the ordinary dog in leaving his visiting card is obviously connected with the scent-secreting functions of the caudal glands. Whether the energetic scratching of dirt which usually accompanies the act is supplementary and leaves a different scent is for the purpose of impregnating his pads with the other secretions is not easy to tell. But in most cases dogs seem to smell the ground as well as the post or object where another dog has left his card.

Certainly the more astonishing American advertisements make a difference between the varieties of human odour. We have the pathetic girl who nearly loses her boy from B.O. (Body Odour!), the disgusted mother of schoolboys whose feet perspire in rubber shoes (That Sneaker Smell !) and even bad breath (Halitosis!).

America is apparently scourged with these plagues, and they are not unknown in Europe. It is, however, difficult to argue from the human to the dog or fox, and it is possible that pad