Hunting With Hounds in North America

By Andreas F. von Recum

A study of the history of hunting with hounds, the development of hunting breeds, and contemporary hunting practices in North America.

Hunting with Hounds in North America is a unique study of what can be considered the world’s oldest team sport. History suggests that man has hunted with hounds for at least twenty thousand years. Using evidence from ancient Egyptian drawings to paintings by the great masters, Dr. von Recum traces the evolution of the hound, or free-hunting canid, and its place beside human hunters.

While hunting dogs like pointers and retrievers assist the human hunter in locating prey, hounds instinctively know how to find, track, and even capture prey on their own. Dr. von Recum describes the two classes of hounds. Sighthounds, such as greyhounds, whippets, and borzois, are lean, fast dogs designed to chase down, or course, their prey. Scenthounds, including redbones and beagles, will follow a hot or cold trail until their quarry is caught, cornered, or treed. Discussions of different breeds, including hound-and-dog hybrids, are included.

Dr. von Recum vividly describes contemporary American hunting practices, from the fast-paced fury of prairie coursing to the formalities of traditional fox hunting. He also addresses important concerns facing houndsmen today, from communicable diseases to game-management practices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 30, 2002
• ISBN: 9781455606146

Book preview

Introduction

In January of 1971, my wife, Gudrun, and I immigrated with four children into the United States of America. This decision evolved while I was a guest scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

We had come from Berlin, Germany—a walled-in town, a relic of the cold war, an incongruity of the twentieth century, a town trapped between West and East Germany and surrounded by psychological, physical, and political iron curtains. In spite of Berlin's special geographic confinement, I had enjoyed my budding career as a veterinarian at its Free University, which was famous for its superior dog and cat clinic. At that same time, however, I had missed a connection to the outdoors. My great passion for dogs and hunting was starving; there was very limited time and opportunity to cultivate such a hobby in Berlin.

While this isolation from the outdoors was generally true for all Berliners, I was fascinated by the ingenious solution of one of my veterinary colleagues, Prof. Christian Saar, who hunted with falcons and German (Stichelhaar) pointers. It seemed anachronistic to see him team up with a gun dog and a bird of prey to hunt quail in town. He did this on tiny pieces of land such as abandoned properties and city parks. It happened under the eyes of passersby, yet was often unnoticed by them. Among falconers he was famous for his hunting skills but even more so for his ability to breed, hatch, raise, and train falcons out of his home when birds of prey were almost extinct in their natural habitat. He had adapted his hunting style to the urban environment and even to the iron curtain. More than once his falcons flew into the Communist side of the world. It took interventions on highest international levels to get them back into the Capitalist side.

After our arrival in Fort Collins, we discovered the vast and magnificent outdoors of North America and how invitingly accessible it is to people like us, who like to hike, fish, or hunt. I spent many evenings in the university library studying wildlife, where it is found, and how it is hunted on this continent. We raised and trained a golden retriever, Corvey, and I went waterfowl hunting with my colleagues in the dry farming lands of eastern Colorado. During spring break, Gudrun drove me up into the mountains, where I stayed for a week experiencing the wilderness up close. I observed elk, coyotes, and upland birds in their natural high-mountain habitat. It felt good to be in the unadulterated wilderness of God's country.

Most of the following twenty-five years, my family and I lived in Clemson, South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Friends there introduced me to hunting with hounds, and I started to raise my own pack of scenthounds. To me, this was the most original way to hunt game, and I enjoyed every aspect of it. Although my work at Clemson University allowed me little time to devote to serious hunting, my vacations were always planned around bear and raccoon hunting seasons.

In 1997, I transferred to Ohio State University in Columbus. There, it seemed, my hunting hobby had come to an end. We moved into a house in the suburbs and there was no room nearby for hounds. Furthermore, my health was not good enough anymore to cultivate new hunting buddies and find suitable hunting grounds. I had just given in to this unavoidable change of lifestyle when Gudrun acquired two whippets. I must admit that it took me some time to get used to this very different kind of dog that seemed to boast nothing but a timid, shivering, aloof nature. For some time I treated these whippets as her dogs. Gradually, however, I discovered their passion and agility for hunting and their likeable character as house dogs. I went back to the library and studied again. I became fascinated with the world of sighthounds, to which I had not been exposed before.

There, in the library, the idea was born to write a book on hunting with hounds—all hounds, that is. I planned a text that would investigate and describe this wonderful sport from the perspective of a hunting veterinarian.

Having written scientific, surgical research texts since 1971, I am unsure whether I have found a writing style that will please my new readers. Hopefully I have succeeded, at least to preserve our knowledge of the art of hunting with hounds. Perhaps I can even infect some of my readers with my enthusiasm for hounds and the outdoors.

HUNTING WITH HOUNDS in North America

CHAPTER ONE

Historical Evidence

Most of us believe that it is important to know where we come from, who our ancestors were, what opportunities and challenges they had, and how their offspring progressed. I have asked these same questions of our hounds and explored their history.

WHAT IS A HOUND?

Dogs that hunt their quarry are called hounds. The German word Hund (pronounced hoond) refers to all kinds of dogs, but the English word is only used for a special kind of dog, which is the topic of this book.

The modern English word dog seems to derive from the Old English word docga and is used for all other dog classes, such as mastiff, guard dog, herding dog, gun dog, and companion dog. Yet dog is also used in Germany as a derivation of the old French-German word Dogge. There it refers to one class of dog breeds: the giants, or mastiffs as they are listed in Group 2 by the Federation Cynologique Internationale (FCI). The Deutsche Dogge may serve as an example.

In the vernacular of the professional German hunter, the official term for hound is Jagdhund (hunting hound). In some German hound breed names, the word Bracke, derived from the Latin word bracco, appears (as in Brandlbracke or Steinbracke). The German verb brackieren describes the method by which the scenthound tracks the quarry with the eventual goal to drive it toward the hunter. It seems that the best way to translate brackieren into English is hunting.

The word Bracke is also used in the Romance languages: in France as braque (such as the braquefranqais), in Spain as braco (such as the braco de burgos), and in Italy as bracco (such as the bracco Italiano). But all those dog breeds are pointers, which may have descended from hounds but no longer hunt. As one can see, the words dog, hound, and Bracke have made the rounds in Western Europe, but their meanings often changed in the transfer.

In this book, hound is the defining word for free-hunting dogs, and hunting will be used specifically for the hound's free pursuit of game for the purpose of taking it.

Hounds are employed to hunt in the most narrow meaning of the word, which is to chase, catch, and dispatch game on their own. Dogs, on the other hand, assist hunters by pointing, flushing, retrieving, or dispatching. Collectively these are called hunting dogs or gun dogs, and they are intended to work under the immediate command of the hunter. Gun dogs in the Western hunting culture would include pointers, setters, retrievers, spaniels, and terriers. Again, what unites all hounds, and separates them from dogs, is that hounds hunt for themselves and on their own, whereas gun dogs assist their hunting masters during their joint hunt.

The Finnish spitz, Russian laika, Hokkaido ken in Japan, and basenji in Africa are used to hunt in a similar fashion. However, they have a very different racial background and appearance and are not considered here.

Many dog classifications have been published. They are often unreliable on the subject of common ancestry. The oldest known, published classification, according to J. A. Peters,¹ is found in The Boke of St. Albans, attributed to Juliana Barnes (Berners), prioress of Sopwell Nunnery, England, and published in 1486. But its information is considered to originate from an earlier source called The Master of Game, written between 1406 and 1413 by Edward, second duke of York, who was at that time the master of game to his cousin Henry IV. In their modern translation the classes read as: Gazehound, Scenthound, Mongrel, Terrier, Bulldog (butcher's dog, cattle driver, or boarhound), Mastiff (Giant), and Toy Dog. The first modern classification in the English language is that of H. P. Davis in 1858,² which does not deviate much from these major classes.

PREHISTORIC EVIDENCE OF HOUNDS

Dogs are considered the first species of animal to be domesticated. This may have evolved toward the end of the last Ice Age, according to Juliet Clutton-Brock, when all human subsistence still depended on hunting, gathering, and foraging.³ First skeletal findings, which were sufficiently different from wolf skeletons to identify them as dog bones, dated to the Natufian period, about fourteen thousand years ago. At that time, according to Clutton-Brock, hunters were moving from clubbing their quarry to shooting it with arrows armed with sharp stone heads (Stone Age). The early dogs may have been instrumental in this change, since they could chase the prey into the hunter's shooting range, a technique still used by houndsmen today.

We have reliable evidence from Charles Vila's recent (1997) genetic molecular studies⁴ that all current dog breeds descended from one common ancestor—a wolf. The specific wolf progenitor could not be identified. V. Morell speculates that a first transformation from wolf to dog may have occurred more than 100,000 years ago.⁵ Other sources claim that dog originated as dog and did not transform out of other canids. Along that argument, Raymond Coppinger and Richard Schneider present their observations that dog is principally different from other