Old Pictures of Coyote Lurchers

My notes on this one say: "Coyotes and wolf, 1910, in Montanta."




My notes on this one only say: "Greeley, 1908." I am assuming this is Greeley, Colorado.
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Custer's Long Dogs

George A. Custer, 1862, Peninsula Campaign, Virginia. Click to enlarge.


In the past, I have, written a bit about jack rabbits out west as well as coyotes and the use of lurchers to hunt coyotes , but I have yet to talk too much about one of the most famous of American dog men -- George Armstrong Custer.

Custer found particular solace with the dogs. A border-line manic-depressive, Custer found that when he was manic he could go riding and running with them, and when he was despondent, they were perfect company to lie down with.

And Custer did "lie down with dogs," never once feeling a moment of shame as he cuddled up next to them, their large bodies wrapped around his to keep him warm on the cold Plains.

George A. Custer with the Sioux-Ree warrior Bloody Knife
(pointing) and the Crow warrior Curly (standing), with
staghound and greyhound. Montana, Spring 1876.

Custer's dogs were greyhound crosses -- what later came to be called the "American Staghound."

A Staghound, of course is simply a large American longdog -- a cross between two sighthounds such as a Greyhound or Scottish Deerhound, though Borzoi, Saluki, Afghan, or Irish Wolf Hound could theoretically be crossed in there as well. Today, most American Staghounds are multi-generation Staghound crosses.

It's possible that some of Custer's dogs may have been lurchers. A lurcher is a cross between a sighthound (such as a Deerhound, Greyhound or Whippet) and a herding dog (such as a rough collie) or perhaps a larger terrier (such as a Aierdale or Bedlington). If some of Custer's dogs were lurchers, they are likely to have been Greyhound or Deerhounds crossed with a collie or some other large herding dog.

Too much can be made of breed and terminology, especially when talking about historical dogs. Custer was running in the West where dogs were intact their whole lives, found their own mates, and designed themselves as Nature saw fit.

Custer's first longdogs dogs, acquired sometime after the end of the Civil War in 1866 were killed (one in a firearms mishap and the other -- Blucher-- in 1868 at the Battle of the Washita River against the Cheyenne).

Custer got other dogs, and always seemed to have four or five with him, including a pair that reportedly came from Queen Victoria through Lord Berkeley Paget, the man who supplied Custer (in 1869) with the revolver he had with him during the last stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

The fate of Custer's dogs after his demise at The Litttle Bighorn is not too well documented. Dutch Salmon, who has looked into it, reports that:

"One hound, Cardigan, went to a clergyman in Minneapolis, who later had the dog mounted on display in a public building."

An ignoble fate, I suppose, but if there a noble use for a dog after death, I am unaware of it. Come to think of it, being stuffed and remembered and awed over by school kids is about as good as a dog can hope for after death. Carry on Cardigan!

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The Things Unseen

Laura and Dan Belkin, 1976

Sometimes people send me stuff over the transom that is pure gold, and one example is The Functional Saluki - Lessons from the Coursing Field by Dan Belkin and sent to me by Kevin P.

Dan Belkin was an evolutionary biologist and a falconer who was flying birds right after WWII when that was as rare a thing as frog hair.   A biographical squib at the top of the article says simply, "In 1971, he abandoned his scientific career in order to course Salukis full time." Right there he became my hero.

I knew this was a special article when it started off like this:

I WANT YOU TO LEAVE HERE with this idea: things you cannot see are more important than things you can. There are many things about Salukis that a judge can't see and can't feel, and functionally, those things are more important than the visible and palpable ones.

Ah, the things unseen!  The things you cannot say or write about about unless you have actually experienced them in the field.

The typists and rosette chasers will never understand that it is not about romantic history or theory, paper pedigrees or alleles.

Dogs are about sinew and desire, muscles, brains, and nose. A true dog man understands that there are different horses for different courses, and he is not looking for a theoretical dog for a course or field he will never run or hunt, but a real dog for the land that is right in front of him.

As Belkin notes in a quick line, buried in this piece:

I don't think the quarry cares about how much stop the Saluki has, or what color its nose is.

No, not at all. Nor does it care what color its coat is, or whether the dog's sire won Crufts. It does not even care if the dog breathing down its neck is a Saluki! It cares only about speed and distance, turning radius and the fire called desire. It cares only about making a zig when the dog makes a zag.  It cares only about how close the teeth are.

Belkin notes that there are many types of Salukis for different county, different quary and even different human amusements, and that dogs develop their own habits and useful idiosyncracies.

A good hunting Saluki is not necessarily a good coursing Saluki. Let me tell you a little story about that. I once took two of our top hot-shot open field coursing Salukis to the desert on a camping trip. I also took along a friend's young Saluki. This puppy was a very big red dog, about 14 months old, 29 inches at the shoulder, 60 pounds and inexperienced. The first day we went out, the coursing dogs took off after a hare and the puppy tried to go with them. After about 400 yards, the puppy quit because he couldn't see the other dogs and the hare anymore. This happened several times and it was clear that the puppy, at that time, was not fast enough to compete with top flight coursing dogs. The next day, the hot-shot coursing dogs' feet were so sore that I wouldn't let them run. The puppy went out on his own. We were camped on a hill; I could watch the puppy go out and find a hare and start chasing it. If the hare ran fast, the puppy would quit and find another one. That puppy learned how to catch half-grown hares — which are the best ones to eat anyway. He would catch one and bring it back to camp, lay down in the shade of the car for awhile, then go off and catch another one. He fed the two coursing dogs, himself and me for a week, but he couldn't have gotten a coursing championship in Merced. Now, which one of those is a better Saluki?

From the audience: ‘I guess it depends on how hungry you are!' (laughter).

Belkin notes that things went wrong right out of the box when the Saluki entered the show ring, as the goal was to eliminate differences within the type, which effectively eliminated the wide-ranging abilities of dogs within the breed to hunt different kinds of game across a wide spectrum of land.

In the Middle East, Saluki just means ‘coursing dog' or ‘sighthound.' There are Salukis that are sprinters, like Greyhounds, and there are Salukis that are marathon runners. The crusaders brought ‘Greyhounds' back from that area: they brought Salukis back and made them into what we now call Greyhounds, by breeding them to course the brown hare. When, hundreds of years later, these Greyhounds were brought to the Middle East, the Arabs called them English Salukis. We don't want to make our Salukis into Greyhounds, so we say the Saluki is a distance runner. I'll modify my working definition of a Saluki to read: ‘a dog that looks like a Saluki and can run two miles in under four minutes.' This is fairly easy for most well-conditioned Salukis, but something most other present-day sighthounds cannot do

Later on, he compares the hunting style of the Jack Rabbit (hare) Salukui with that of the Foxhound, noting that Enclosure changed the Greyhound in England even as it changed so much of the rest of the world of dogs:

What we have done with the coursing Saluki in the west is to make it into a middle-distance runner. If you want a long-distance runner, you get something like an American Foxhound — it can't go as fast as a Saluki, but it can go farther. We want a Saluki to be able to run about two miles, as that is how long it takes to wear down a hare. This they can do. If we were coursing antelope, we would want a Saluki with even more endurance, but it would be slower. The difference between Salukis and Greyhounds is that the Greyhounds are faster than most hares, and the Salukis are not - the Saluki wears the hare out; the Greyhound sprints and catches it quickly. If the hare is not killed by a Greyhound in the first mile or so, it usually escapes. Salukis often don't cause the hare much worry until that point. This is a recent development, as the Greyhounds in England, before the land was enclosed, coursed hares the way our Salukis can, and maybe better.

Dan Belkin notes that a good hunting dog is not all about speed or teeth; it's about brains too. Can the dog problem-solve? Does it study its quarry? Has the dog been given enough experience to actually learn the game?

The standard says nothing whatsoever about the most important aspect of the head: what's inside it. When we first went coursing in Merced, the dominant Saluki was a Billa de Esta dog, named Lance. The way the judging was done in those days tended to reward a dog for hunting rather than coursing. The reason Lance was such a great hunting dog was that he knew hares — he acted as though he could read their minds. The hounds would be slipped and off they would go. Off Lance would go in a direction 90 degrees from that taken by the hare — and the hare would come to him — always! Many Salukis, particularly those that have run the lure, will hedge (run to one side of their quarry, rather than at it). Some of the coursing Salukis will hedge, taking a chance that they know which way the hare will turn. Some of the good hunting Salukis can identify a place where the hare might escape, such as some brush or a fence, so they hedge and give away a little ground to keep the hare from going that way and getting to the cover. I never saw Lance make a mistake. He would go to where the hare was going to go. Lance loved to course, and loved to run hares. He didn't particularly want to kill them. When he caught up to the hare he would run alongside and look at it, occasionally looking back over his shoulder to see if the other hounds were catching up. If he saw them catching up he would kill the hare. He had the best coursing record of his time — because of what was in his head, not because of his athleticism, as there were many Salukis that could run faster and turn better than he could.

Belkin does an autopsy on the standard, noting that "the standard doesn't say anything about whether or not the Saluki is deaf" despite the need for the dog to hear whistle or voice commands, and he also notes that a level or scissors bite does not matter a whit.   Ha!  True enough for terrier work as well!

As for chest depth and lung size, Belkin notes that even with running dogs one has nothing to do with the other, a point missed in nearly every breed description, but provable by science. 

What about heart? Well there are two types of "heart," and Belkin discusses them both.   As for the muscle that pumps blood, it starts out large in Salukis and can be excercised and conditioned larger, but there is always room enough inside a chest for that!

Belkin closes, before a question and answer session, with this point:

The last thing I would like to impress on you is that if you don't select for something, you are going to lose it. If you fail to select for visual acuity for a long enough time, your Salukis are not going to be able to see at all. If you only select your Salukis for moving correctly at a trot, eventually you are going to have Salukis that can't gallop well enough to catch anything. Look at show Afghans if you want to see an example of that. That's the way selection works. That's the way genetics works: any characteristic which is not actively selected for will degenerate. It will go away. That's true throughout the animal kingdom and is true for our dogs as well.

Nice! Excellent. Read the whole thing. Much thanks to Kevin P. for sending this to me, and to Steve Bodio at the Querencia blog for the picture, below, of Impulse, one of Dan Belkin's gorgeous working Salukis.  Dan Belkin died of an inoperable brain tumor in April, 1998. His words and thoughts live on.

Rudyard Kipling: The Fox Meditates

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Rudyard Kipling traces the history of England and western civilization through the "meditations" of the fox in the poem appended below.

As the last verse notes, the car on the road kills far more fox than any of the mounted hunts ever did -- in fact it kills far more fox in the UK than the mounted hunts, the weekend terrier enthusiast, and the shooter and working lurcher enthusiast combined.

Kipling references the time when "hedging came in fashion" (the Enclosure Movement) and notes too the rise of wire fences and trains which enabled more and more "townies" to come into the countryside.

Carter Fell is mentioned as well -- the same Carter Fell that John Dodd of Catcleugh -- one of the creators of the Border Terrier -- was hunting during Kipling's lifetime.

For more information about the role of the Enclosure Movement in the development of terriers, see >> "A Pictorial History of Terriers; Their Politics & Their Place"

For more about how the rise of cars and easy travel to the countryside has influenced terrier work, see >> "The Sad Rise of Hard Dogs"

Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865 in Bombay India, and died in 1936 in London. He married an American woman in 1889 and, for four years, he lived in Vermont, where he wrote The Jungle Book and the sequel, Just So Stories.

Kipling was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Fox Meditates by Rudyard Kipling
When Samson set my brush afire
To spoil the Timnite's barley,
I made my point for Leicestershire
And left Philistia early.
Through Gath and Rankesborough Gorse I fled,
And took the Coplow Road, sir!
And was a gentleman in Red
When all the Quorn wore woad, sir!
When Rome lay massed on Hadrian's Wall,
And nothing much was doing,
Her bored Centurions heard my call
0' nights when I went wooing.
They raised a pack - they ran it well
(For I was there to run 'em)
From Aesica to Carter Fell,
And down North Tyne to Hunnum.

When William landed hot for blood,
And Harold's hosts were smitten,
I lay at earth in Battle Wood
While Domesday Book was written.
Whatever harm he did to man,
I owe him pure affection;
For in his righteous reign began
The first of Game Protection.

When Charles, my namesake, lost his mask,
And Oliver dropped his'n,
I found those Northern Squires a task,
To keep 'em out of prison.
In boots as big as milking-pails,
With holsters on the pommel,
They chevied me across the Dales
Instead of fighting Cromwell.

When thrifty Walpole took the helm,
And hedging came in fashion,
The March of Progress gave my realm
Enclosure and Plantation.
'Twas then, to soothe their discontent,
I showed each pounded Master,
However fast the Commons went,
I went a little faster!

When Pigg and Jorrocks held the stage
And Steam had linked the Shires,
I broke the staid Victorian age
To posts, and rails, and wires.
Then fifty mile was none too far
To go by train to cover,
Till some dam' sutler pupped a car,
And decent sport was over!

When men grew shy of hunting stag,
For fear the Law might try 'em,
The Car put up an average bag
Of twenty dead per diem.
Then every road was made a rink
For Coroners to sit on;
And so began, in skid and stink,
The real blood-sport of Britain!

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The Beast of Exmoor and Other Nonsense

A repost from February 2009

Stories of feral "beasts" lurking in the darkness of the English countryside have been around for hundred of years, and were already old when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used such a tale as the basis of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The stories persist, of course.

Here are a few contemporary descriptions of various U.K. beasties:

• Beast of Muchty: "I was travelling to my work at 04:30 when a cat the size of a Lurcher, jet black, small head, very slim with a long tail ran in front of my car (about fifty yards). The whole incident was over in 2 seconds ... "
• Beast of Bont: "The main evidence for the existence of these sharp-clawed, but mysterious stalkers has been the death toll among vulnerable herds of sheep."
• Beast of Barford: "It is twice the size of a dog print and clearly shows three huge claws and a large pad at the back. Wildlife experts believe the print is the most conclusive evidence yet that big cats are roaming Warwickshire."
• The Beast of Gloucester and The Black Beast of Inkeberrow: "A 'huge black beast' ran in front of Ray Lock's car on the other side of the river near Lydney... one evening near Monmouth where it was described as 'jet black and about the size of a large dog.'"
• Beast of Burford: "A £5,000 reward has been offered for the capture of a 'big cat' which has been terrorising a farming community ..... Pc Ray Hamilton, wildlife crime officer at Thames Valley Police, admitted there had been several sightings - but said this was not unusual. 'We've had sightings of everything you could imagine - pink flamingos, lions, dingos, wolves and even a giant ant-eater in Pangbourne.'"

The human desire to create imaginary "beasts" seems to have some correlation to the loss of large predators and true wilderness.

With the extinction of the bear and the wolf, the U.K. has lost all large predators and now has to suffice with two rather unimpressive meso-predators, the fox (average weight 15 pounds and living almost entirely off of mice) and the badger (average weight around 25 to 30 pounds and living almost entirely off of worms, beetle grubs, and small bulbs).

So what are these large feral "beasts" seen in the English countryside, and why is it that they are never actually found?

The short answer is that these "beasts" are nothing more than large escaped lurchers (coursing dog crosses) that have taken to livestock-worrying. As an article on the Beast of Osset notes:

"On a parkland estate in rural Yorkshire a poacher's lurcher (a fast greyhound-like hunting dog) was at large for six months but was sighted only once during that period. The gamekeepers knew it was there because they found the roe deer that it had killed, but it took a concerted effort with volunteers to flush it out of the wood."

In fact, sheep worrying is a serious problem in the U.K., and while any dog can end up attacking sheep, it is the larger dogs such as Lurchers and Bandogs (mastiff crosses) that do the damage that lead some to think a large cat or lion is loose in the English countryside.

Sheep worrying by lurcher.

In fact, a lurcher really does look like a large cat if seen in the dark or fog, and especially if it is seen only briefly from a moving car, as most "big cat" sightings are.

A Bandog (what the Hound of the Baskervilles was) really does look like a lion if seen under the same circumstances.

What is amazing about the "big cat" stories in the U.K., however, is how easy they are disprove, and yet how utterly resistant people are to having their bubbles burst.

Take the issue of "big cat footprints". Most of these footprints are clearly large dog prints. How can we be sure? Simple -- all the footprints show claw marks. All the large cats, except the cheetah, however, walk with retracted claws, otherwise they would quickly dull

This foot print of the "Beast of Barford"
is held up by a young hopeful.

The other issue has to do with hounds -- the U.K. is crawling with fox packs, and yet none has ever chased and cornered a large cat other than the now very rare native Scottish Wildcat, which is not much larger than a tabby.

You can be sure that if the big cats were out there, British fox hounds would have found them by now! In the U.S., small teams of less experienced hounds manage to track down marauding farm-country cougars in only a few hours time.

Finally, we come to the issue of rub strips -- bits of carpet and tacks impregnated with a mixture of catnip and beaver castoreum -- that have failed to turn up any positive large cat hits in the U.K.

Wherever these rub strips are used -- whether in North America, South American, Europe, Africa, or Asia -- they are quickly found and rubbed against by large cats and other predators.

A DNA analysis of fur caught on the hooks of the carpet tacks can not only identify what species of animal has left it behind, it can identify what specific animal has come by in the night.

Rub strips are so accurate they are now routinely used to survey population densities of such elusive large cats as leopard, lynx, cougar, and jaguar, as well as badger, wolverine, bear, wolf, coyote and bobcat.

Of course, "Beast of" stories are not unique to the U.K.

Here in the United States we have Sasquatch and some local tales of little green men, swamp creatures, and even a werewolf or two (all delivered with a wink to small children).

In truth, however, we have far fewer fantasy "Beast" stories than the U.K. for a simple reason: we have more real top end predators.

In states like Minnesota, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and North Carolina we really do have wolves prowling the remote sections.

In Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina we really do have 12 foot lizards slithering out of drainage ditches and quite capable of eating an old lady alive.

Mountain lions really do prowl the remote sections of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Colorado and even Texas, and are now being found as far east as Iowa.

Black bears number well over 400,000 in the lower 48 states, and there are over 100,000 more in Alaska.

Bobcats are everywhere, as are coyotes -- the later so common that there are bounties on them, including in my home state of Virginia.

No one living in a large America city today lives more than two hours away from a major top-end predator of some kind.

This is a glorious thing, and something we should count among our greatest national treasures.

But a "Beast of Bondwynn?" No, we don't have that.

In a world in which top-end predators are still common, there is no reason to invent ghost stories.

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Go-to-Ground Lurcher and Hawk

A nice little video from T.S. Wright showing Cog, the Hybrid Falcon, and Loki the Lurcher digging a Jackrabbit out of a hole after a long flight.  

This is real four-species interaction, and real three-species partnership!

Jack Rabbits are actually a type of hare and do not den underground (neither do Cottontail rabbits), but will bolt into a hole if chased in hot pursuit.   I am not sure what made the original hole, but given the area, it would have to be badger, fox or prairie dog I would think.

• Related Links:
  ** Jack Rabbit Hunt, Mead, Kansas ~1912
  ** Harris Hawk X Golden Eagle
  ** American Jack Rabbit History. 

American Coursing 100 Years Ago in Nebraska

A repost from this blog circa June 2005
These are pictures of coursing dogs taken in Kearney, Nebraska around 1908 -- a very different world in some aspects, but very much the same in others.
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Fantasy Creatures and Halloween

This post is recycled from 2004.

People seem to have a need for fantasy. I have written in the past about "fantasty diggers" but perhaps something should be said about fantasy creatures as well.

There is the fellow who claims to be an expert in wildlife who says he hunts blue fox, which he describes as a cross between a red fox and a Gray fox. That would be a fascinating cross (!) as these two animals are not remotely related to each other and cannot mate (nor do they wish to).

The same fellow chimed in that American rabbits den underground and that there are rabbit warrens in America. In fact no American rabbit dens underground. All of our native rabbits are cottontails (which is a genus, not a species) or hares and they nest in the shallowest of scrapes in the dirt. The pygmy rabbit, which lived in a small section of the West and was no bigger than a rat, was the one exception, but it is now believed to be extinct in the wild.

America runs rife with fantasy animals. There is Big Foot and Sasquatch, but also the Chupacabra, the Mothmen of Ohio, the Ozark Howler, various types of vampire dogs and Werewoves, and "Chessie" the Lake Champlain version of the Loch Ness Monster.

The U.K. has the same phenomenon, where loose, sem-feral lurchers and sheep-worrying dogs are described as the "Beast of Bonndwyyn" or some other interesting-sounding place.

Tracks are carefully photographed, and the brave locals point to the big claw marks as proof that a large feral cat (a black panther or jaguar or American cougar) is running loose in the allotmments.

In fact, the claw marks are proof that it is not a big cat -- all cats except cheetahs retract their claws when walking or running. If you see claw marks in a track, you have a dog. A dog that looks a lot like a large wild cat is most probably a lurcher. There may be a few feral swamp cats in the UK (as well as Scottish wild cats) but if you have ever seen one of either species, you will not worry about much livestock being lost -- both are hardly bigger than a large house cat.

Tonight, when you see monsters running through your streets, try to remember it's Halloween, and not Chupacabra hunting season. Fantasy is a fine thing -- so long as it's not confused with reality.

• Related Posts
  ** Chupacabra Hunting With Terriers
  ** The Beast of Exmoor and Other Nonsense
  ** Beast of Dartmoor is Caught
  ** The "Beast of Basra" Is Blamed on the British
  ** The Lion of Dartmoor
  ** P.T. Barnum and the Beastiaries of the Imagination
  ** The Mystery Beast of North Carolina
  ** Nonsense With Trail Cams
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American Coyote Lurchers, Old and New

There's a history of working coyotes with lurchers and long dogs in the American west. The top five pictures in this post were taken in Montana between 1910-1920, and some of the other photos were taken in Nebraska and Colorado. Several have an unknown origin (I keep these things pretty randomly on my hard drive as I come across them).




Lurchers and long dogs still run coyote in the American West, along with jack rabbits, which are actually a kind of hare. The American dogs are mostly greyhound and staghound crosses, and tend to be a little bigger than their UK counterparts.






While a red fox anywhere in the world, averages 12-15 pounds, a western coyote weighs an average of 35-45 pounds, and the eastern variant runs even larger (45-55 pounds).





Two running dogs are generally required to take down a coyote and avoid injury to the lurcher or long dog. Even absent a run-in with barbed wire, the potential of getting a dog wrecked working coyote is enough to give most people pause.

A coyote is a serious animal -- it is not a big fox.






The pictures, above, shows a pair of modern American coyote trucks -- a Geo Tracker on top, and a larger Chevy truck on the bottom. The dogs are loaded in the back and released with the pull of a string when a coyote is spotted in the basin-and-range country of the American west. These pictures are from Dan Gauss, whose Shot on Site blog is in the blogroll on right, and there are more pictures here. All these shots were taken at the annual coyote hound swap meet and races held in Loomis, Nebraska on the first Friday-Saturday of October by Dan.

The land here in the U.S. is so vast here that most people in Europe cannot fathom it. To put it in perspective, the U.S. is more than 66 times bigger than England, and 38 times bigger than all of the UK. All of the UK, with a population of over 60 million, is smaller than Oregon, which has a population of over 3.5 million . . . and Oregon is crowded when compared to states like Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Idaho.

The pictures below are from the Badlands Tradewinds Kennel in South Dakota, and show modern U.S. coyote-lurchers. As you can see, not much has changed from 100 years ago.





Coyotes now reside in every state of the Union except Hawaii, and some states will actually pay you to kill them (my home state of Virginia has a bounty on them, for example). That said, despite the fact that 500,000 coyotes a year are taken in the U.S. (mostly by gun and trap), the numbers keep going up.



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Order Earth Dog Running Dog Online

Earth Dog - Running Dog Magazine is the oldest and largest-circulation publication on lurchers and terrier work in the United Kingdom.

Edited by David Harcombe (profiled in Terriermen & Terriers by John Broadhurst), this publication features pictures and tales of working terriers and long dogs in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and even the U.S, and mainland Europe.

If you're looking for a gift for yourself, a trial judge, or a fellow sportsman that has taken you out into the field and taught you the ropes, an annual subscription to Earth Dog - Running Dog is the way to go!

To order by credit card (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, eCheck >> click here
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Earth Dog - Running Dog Magazine

You can subscribe to Earth Dog - Running Dog magazine on line by simply clicking here. MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover, eCheck and several other forms of payment are accepted.

It's never been easier to subscribe (or to renew your subscription!) to the oldest and largest-circulation publication on lurchers and terrier work in the UK.
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P.T. Barnum and the Beastiaries of the Imagination

Over at the Querencia blog a while back, Matt M. reported that he had been reading a book called Big Foot Exposed, which was written by his wife's first cousin, who happens to be a specialist in primate anatomy and biomechanics. Big Foot data is looked at straight-faced and is -- not too surprisingly -- found wanting.

Meanwhile, over at the Tetrapod Zoology blog, the always-interesting Darren Naish went to a Big Cat conference in the U.K. and seems to have gotten sucked in to believing that there are large mystery cats running around Britain. Well maybe they're not large cats ... maybe they're little ones about the size of a house cat or a Scottish Wild Cat. Hmmmm . . . . could they possible be just house cats and Scottish Wild Cats?

On my end, I have to say I rather enjoy the cryto-zoology crowd because it's an odd alamgam of P. T. Barnum myth makers, city slickers that that have never touched a cow, country rubes easily fooled at the carnival, and regular folks with a deep-seated desire to find (please!) some level of mystery, fantasy and novelty in a world that is pretty well explored and explained.

At some level we all desperately want there to be a Santa Clause, a flying Yogi, a living T-Rex, and an anaconda large enough to swallow a house trailer.

If we canot find it, we will invent it, and who is to say that it does not exist? You cannot prove that the non-existent does not exist -- an interesting fall back position for every kind of fun thing from Sasquatch and Cold Fusion theorists to the Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

It's a bit fun to stoke the fires of misbelief, as anyone who has even taken a troop of cub scouts "Snipe Hunting" at night can tell you. After you have them beat the brush for half an hour looking for a "snipe" (described as an animal that looks like a thin rabbit with a white stripe downs its back) you aim your flashlight up a tree and bounce it around a bit while telling the kids you just saw .... a Ho-Dag!

I plead guilty of pulling a few tricks like this. Regular readers might remember the "Chupacabra" that I reported the dogs killing a while back. The post came complete with pictures, and they were not faked. All I did was take a natural oddity, add a tall tale which I told straight, and presto -- a real Chupacabra.

In fact, my "Chubacabra" was nothing more than a groundhog victimized by four or five very large tumors that had distorted its body to the point that it looked like an alien beast. The purple color was due to the fact that the poor creature was dragging itself over nearby pokeberry plants as it tried to find food in the final days of its misery.

Similar "mystery creatures" are reported all the time, and in almost every case they are nothing more than a mangey fox or coyote, or a bear that has lost its hair or -- in some rare cases -- an escaped exotic pet like a mouflon goat or a wallabee.

The "Beast of Stronsay" turned out to be nothing more than a half-rotted basking shark.

Pulling people's leg is big business. I could point to Big Tobacco here (or the Bush Administration and Haliburton), but let me stick to the natural world and not digress too much.

Phineas T. Barnum made his fortune by parading people into a museum to see a "Feejee Mermaid," which was nothing more than a faked bit of taxidermy combining a monkey and a fish. That gag worked so well, he began parading a pair of retarded dwarf brothers from Connecticut around as the "Wild Men of Borneo," and he found a 5-year old midget he paraded around as an adult named "General Tom Thumb."

Today, thanks to PhotoShop, the gags have never been easier. In the great tradition of western postcards that show Rainbow Trout so large that just one of them fills a wagon pulled by a team of 20 mules, we now have pictures of massive sharks looming over surfers or jumping out of the water to snatch National Guardsmen off of ladders dangling from helicopters. Even video tape can be faked.

And yet, we want to believe. I regularly get interesting bits of stuff sent my way from folks who are sure it is true. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, an office mate sent me a picture of a giant alligator that was caught in New Orleans' streets. There was just one problem -- the picture was not an alligator, but a crocodile. I tracked down the origin of the picture in a few minutes ... ditto with the enormous snake "in Australia" that I quickly recognized as an African Rock Python.

Some of my favorite tall tales are the myriad "Beast of" stories that come out of the U.K. People who believe in such things are entirely immune to rational thought. Here's a hint: there are about 200 mounted fox hound packs working every inch of a very crowded U.K., and yet they have never turned up a big cat.

Yet people want to believe there is real danger in the English countryside -- never mind that the last wolf in the U.K. was shot dead more than 250 years ago, and the last bear more than 1500. If there is a dead sheep with a torn throat it must be a giant cat, never mind all the sheep-worrying lurchers that regularly get loose and go feral for a few days, weeks or months. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle understood the mind set well when he wrote "The Hound of the Baskervilles."

People want to believe and will suspend all logic to do so, and if it also helps sell a few newspapers and T-shirts, so much the better.

The folks around Loch Ness have a small business selling postcards, tours and trinkets. The same is true around Lake Champlain where the locals have invented their own version of "the monster" which they call "Champ." Add to the mix the Yetti of the Himalayas and the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest.

And while we're at it, let's not forget the thousands of "Jackaplope" heads gracing the walls of western bars and tourist stores in Wyoming, Colorado and Montana.

And, of course, if there is ever a Museum of Humbuggery, the alien autopsy gag has to get its own case, as does the running gag known as "crop circles," which turned out to be nothing more than a collection of pranksters with a bit of rope and a couple of two-by-fours.

The real story, however, is that most of the earth has been well-swarmed by biologists, hunters, anglers, explorers, bug collectors, small children, foreign aid workers, and old men. Sadly, on land and in the air, there is no longer too much new under the sun.

Not all mystery is gone, of course. About once every decade we find something as "amazing" as a new small deer or striped rabbit in the forests of Southeast Asia.

Several times a year a scientist or two declares he has found a new species of mouse, frog, large insect, or small bird.

The deep oceans contain a lot of things yet unseen and unnamed. Perhaps the Creature from the Black Lagoon really does exist .... somewhere ... out there.

And even if not, we can still sell a book, a movie, and a few T-shirts about it, eh? What's the harm in believing?


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The Last Great Lurcherman

Parody is always a form of compliment, even if a back-handed one, and when it is done well it can rise to an art form as it does here in this piece from Gary Hosker's web site. Wonderful!

This is, of course, a twist on the sometime fawning magazine profiles about the late Brian Plummer (including one that once appeared in The New Yorker), which generally featured his ratting terriers, but sometimes his Hancock-bred lurchers as well.

I will see if I can find the old New Yorker piece and post it -- I think I have it somewhere. Note that the jump link at the end of this exerpt takes you to the rest of the story on the original web site.

John Higginbottom, the Last Great Lurcherman.


For this report we are indebted to the Sunday Spineless and its roving correspondent, Miss Wilhelmina Wordspinner.

This article first appeared in the 1991 lurcher yearbook. However, Miss Wordspinner has made ‘several’ trips to the Yorkshire Dales since 1991 and has agreed to publish her articles and extracts from her private diaries here on the Official Lurcher Web Site.


Part 1.

I drove north the three hundred long miles from my comfortable air-conditioned London office to interview a recluse, a self- styled eccentric, a man above men, a lurcherman. Name, John Higginbottom.

My journey started with a long drive north, then north and north again along the MI for what seemed an age. As the flat lands of the south turned first to gently rolling meadows of Northamptonshire and then to the hills of Derbyshire I drove ever onwards, finally arriving in the windswept dales of Yorkshire; a land where, if it's not raining one instinctively knows it must be snowing.

High limestone and millstone grit fells clad in an ever-present mist seemingly sweep up to the very base of the stratosphere. This North of England that lies on the wrong side of a theoretical line known as the north-south divide; a North of dark satanic cotton mills that belch black smoke out of imposing, discoloured and misshapen chimneys, chimneys reaching almost as high as the fells that surround them, blending with the landscape yet at the same time destroying it. A North of coal mines and colliers, of iron foundries and smelters, where work- hardened men lead lives so arduous their circumstances could best be described as an existence.

Yet, leave this industrial landscape that was once the pulsating heart of a proud British Empire and drive only a few short miles through the bitter driving rain and take a side road (track would be a more accurate description for metalled roads have yet to come to this part of Britain) signposted 'to the edge of the world' and one encounters an altogether unique England.

An England so blissfully isolated from the twentieth century that one feels encapsulated in an age long past.

Sheep hardened by many a long winter shelter behind 'dry' stone walls from the ever present torrent of rain, where men still scrape a meagre living for themselves behind horse and plough, cultivating crops on half an acre of boulder-strewn land, subsistence living that is this England. Yes this can truly be called a place on the edge of the world.

I took this path to find lurcherman John Higginbottom, John, a giant of a man with ruddy complexion, short greying hair, a beard of flaming red, and hands like the proverbial size ten shovel. Hands that were cut, bruised and contorted, he told me, through many a long desperate dig, rescuing his battle-hardened terrier 'Tootsie' from life or death conflicts with rabbit and other subterranean creatures, this reclusive, almost shy man refused to talk about.

John, a youthful forty-seven, a taciturn man who still retains most of his own teeth, was brought up in the Midlands and is a spot welder by trade. I asked him why? Why does any man try and live here, all alone pushing himself to the very limits of endurance in order to eke out a shallow existence in this particularly inhospitable place, with only the bark of his seven lurcher dogs and sound of the occasional crow for company. “Have you ever spot welded?” replied John philosophically. He sat quite still reading Kipling to himself.

Breaking the silence I enquired about the breeding of his battle-hardened terrier, Tootsie. “That,” explained John, ”is a Higginbottom terrier, the culmination of a twenty-five year selective breeding programme based on the Yorkshire terrier with just a dash of King Charles spaniel for temperament.”

Feeling that I had in some small way penetrated his rock-hard exterior and socialized myself with John, I asked, nay begged, to accompany him on one of his famous hunting expeditions -- expeditions, on which I was informed, he uses his homogeneous pack of Higginbottom lurchers to hunt all legal quarry. For John truly is the last of the self-confessed great hunters.

John fell silent, gritted his teeth, pursed his lips, and went into deep thought, almost a trance as if he were going through a metamorphosis or having an out-of-body experience.

Then as suddenly as he had entered the trance he snapped back to reality, kicked his dog and snapped: “Yes, the mad are in God's keeping. Tomorrow morning, crack of ten thirty, not a minute later and I hope for your sake you have a high attention span.”

Glancing in my direction before walking into his meagre shanty home, shared with his pack of Higginbottom hounds, John continued “I insist upon complete and utter obedience from both my dogs and those who chose to follow me.” Fixing me with those steely blue eyes, he gave a penetrating stare, a stare that I would come to know as his force 7 stare. I felt as the Apostles must have felt on the banks of sea of Galilee. I was in awe of this demigod.

Next morning we set off across the fields at a quarter-past- eleven precisely. I asked John why he was late. “Time has no relevance here on the edge of the world,” replied he, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

'Ferrets, ferrets I must have ferrets,' he whispered gently. Suddenly he opened a hutch door, and plunged his gigantic hand into a cage of these ferocious little carnivores. Five ferrets bit deep into the flesh of each of his massive digits -- yet did this man flinch? Not he.

With blood trickling down his forearm he throttled each ferret in turn in order to prise them from his fingers. "Aren't you concerned about infection' I asked “No,” said he “The poker's in the fire. I'll cauterize the wounds when we return.” I glanced ominously at the cumulus clouds gathering overhead, said a silent prayer and thought – ‘If we return.’ >> TO READ MORE

Small World Department

Steve Bodio gives a "big water bowl" boost to Lilly the dacshund.

The world is a small southern town. A while back, I discovered that Teddy Moritz's Harris Hawk was sired by Matt Mullenix's retired bird Charlie. Now it turns out that Steve Bodio's long-haired dachshund, Lilly, is related to Teddy's line of long-haired min-dachshunds, while his two lurchers, Pearlie and Plum (short for Plummer), are Hancock-bred animals as was Keeper, Teddy's old shattered-eye lurcher which was, I think, one of the spookiest-looking dogs I ever looked in the face.


Pearlie the lurcher looking guilty for having found a soft seat.



Bear the stag hound (left) and Plum the lurcher (right).

Since I've got a couple of lurcher pictures up, and I mentioned Col. David Hancock, I will quote from a Hancock article that first appeared in the The Countryman's Weekly back on July 14, 2000:

"Dog breeders have a huge moral responsibility, magnified by the increasing loss of role for breeds which once worked. Function once decided design. Now the whim of man all too often distorts a design originally drawn up by knowledgeable people who worked their dogs.

"Pastoral breeds were never intended to possess coats, which would hamper them at work. Working Bloodhounds do not display the degree of wrinkle seen in the breed in the show rings of today. Working Bassets, or English Bassets as they have now become known, do not display the over-long backs and under-length legs found in their show ring counterparts.

"The pursuit of undesirable and harmful exaggerations in breeds of dog tells you more about the moral shortcomings of man than about the faults in individual dogs."

8 To read the full article

Bellman & Flint's New Web Site: Well Worth a Visit

I am a tough sell. I get a lot of links forwarded to me from folks that want to cross link in order to help sell some piece of dog paraphenalia or another, and I generally ignore them.

Consequently, if I give something a thumbs up, it tends to mean something. With that caveat, take a look at Bellman & Flint's new web site. It's not perfect yet, but it's the right stuff and the price seems fair for what appears to be very high quality goods.

This is the right direction for a small business to take -- specialized quality goods sold around the world to those of us who care and look for such things.

In the terrier world, most folks over here in the U.S. have heard of Bellman & Flint because they were the first folks, other than Deben, to make a terrier-dedicated locator collar.

I have used the Bellman and Flint kit, and while it is extremely well made (no complaints there!), I found the locator collar too big for the earths we have here in the Eastern U.S.

That said, not every place on earth has such tight pipes, and in the U.K. where old badger settes, deep rock fissures and 9 inch drains are more common, the Bellman & Flint kit has its enthusiastic champions. There is no reason in the world that everyone has to embrace the same technology. Different horses for different courses.

Now what else is Bellman and Flint selling on their new web site? For one thing, a wide variety of well-made terrier and hound couples. These appear to be made of top-quality leather and can be custom-assembled in any number of sizes, leather types and bits of gleaming hardware for terrier, beagle, lurcher, and hound alike. Beautiful stuff.

Along with very nice terrier, hound and lurcher couples and leads, there is also a nice collection of digging tools along with some very nice knives that, from their labeling, appear to be made in America. I am a bit of an old stick with my cheap Opinal knife, but I have to say these pretty wooden-handled locking blades are a very tempting acquisition ....

Christmas is just a month away, so for those of you looking to bring a smile on the face of a digger's heart, visit the Bellman and Flint site.

And while you are ordering things, don't forget to give a gift of American Working Terriers to someone you love!

The Working Bedlington

This book, by John Glover, is said to cover all aspects of choosing, keeping, breeding and working Bedlington Terriers, and includes important information on the history of the breed and how the working type has been kept alive. There is also a chapter on the increasingly popular Bedlington Lurcher. The author is said to be a well known figure in the Bedlington terrier world, "and has played a major part in the resurgence of popularity this type of Bedlington is now enjoying."

In fact, I do not think it is too much of a resurgence -- though there is no doubt people are trying. Bedlingtons are still uncommon in the field as they are quite large and prone to some very serious health problems. In addition, among most of the Bedlingtons I have seen, the coat is very linty and does little to keep the animal warm and dry in bad weather. A Bedlington x Greyhound or Whippet is a popular small lurcher, however.

>> To order a copy of this book, try Coch-y-Bonddu Books ( http://www.anglebooks.com ) or Read Country Books ( http://www.readcountrybooks.com ) I can vounch for both sellers -- great service and fair prices for hard-to-get books.

Lurchers, Terriers & Ferrets

Paul Dooley's blog at http://lurchersterriersferrets.blogspot.com is worth a visit as it has some nice pictures and narrative. Why you are at it you might invest a little money in Paul's book >> ordering information here

As for the picture above, it's a lot of rabbit holes being netted, with a ferret below ground and a deben box in hand. Looking at this picture, I am reminded of the Beatles lyric in the song Day in the Life: "Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire / And though the holes were rather small / They had to count them all".

And net them too ...

Earth Dog - Running Dog - Order Online

Earth Dog - Running Dog Magazine is the oldest and largest-circulation publication on lurchers and terrier work in the United Kingdom. Edited by David Harcombe, this publication features pictures and tales of working terriers and long dogs in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and even the U.S, and mainland Europe. If you're looking for a gift for yourself, a trial judge, or a fellow sportsman that has taken you out into the field and taught you the ropes, an annual subscription to Earth Dog - Running Dog is the way to go! To order by credit card (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, eCheck >> click here

Veni, Vici, Vidi Bunny: Roman Rabbits Conquer All

This extraordinary picture is from Sue Rothwell in the Outer Hebrides, and shows an enormous take of rabbits that were lamped at night and taken by well-trained lurchers. Though Sue raises Plummer Terriers and has Scottish Wildcats as well (the native wild cat of Scotland, which was nearly driven to extinction), I suspect rabbit is on the menu a few times a week! To read more about Sue's Plummer and Hancock-bred lurchers, see >> here.

The article below was bird-dogged for me by Steve who knows of my interest in such things -- thank you! It turns out that archeologists now think the rabbit was introduced to the UK by the Romans, rather than the Normans, giving new meaning to the old Latin phrase: Veni, vidi, vici ("we came, we saw, we conquered").

For more on the archeology of hunting, see the April 10th post on this topic.

The Daily Telegraph (London), April 14, 2005

Romans Introduced the Rabbit, By David Sapsted

__________

Years of division among academics over whether the Romans or the Normans introduced rabbits into Britain appears to have been resolved.

An archaeological dig in Norfolk has uncovered the remains of a 2,000-year-old rabbit -- by far the oldest of its kind found on these shores and regarded as final proof that the creatures are now on the list of what the Romans ever did for us.

Many believed that the Normans introduced rabbits for their meat and fur.

However, others have always insisted that the creatures were brought in by the Romans, citing Marcus Terrentius Varro (116-27BC) who wrote that the legions brought rabbits from Spain, where they were reared in walled enclosures and then served up as a gourmet dish.

The remains were found at Lynford, near Thetford.

Jayne Bown, the manager of the Norfolk Archaeological Unit, which is conducting the dig, said yesterday: "We can date the rabbit to the first or second century AD from the pottery fragments found beside it. Some of these fragments included domestic pots which could have been used for cooking. "We could tell the bones had been butchered."

New Book on Lurchers and Terriers

Paul Dooley has written a new book on lurchers and terrier work in the U.K. entitled Stormy Nights and Frosty Mornings .

You can now order this book by credit card and on line at: http://www.terrierman.com/dooley.htm . Prices posted are in U.S. dollars, Pounds Sterling and Euros, and include shipping.