CHAPTER XLIII 



THE HOUND FAMILY 



OUNDS form a very large section of the dog family, as the term 

 embraces all dogs which follow game either by sight or by 

 scent. Of the former section the leading member of the 

 present time is the greyhound, and has as its consorts the 

 Irish wolfhound, the Scottish deerhound and the Russian 

 wolfhound. To these may be added the later-made breed for racing and 

 rabbit coursing, called the whippet or snap dog. Of the hounds that follow 

 the quarry by scent we have the bloodhound, foxhound, harrier, beagle and 

 basset; and up to a short time ago there was another variety of large fox- 

 hound called the staghound or buckhound, which was used in deer hunting, 

 such as the Royal hunt after carted deer, or after wild deer in some of the 

 still remaining sections of England where they were to be found. The 

 Royal buckhounds were given up some years ago and the carted-deer hunts 

 having fallen into disrepute as had the annual cockney Epping Hunt. Stag- 

 hounds are not a breed of to-day nor, indeed, are harriers to the extent they 

 were. The harrier is the intermediate dog between the foxhound and the 

 beagle and has been interbred at each end, so that we have foxhound-har- 

 riers and beagle-harriers; and the old type of true harrier is confined to a 

 very few English hunts and is not in any sense an American breed, though 

 some small foxhounds in Canada are called harriers or "American fox- 

 hounds" as the owner pleases. 



Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton Smith, whose researches into the origin 

 of the dog and the individual breeds have never been properly recognised by 

 modern writers, to whom his work seems to have been unknown, devoted 

 much attention to the question of the early hounds. When he wrote re- 

 garding ancient dogs researches in Assyria had not progressed so far as they 

 had in Egypt, and he was only aware of one representation of a long-eared 

 dog, the others being erect-eared. He was therefore inclined to the opinion 

 that the greyhound type was the older. Since his day, however, we have 

 had the Layard researches and those of later times and the pendulous-eared 



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