Beagles 1 5 1 



the second place, his work does not show to ad- 

 vantage when the rabbits are so abundant that 

 the trails are badly mixed. Meat hunters in the 

 West can kill more rabbits with a bird dog than 

 with a pack of beagles, and, to tell the truth, the 

 sportsmen who are not meat hunters regard the 

 rabbit as an inferior game, or as they frequently 

 express it " nigger meat." A little farther South, 

 where the country gets rougher and more thickly 

 timbered, half-bred beagles are used for tracking 

 deer, though most of the deer hunters whom I 

 have known preferred the large and slow foxhound 

 of the English type. I refer now not to the more 

 sportsmanlike deer hunters, but to the slow 

 trackers who care nothing for the chase and are 

 simply after the market. 



Much can be said in advocacy of packs of bea- 

 gles bred and used after the English practice. 

 With us that custom has not yet taken firm root. 

 When we write of packs, it must be understood 

 that the term is not precise. We may mean 

 either of two things. The beagles put down at 

 our field trials are bred and hunted for individual 

 merit. The pack competitions at these trials are 

 made up of fours, sometimes eights, selected not 

 without regard to uniformity, to be sure, but pri- 

 marily for class in performance rather than sorti- 

 ness as a lot. The Guyasuta beagles are a field 

 trial and hunting kennel. The Rock Ridge bea- 



