AUGUST, 1917 FOREST AND STREAM 357 
PASSING OF THE FLORIDA CATCH DOG 
THE USEFULNESS OF A UNIQUE TYPE, WHICH SPRANG UP TO MEET A PIC¬ 
TURESQUE LOCAL NEED, HAS ENDED, BUT THE BREED SHOULD BE PRESERVED 
1 CALL them cattle dogs, or cow dogs. 
But the men who for half a century 
and more have used them for handling 
cattle on the Kissimmee prairies, north of 
Lake Okeechobee in Florida, have always 
called them cur dogs. Sometimes they call 
them catch (or as usually pronounced, 
“ketch”) dogs, because they can seize a 
cow by the nose and hold her. They never 
assent to my name for them, and their 
reason is a good one. 
Their other dogs are hounds, used for 
trailing deer, wildcats and other game, 
and this is so to speak their aristocratic 
dog. He is valuable and romantic for his 
wonderful and somewhat mysterious power 
of scent, and is rated as well bred in pro¬ 
portion to this power. But he is not usual¬ 
ly aggressive enough to seize a steer by 
the nose or hold a pig by the ear. Want¬ 
ing a dog for these latter purposes, the 
cattle men long ago found they could get 
one by crossing the hound with short- 
haired rugged curs, and keeping up any 
strain that proved to be good holders. 
This is to them mongrelism, and so they 
insist on calling the result by what seems 
to them its proper name, except occasion¬ 
ally when they call it a catch dog. 
For fifteen years, on winter outings in 
Florida, I have come in contact with speci¬ 
mens of this interesting animal. I should 
have written down notes and information 
about them from the beginning. In fact, 
I several times intended to do so. Finally, 
a year ago I was aroused to the importance 
of it by learning from the cattlemen that 
the dogs were passing out of use, and 
soon would be discarded entirely. 
The reasons given are that they find they 
can get on without them, and that they 
only injure the cattle. It is curious, how¬ 
ever, that these reasons should appear so 
suddenly after the dogs have been in use 
so long. Possibly the real reason is that 
the cattle are becoming tamer or weaker. 
Last year I could not persuade any cattle¬ 
man to use his dog on a steer or cow so 
as to give me a chance for a photograph, 
because he said that the cattle were so 
weak and sickly that the dog might kill 
them. 
They are, at best, smaller and weaker 
than northern or western cattle. Vegeta¬ 
tion is abundant all around them, in fact is 
in semi-tropical luxuriance; but it is not 
of the right kind. It does not furnish the 
grasses that, with their European and 
northern origin, they can convert readily 
into nutrition. The all pervasive tic, giving 
the tic or Texas fever, also holds them 
down and is usually regarded as the mam 
By SYDNEY G. FISHER 
This useful and highly intelligent 
breed—the Florida catch dog, which 
seems in danger of lapsing—could be 
developed and trained readily to do 
the work of the German police dog. 
And being American, he could un¬ 
doubtedly do it better. Forest and 
Stream would be glad to receive from 
breeders and other experts in the dog 
world, opinions on the practicability 
of this suggestion. 
cause of their degeneracy. It is proposed 
now to abolish the tic by dipping tanks, 
and to plant special grasses. 
B UT the best explanation of the disuse 
of the catch dog is that with the lapse 
of time, more association with human 
beings and the restriction 'of wire fences 
in place of the old free range of the wil¬ 
derness, the cattle have grown less wild 
and unruly. Naturalists, I understand, be¬ 
lieve that this taming process has been 
going on among all cattle, even in Europe; 
and that the European animal which some 
centuries ago developed the ferocity of 
the bull dog by the sport of bull baiting 
(and in fact created that type of dog) now 
no longer exists. The bull dog we know 
has degenerated into a bench show weak¬ 
ling, which would be entirely harmless to 
the most sickly bull. 
In Florida cattle dogs were used, not for 
driving the cattle as collie dogs are used, 
but for controlling or subduing particu¬ 
larly unruly animals, in driving or when 
the herds are collected to be driven off for 
sale. They have also been used for con¬ 
trolling hogs in the same way, or for 
catching and holding a hog by the ears 
until a man or two can come up and seize 
the hog by the hind legs to throw him 
into a wagon. 
This cattle business has been conducted 
in the prairie and open pine timber dis¬ 
trict of central Florida for a long time; 
long before the times .of the Civil war. 
The Florida cowboy is older than the west¬ 
ern cowboy, and herded cattle on horse¬ 
back and wore a broad-brimmed hat long 
before the western cowboy was heard of. 
The Florida cattleman however has sel¬ 
dom used a lasso. Instead he uses a long 
whip: the handle only about a foot long, 
but the lash eighteen feet long. This he 
learns to crack—or pop, as he calls it—with 
a report like that of a rifle, and with it he 
rounds up the cattle and drives them on 
long journeys to market. An unruly or 
vicious animal he whips unmercifully in 
the face, with crack after crack of his 
terrible whip. It requires strength, skill 
and long practice to do it from horse¬ 
back, and is sometimes called “burning ’em 
up.” At other times the dog is turned on 
the animal; which soon quiets down when 
a good dog has it by the nose. 
It is difficult now to get details of the 
old days of the cattle business. And that 
is unfortunate, for they were full of ad¬ 
venture, hunting and not a little fighting. 
The occupation seems to have begun at 
least as early as the year 1835, near Ocala. 
Of course it began gradually, and it would 
be quite impossible to fix upon an exact 
date. In the early days the country south 
of Ocala was all wilderness, and the fur¬ 
ther south you went the more you mixed 
with Seminole Indians. The Ocala herds¬ 
men appear to have gradually spread their 
animals through the forest and timber 
country south of them until they finally 
penetrated that interesting prairie region, 
the Kissimmee Valley, which extends to 
Lake Okeechobee. They had reached the 
prairie region and probably penetrated it 
some time before the Civil war, , 
O NE of the characters of the early 
times was Moses Barber, a very pa¬ 
triarchal personage with a long 
beard, usually credited with being the first 
of the cattle kings. He was finally killed 
in one of the feuds which were frequent 
and venomous among the cattlemen. The 
business was of course for a long time 
very irregular and wild, conducted as it 
was without ownership of the land, in a 
vast uninhabited region. Cattle stealing 
was so frequent that it was hardly a 
crime; and indeed it has been stopped only 
within the last eighteen or twenty years, 
by the enforcement of a stringent law put 
through the legislature of the state by C. 
A. Carson, who is still a large cattle owner. 
With him and other cattlemen of life¬ 
long experience, like John M. Lee and 
Elijah Godwin (now deceased) I have had 
interesting conversations on this subject. 
The free range cattle business was at its 
height of glory about 1880, when enormous 
herds filled the Kissimmee region. It must 
have been a paradise of saddle ponies and 
popping whips, wonderful and terrible 
scenes with the dogs, unlimited deer, wild 
cats and plumage and song-birds, ducks, 
quail and snipe innumerable. It was then, 
T take it. that the catch dog received his 
best development. 
In a herd of often hundreds at a time 
of these partially wild animals, a bull or 
steer would every now and then decide to 
go back to his old pasturage. No collie 
