question for our american doggers on here

[desertdog 149]

definition of a cur dog,"not a hound", check out any good english foxhunting literature, good pics though.

Yes in English hound circles a cur dog is any dog other than a hound no matter how many ribbons it might have won. In American hunting terminology a cur is a general mixed breed working/hunting dog many of which are being bred true to type. Curs have there history with the early settlers and their european and native dogs.

 

By Deffination the ridgeback is a cur dog from another continent.

good statement,

[Ideation 8,216]

Doesn't cur just basically mean the same as 'mongrel', but in the states, it's used to describe mixed breed hound type dogs used as all round utility/hunting dogs.

[stevemac 433]

Doesn't cur just basically mean the same as 'mongrel', but in the states, it's used to describe mixed breed hound type dogs used as all round utility/hunting dogs.

As I tried to point out in my previous post the word has different meanings on either side of the atlantic just because it has one meaning in your neck of the woods does not mean it has to have the same for some one else. American curs a whole group of dogs seperate to the many hound breeds the have as time passes the working cur dogs are being broken up into breed groups. A work in progress as it were.

[Pops 19]

in the 2004 Jan edition of Full Cry magazine Original Mountain Cur Breeders Association column, David Carr (RIP) detailed a couple of years of casual research into the history & meaning of the word cur in the ENGLISH language. he showed that the word was borrowed from gaelic/briton word cu/kyr (dog). from the 13th century until the 18th century it referred to a specific TYPE of dog that both worked rough livestock such as cattle & swine AND hunted by scent. the word cur as a type of dog predates the word curtail in literature by at least a century. one 15th century writer noted that "a most useful dog for hunting boar was made by crossing a cur to a bulldog or mastive." it is only in the 18th century that the word begins to be used to describe a mongrel dog.

the smithfield was a cur or curXcollie. the modern american curs are descended primarily of the british & irish dogs brought over by the colonists either when they emigrated or later. during the colonial and expansion periods livestock was fenced OUT of the garden & yard and lived semi wild. so the cur dogs w/ their natural trailing & herding instincts were invaluable in managing the stock & catching game. dogs of similar function from the continent were brought over by colonists from those countries and added to the gene pool (for example the ancestral beauceron brought by french colonists to the lower mississippi combined w/ the later brit/irish dogs to produce the leopard cow/cur dogs now called catahoulas).

the cur dog is a type of dog like scenthound or sighthound. just like scenthounds vary from beagle to bloodhound the cur "breeds" vary from the little stephens & lacy dogs to the big lines of catahoula, & blackmouth cur & plott. just as americans aren't pure english, irish, german or italian, the cur dogs aren't pure descendants of the original stock.

good curs are everything they are cracked up to be, unfortunately there aren't as many good ones as there should be. just like any other dogs overbred, the overall quality has dropped. some can't herd. some can't hunt. some can't do either. but i can remember as a kid seeing one BMC get his leg broke then catch & hold the bull that did it. i know of one belonging to a friend that did a great job as 3 legged hog dog for 4 years befor getting killed by a bad boar that also wrecked two bulldogs. there are good curs still to be had they are just lost i a sea of mediocre mutts.

[forest of dean redneck 11,531]

thanks pops a detailed answer

i did see several old ads in the uk for bmc pups one was under a ridgeback title so looks like their might be some in the uk but as for their quality who knows.

[Dan Edwards 1,134]

Most are somewhere in between, gritty bay dogs. The word cur has a bad negative connotation to ya'll, but lots of cattle men back home still rely on their stock working curs and wouldn't trade them for anything. These guys have been keeping and improving the same bloodlines for generations... culling what ever doesn't work.

 

 

Great post. Very truthful. I like the part about "gritty bay dogs".