catahoulas

[bad moon]

any body running catahoulas out there. i am looking for a pup close to utah so if anybody has any ideas i would appreciate it?

[Liz ODell]

there are LOTS of them here in California, there are usually some for sale at least once a month in the Sacramento Bee. I haven't really seen one that would have ever made me happy as a bear/lion/cat dog but they are good hog and cow catchers. They are becoming fairly popular as trendy pets so you might just want to start looking in the newspaper classifieds around the cities in Utah.

[easttenngator]

I had one that would run a coon...but not a lock down tree dog.....she found more on the ground than any dog I have ever hunted with...she also worked cows hogs and goats and sheep. You have never had a better truck dog or family house pet.Ours has been left in the truck gor over 12 hours because we forgot to tell her to unload or drop the tail gate( we learned quickly to unload her 1st)

They love living in a crate if it is large enough....fells like a den to them.

If you didnt know the gene pool of a Cat ...it is spanish mastiff,red wolf,and greyhound or whippit.

One warning ...they are great watch dogs and protect you and your family..meaning thay will bite if not knowing the person in there yard.

we have come home more than once with friends of ours sitting on top of there autos and her baying them round and round .

[Beartree]

My buddy has a pup he was wanting to get rid of the last i talked. It is a female if I remember right, just the right age to start.

[Pops]

bad moon don't believe that wolf crap, that story didn't get invented until after they started being called catahoulas. but they are some sure enough guard dogs.
they aren't real popular w/ most houndsmen, and heres why:
1. they don't trade well because they can take several months with lots handling before they warm up to a new owner & will work for them. 95x out of a hundred you can't buy them today & hunt them tommorrow.
2. they can be dog aggressive (although personally i'v had 10 times as many problems from walkers as all the bulldogs & houlas i've worked w/ combined). and being rough dogs they tend to finish fights other dogs start (and if your $3500 bear hound picks a fight w/ my $50 cur and loses, don't expect me to pick up the vet bill, i'll help w/ stitching & stapling but that's about it). on the plus side they are less likely to get ruined by someone's fight picking cull.
3. they are very rough on game, they don't "pull fur." they bite, hard and getting cut can make them fight harder. vet bills tend to pile up in the first few years, but then they get smarter w/o losing any grit.
4. they run silent, so no music to enjoy. OTH this also means the game doesn't know the dogs are there until they feel teeth in their @$$.
5. they can be very unfriendly to strangers, dangerously so to uninvited strangers on their own property. OTH they are harder to steal because of this, but most will learn to tolerate being handled by strangers when you're around.
6. they tend to be medium to hot nosed. they may drop the track you put them on for a warmer one. this can be a real problem w/ young dogs that will ignore a big critter you put him on in favor of a yearling that crossed his path. if you need to rack up #s and you're good enough to consistantly put him in hot sign then they'll do the job.
7. most won't tree by scent, although almost all will sight tree.

i strongly believe one or two raised & run w/ a pack of hounds would be very helpful in putting critters up a tree the same way Ben Lilley used Dales.
if you still want to try them out, i strongly reccommend Doug Mason in TX or Larry Parker in louisiana for pure bad @$$ grit. for more tree power there is a fella in FL who runs coon, his kennel name is black oak or lone oak i can't remember & would have to look for it to be sure.

[Doogie]

why just not get a Leopard Cur???? or are you going to work stock with it too?

[Cold Track]

There's a guy in Peoa named Brian Billings, I think he had some. If he does I know they are good ones, he catches a lot of game. There's also a guy in the Toole area named Shamus Haws who had some, but I think his were more used for cow dogs. Maybe look them up.

[broncobilly]

There was a lady on the old shadetree named cowhunter who used to raise some pretty good catahoulas, she lived in WY and FL, but delivered most anywhere, I don't know where she is now, but I think she is in WY. There is also a guy in Southern CO that has some pretty good catahoulas, he visits waycools site from time to time and uses the name of cowhound. I've got some pups in my yard out of his dogs and they are coming along very nicely.

Most of what pops wrote in his post I agree with, so I am not going to bother retypeing it, but my experience with catahoulas is that they are colder nosed than he indicated, at least the strain I use is, but I do know that if you are not careful you can get a pretty hot nosed catahoula, so I am not going to disagree to violently with him.

Good luck

Bill

[easttenngator]

then Pops please tell me their breed make up....I guess they werent started in La either and of course Indains never breed any of them.

Right they are breed to bay .....not catch or tree, but they will do both if you work with themand a dog trader has no reason to have one these are a working dog with a strong family bond

[Pops]

they originated from cur style dogs the french had & the cur dogs the anglo americans brought to the area. in fact leopard spotted cur dogs have been inexistance in britain since at least the 1300s. anecdotal evidence suggests it came from crossing herding dogs & curs. an uncropped beauceron bears a strong resemblance to the breed as well. and lastly the indians had dog, not wolves or wolfdogs but true pariah type dogs.
also every attempt to improve any kind of working dog through the addition of wolf has ended in failure. the only people keeping alive wolfdogs are people breeding for the pet trade. honestly what does a wolf have to offer that can't be found better in a dog? grit, nonexistant wolves are timid & cautious one on one; stamina, they can be (and historically have been) run down by packs of hounds; speed, they can be (and historically have been) run down by packs of greyhounds; smarts, if they were so smart how did the get exterminated in the lower 48; trailing, on a hound forum do i really need to point out how ridiculous that is.
Gator the simple fact is people will make up a lot of nonsense to sell dogs, just look at the BS the AKC spouts of at westminster show when it's on cable. the wolf baloney didn't get thrown about until the 70s, before then it was generally accepted that they were just good cur dogs w/ some french ancestry.
yes the dogs that became catahoulas originated in LA & east TX. yes indians bred them but you'll find more cur dogs w/ the civilized tribes in OK than the native LA tribes. when they were forced off their plantations & villages in the SE USA they brought more white culture to the area, including our dogs.

mapping the dog genome is going to embarass a lot of breed registries & their baloney histories.

[easttenngator]

i have been working alot of sites to try and find the part wolf myth and cannot so far, and still the other breeds the Spanish Mastiff and the wippet/greyhound are still what the informed site (or seemingly informed) are calling the gene pool.
Yes if i ran anything with enough dogs you could get them to run.....sure tigers and elephants and hippos even fall into that belief, I also believe that thier is a European wolf hound if not a couple of breeds to that effect. And to call them a French breed...the Spanish were in that area years before the french ever made it here.

Now I am young into hounds but I have had Curs for years ( Cracker curs, Black mouth, Mt and the Cats) To compare them to one another should be a crime. Work any 2 of the " Cur" breeds together and you will see what i mean.

[Pops]

if you've seen the big lanky 80-90# cats & the french beauceron, you know the resemblance is remarkable. also the beauceron was developed in france as a boar dog, i consider it entirely feasible that some frenchman would have brought them over to run bear (like the Plotts did w/ their german boardogs). also interesting is that the beauceron is now trained primarily for protection & herding trials. the french hugonaut (sp) settlement in south carolina might also contribute to the existance of leopard colored hunting dogs in that area prior to the revolution.
as for the french/spanish thing the spanish passed through, they didn't settle in the lower mississippi drainage which is why colonization happened w/o a fight. also the spanish in spain do not have an equivalent dog to the BMC or leopard dogs. the brits, french & germans however all had breeds that either were curs or hunted in a currish style.
the saarloos wolfHUND is a german wolf hybrid that exists primarily as an exotic pet. the wolf hybrid as a working dog has been tried here, in germany, czeckoslovakia, and russia. the largest scale program were the czeck & russian one undertaken by their communist governments these program had success rates of about 0.1% or 1 out of every thousand pups turned out to be an ADEQUATE worker. these programs were dropped in favor of more successful ones like the black russian terrier, the improved ovtcharkas & the now famous czech german sheperds.

[easttenngator]

found two site with your opinon on the wolf DNA and i am a daily learner...will have to think that they and you are right.
But on the french thing ...the 1st stories of these dogs are in DeSotos time and were used to keep his herd of hogs for his personal use with his travels,and the people with him 1st wrote of these dogs....maybe some french blood later on but not when they were started and that is what we are talking about....... or we can just jump into the 20th century and give all the credit to the 3 men that built the breed into there own lines stoghill in the 50's and Mc Duffie in the 60's cant remember the last mans name.( just like Cameron didnt invent the bluetick)

So it would still go back to the spanish mastiff and greyhound/whippet type dog and the dog breed by the Indians( which has been found in graves in 5640 bc)

[Pops]

before this thread dies can you give me some info on the cracker cur?

[easttenngator]

Pops ....florida names everything breed in that state Cracker. Cracker Curs have no origin or no blood line but if you had a working dog back in 1800's and bred it to another working dog from a buddies of yours farm and then went to the cow sale and heard about Joe Smiths working dog and bred to him and so on and so on...(.and I am sure catahoula s and blackmouths have been bred in and some bulldog)

Well if you can track a couple of generations and send it to the Fla Dept of Ag Musume then they will reg the dog for you as a Cracker Cur.


you should see what a papered Cracker cow or Cracker Horse will bring.. also there are cracker hogs and goats( just big mixed breeds)