The Bloodhound.

Otago Witness, Issue 2849, 21 October 1908, Page 76

The Bloodhound.

The failure of the bloodhound hunt in Liverpool was a failure very honourable to this ancient and honourable race of dog. The sleuth-hound ("sleitth" is old English for "scent") was known- in Britain before even the days of Wallace and Bruce. Both i these heroes are said to have been "hunted," Wallace escaping by slaying a suspected comrade and casting his corpse on the track, and Bruce by wading down a stream, and climbing into a tree which overhung the waiter, so that he broke the soent and found shelter without touching bank. To baffle a bloodhound' in open country would indeed tax human ingenuity to the utmost, and the closeness with which dogs will follow • their man is illustrated by the performance of Mr Brouglh's Barnabv and Mr R. H. Wright's Hector II in some trials held not many years ago. when they ran under those railings through which their quarry had crept, but jumped those which he had climbed! —Give a Dog a Bad Name. — But for the efforts of a few private gentlemen this keen-scented breed was in danger, some 40 yeairs ago, of extinction. Yet in ear-lier times, •before a speedier animal had been evolved by cross-breeding, the bloodhound had been the principal dog of the chase. The- bloodhound' has an absurd reputation for ferocity, pertly due to the iibellous pages of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and still more to his name, tho probably true origin- of which may surprise many. Only a century ago he was often spoken of as a "staghound, and his present name probably embodies the idea that he represents the orig-inal stock from which all other types of British hounds have arisen, and that he is thus the bloodhound in the same 6ense that the B&rbary Arab is the blood horee. His^true mature is not bloodthirsty. —The Man-hunting. Instinct. — Nevertheless, some, associations of horror will always cling to the' bloodhound. Though he tolerates the -ohasG, his instinct is to hunt man. WhSe. other dogs learn to track human footsteps by following at first thoee of someone they know, and-after-wards those of a stranger whose shoes -Jhave been 'smeared with something savoury, the young bloodhound actually "finds ihis nose by hunting the stranger," and will follow the trail of a "clean «noe." Nature having darkened his bloodshot eyes with flabby folds of skin, and blunted his hearing with an involuted thickly-curtained ear, he is all nose; and -there is -something additionally horrible in the fact that, though he has the finest, voice in the whole oanine tribe, aaid gives vent to it freely when hunting animals, yet when hunting man he w-ill often work in ominous and complete silence.—T. P.*s Weekly.