Natural History

Source.

This is a mutual bark off! (Yes.  The fox is barking back– very raspily!)

Remember that gray foxes and their close cousins, the island foxes, aren’t really foxes. They are actually the most primitive of all wild dog species.  The lineage to which these creatures belong is estimated to be around 10 million years old, the oldest of all extant canids.

The Kemmer cur in this video is of a strain of the greater mountain cur type. There are several strains of mountain cur that are well onto their way to breed formation. They still have an open registry system, which registered all dogs that can be proven to have 75 percent Kemmer ancestry with white papers. However, they still allow dogs with less than 75 percent Kemmer ancestry to be registered with green papers. And the green paper dogs can breed to the white paper dogs.

Curs are often called hounds, but it’s slightly in error. They may have hound ancestry, but they are actually meant to be multipurpose hunting dogs in ways that beagles, foxhounds, and coonhounds typically aren’t. And many of these curs can be used to herd livestock and hunt and retrieve birds. Their ancestry includes whatever dogs could live on the frontier, including those of the Native Americans, those of British and Irish working farm dog and hound stock, and those of German working farm dog and hound stock. (I’ve noted how much some of these dog look like rustic pinscher-types, like the rare Austrian pinscher.)

These two animals are truly made in the USA. At one time, most Americans knew what gray foxes were, and they hunted them with dogs very similar to this Kemmer cur.

But now they both might as well be from Siberia.

Curs are often thought of as mongrels, which is the result of a terrible bastardization of the English language. Curs were the dogs of small farmers in the British Isles. They weren’t standardized or “improved” within the nineteenth century dog fancy system, so they were considered dogs of “low breeding.” Because they weren’t within this system, they might as well have been totally randomly-bred mongrels. But they weren’t.  Some strains of these dogs have been established and maintained for many generations, and many breeders were very careful in selectively breeding their dogs.

The most famous cur was the dog in Fred Gipson’s novel Old Yeller. That particular dog was probably more of a black mouth cur, which is the cur-type that was common around the Gulf Coast states and Texas. The dog in the film version of Gipson’s novel was a Labrador cross named Spike.

No one really seems to know much about either canids in this video. Four of the six small canids native to North America are gray. Two of these, the swift and the kit fox, are actually foxes– that are very closely related to the arctic fox.  The gray and island foxes aren’t in that lineage at all, and where gray foxes and kit and swift foxes live near each other, it is very common for people to misidentify them.

So curs aren’t mongrels, and gray foxes aren’t foxes.

What a confusing language we have!