Natural History

The hound is of a strain that was called the old black and tan foxhound, which was common through the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. It was not a pack hound, but it was used by the fur-taker and market hunter. I believe these dogs are descended heavily from a English hound called a “Southern Hound,” which was primarily used to hunt deer and hares.

The many political crises of the British Isles in the seventeenth century resulted in large numbers of dispossessed people relying upon poached deer as a source of protein, and when things eventually settled down, the forests were depleted of deer. The nobles began to develop their hound packs for the pursuit of the red fox.

And the old Southern hounds found themselves without a job. They simply couldn’t run the fox as well as the true fox hound.

So large numbers of these dogs were sent to the North American colonies, which were full of deer and other game that didn’t need to be run as hard as a fox.

Further, red foxes were uncommon south of New York State until the end of the nineteenth century, and when the red foxes wandered down through the Eastern US, these dogs were used to drive foxes to the gun.

The Vermonters would have had a long time to train and develop foxhounds for gun before the rest of the East got their chance.

This photo comes from Fox Trapping (1906) edited by A.R. Harding, which says that the range for the red fox is from Virginia to Alaska. They’ve since made it as far south as Florida.

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It is one of the great myths that North American red foxes are derived from English imports that were brought over in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Our red foxes are native but only colonized south of New York State after colonization.