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CONSERVING THE  CERVIDS
By David Hancock

  Man has long pursued the cervid group of wild animals: antelope, deer, stag, gazelle, elk, caribou, buck and ibex, as part of the need for food or the indulgence of sport. He has used a wide variety of methods using hounds: the mounted chase involving scent hounds using stamina, sighthounds using sheer speed, ‘finders’ using scent and acute hearing – mainly in northern climes, and, in the Middle Ages, powerful ‘seizers’ to pull down exhausted quarry. Across the globe, hunting the cervids became the sport of kings or at least the sport of the ‘high and mighty’, as ancient depictions of Eastern leaders demonstrate. The hounds involved were usually bigger and stronger than those used on other quarry but stronger too was the admiration, almost affection, for such noble prey. Staghounds were once rather like leaner, tighter-skinned Bloodhounds in western Europe and are now mainly obsolescent. Deerhounds too are nearing extinction in Britain.

 You don’t hear much about the Staghound in Britain these days, and by Staghound I mean the scenthound of the packs, not the loose name for a big rough-haired lurcher both here and in Australia and the United States. Of course, the Hunting Act of 2004 has undermined the core function of Staghound packs, but these have long been much-admired hounds, with a clear identity and distinct value for the hound devotee. In his Modern Dogs of 1897, Rawdon Lee wrote of them: “…this hound is neither more nor less than a foxhound under another name, but trained for a different purpose…He has been used, or at any rate, a somewhat similar animal to him has long been used, for staghunting, and we are told by historians that, in the times of the Normans, villages were depopulated, and places for divine worship overthrown, in order that the nobles might have their parks in which to keep their deer.” Lee remarked that the change of quarry “does not appear to have made any difference in the character and disposition of the animal. The staghound is just as fast, and is said to possess as good a nose; in coat, colour, and formation they are identical—and hard, thick feet, good legs, with strong loins…”

  In Lee’s day there were eighteen packs of Staghounds in England and seven in Ireland; he mentions Her Majesty’s Staghounds or Buckhounds, kept by the State and kennelled at Ascot, the Devon and Somerset and Sir John Heathcote Amery’s at Tiverton, Lord de Rothschild’s thirty couple in Bedfordshire, the Enfield Chase with twenty-three and the Surrey and the New Forest with twenty-five, although the latter were called the New Forest Deerhounds, hunting both the wild fallow and red deer. The stamina of the hounds in these packs was awesome, with more than one seventy- mile run being recorded. Blaine, in his Encyclopaedia of Rural Sports of 1870, referred to a “breed of yellow pie”, considered as the genuine buckhound, of the old Southern hound stamp. Johnson, in his The Sportsman’s Cyclopedia of 1831 claimed that “The staghound may be regarded as the first remove from the bloodhound ~ we mean the staghound of ancient days.” Depictions of staghounds of his day did display a distinct Bloodhound impression; this heavier build being attributed by some to Talbot blood, with the Talbot tan still cropping up in packs to this day.

 In his Hounds of Britain of 1973, Jack Ivester Lloyd wrote: “As a distinct breed, the Staghound disappeared from Britain when the old North Devon pack was sold in 1825. It is thought they went to Germany, except for a few retained by Parson Froude and…influenced the breeding of the Welsh Hound as well as, probably, the West Country Harrier.” The old North Devon Staghounds, predecessors of the Devon and Somerset, were considered too slow and too heavy to hunt that country, so a Foxhound cross was instigated. The result earned this tribute: “A nobler pack of hounds no man ever saw. In height twenty-six to twenty-eight inches, colour hare-pied, yellow, yellow and white and badger-pied. Long ears, deep muzzles and deep chests. In tongue they were perfect and even when running at speed they gave plenty of tongue and their great size enabled them to cross the long heather and rough sedgy pasturage of the forest without effort or difficulty.” Their cry was important since it was considered that less tongue was thrown on the scent of the red deer than on fox or roe deer. The great Nimrod described these North Devon Staghounds as having “deep and sonorous” tongues but thought them short in the neck and slack in the loins.

  Sir Walter Gilbey, in his Hounds in Old Days, of 1913, gave his own view of our old breed of Staghound, writing: “The superior size of the old staghound, its longer head, its exceptional scenting power, and, not least, its colour ~ yellow, lemon and badger pied ~ all suggest a cross at some period with the principal breed of French hound.” Today, in France there are over 30 packs of staghounds, made up of breeds like the Poitevin, the quaintly-named Billy, the tricolores and, interestingly, the Blancs et Orange. I believe that the Chaudenay hunt, in the same family since 1830, uses pacey tricoloured Poitevins that have an infusion of Foxhound blood. The red stag is their quarry. A stockier staghound once there was the Chambray type, more like our old type in build and coat colour. Is it too much to hope that the Frenchman’s constitutional right to hunt might one day have some influence on our new law-makers post-EU! Hunting the stag may no longer have public support in many countries but could so easily be restricted to the selection of animals for culling as herds become too large to be an acceptable part of the rural environment.

 The use of dogs for elk-hunting in northern Europe has a long history. It took two forms: one with wide-ranging free-hunting small packs (loshund) and another with dogs on a long leash (lurhund or bandhund) following a trail. The latter demanded close cooperation between dog and handler, to make full use of the wind conditions and not to startle the quarry into hasty retreat. Hounds like the Norwegian Elkhound have been used for centuries to hunt bear, elk, reindeer and the wolf, but it was not until 1877 that they were recognised as a breed there. Only those that qualify in hunting trials may be awarded the full title of champion. This surely has to be the way ahead for all sporting dogs if they are to be retained as such. The Elkhound hunts mainly by scent, working silently to locate its prey, which it then holds or drives towards the hunters. As it doesn’t actually ‘catch and kill’ its quarry, strictly speaking it shouldn’t be classified as a hound. (But under our own Hunting Act, aren’t all hounds now gundogs?)  Usually a shade of grey, with black tips, a black cousin is found in the Finnmark area, with a shorter coat, looking taller and lighter than the Norwegian breed. I saw some sixty years ago when exploring the Jaeggevarre ice-glacier region; the local hunters called them Sorte Dyrehund - they were leggy and thick-coated, hinting at great robustness and stamina. In Sweden, the Jamthund has the same function but is 4 inches taller.

  The Swedes also have the White Elkhound, not recognised until 1998, with around a thousand on the registry. Further east, the Russians have their own laika or point-barker hunting dog breeds, with regional differences between the West Siberian from the Northern Urals, the East Siberian, from the huge forests there and the Russo-European varieties. At World Dog Shows, especially the one held in Helsinki, I have been impressed by them and the imposing Karelian Bear Dog, a sturdy mainly black breed, used for hunting the bear, lynx and elk. Determined, fiercely-independent and immensely resolute, which is hardly surprising when you think of their quarry, they have a very acute sense of smell and superb long-sight, picking up movement at extreme distances. This breed originated in Karelia, a territory stretching from north of St Petersburg to Finland, with the Russian breeders adding Utchak Sheepdog blood for greater resistance to the cold. Twenty-two inches high and around 55lbs in weight, they were originally used to hunt elk, then later to hunt bears and large game. They are related to the Russo-European Laika, often being black-coated and with a similar broad head, but easily confused with the hunting dogs from further east: the Western and Eastern Siberian Laikas. These hunting dogs have quite remarkable resistance to low temperatures and their past value to peasant hunters, especially before the arrival of firearms, must have been immense.

  In their informative book ‘Deer and People’ of 2015, Karis Baker, Ruth Carden and Richard Madgwick make quite a number of important points. In their well-researched and scholarly tome, they point out that: in Medieval and Early Modern England the pursuit of deer was considered to be in the highest form of the sport of hunting; legally, the right to hunt deer during the 15th and 16th centuries was reserved for the aristocracy; in the 18th century the fox supplanted the deer as the favoured quarry – not because of woodland clearances but because the more skilful breeding of horses and then hounds led to a faster and longer chase. In turn, this led to the end of deer-hunting with relays of hounds, the end of deer-coursing in parks, many with ‘viewing platforms’ or lodges and the end too of the pursuit of carted deer by such as the Royal Buckhounds. The West Country stag-hunts alone continued par force hunting but only after ‘tufters’ had located a suitable quarry, but the better-bred Foxhounds replaced the older, heavier, slower Staghound-type. Fox-hunting became the winter sport and where pursued, buck- and stag-hunting were the summer sport.

  For those who look back on the old days with a sense of loss, they can find enrichment in books like Fred Goss’s Memories of a Stag Harbourer (Witherby, 1931, now reprinted by Halsgrove) which he dedicated to “The seven masters of the Devon and Somerset under whom I had the honour to serve”. Are we ever likely to see such a dedication again? The knowledge, expertise and, notably, the affection for the quarry in this man’s words are quite remarkable. Deer control in his time was conducted by countrymen with extraordinary compassion and backed, not by a recent degree in animal studies, but by tapping into centuries of acquired knowledge, a commitment to responsible hunting and immense respect for the country used by the hunt. Michael Brander got this right when he wrote, in his inspired book The Hunting Instinct, of 1964, “Every living thing is in danger and it is the hunter’s natural if contradictory impulse to preserve what he hunts. A truce to all pettiness, let’s look to the future.”  

  Writing in his An Encyclopaedia of Rural Sports of 1870, Delabere Blaine stated that: “Hunting of a fallow deer, whether it be a male or female, in common parlance is called buck hunting, as we say stag hunting, whether it is a stag or a hind we pursue…Fallow deer are hunted by staghounds, by foxhounds or by harriers. There are, however, regular buckhounds; such as we have seen resembled dwarf staghounds, and were bony, without too much weight, and deep toned. Regular packs of buckhounds are supplied with deer from a park…Buckhounds are met with but rarely now in England. They are, however, more common in Scotland.”

    Buckhounds as such may have gone from our lists but were once part of the sporting scene in Britain. “A buck is a diverse beast, he hath not his hair as a hart, for he is more white, and also he hath not such a head.” Those words from The Master of Game show the mild distinction made between the types of deer in times when stag-hunting was very widely practised. In the 15th century however the method of hunting the stag and the smaller buck differed; in the former, the stag was tracked using a limier, or leashed hound, rather like the ‘tufters’ of the West Country staghound packs; in the latter, the pursuit was conducted as a par force hunt, or ‘sight and scent steeplechase’. Buck-hunting had a special importance attached to it during the reign of Edward III when the royal pack for this was acknowledged and its Mastership allocated to the Brocas family. Buckhounds were lighter and faster than their staghound equivalents, the different style of the chase demanding pace ahead of nose. Artistic licence apart, depictions of them show a Harrier-like hound rather than the heavier-boned, noticeably bigger staghound, as the much-acclaimed ‘Woodman’ exemplified. Eventually, the buckhound became subsumed into the staghound fraternity and any differences between them nullified. ‘Woodman’ was much like the famous Staghound ‘Bellman’ exhibiting both type and soundness. Overseas, in Scandinavia for example, very similar hounds were being bred too; in Central Europe: Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic for example, the hunt was conducted using a tracking dog like the Teckel with a scenthound like the Bavarian Mountain Hound. Some dogs used in the deer hunt became useful in other ways.

 The Dalmatian has become known as the coach-dog, the spotted dog used to escort the horse-drawn coach, sometimes to keep the village curs from frightening the horses. The breed’s name has led, fancifully in my view, to the conclusion that the name itself means that this breed hails from the Dalmatia, with patriotic dog-lovers there convincing a number of kennel clubs of their claim to this as their native breed. I can’t find any historical evidence for this claim. Yet just about every book covering or referring to breeds of dog links the origin of the Dalmatian with Dalmatia. My own theory, which I am happy to have challenged, is that this breed name comes not from the country but the medieval Old French expression for a deer-hunting dog: dama-chien, dama being an Old French word for deer. (In her Dalmatians Today, Ringpress, 1997, breed expert Patches Silverstone quotes the detailed case I make for this). There are a number of old paintings that depict such a spotted dog performing in the deer-hunt. Certainly, in conformation, the breed is remarkably hound-like. It has significance; if they were hounds of the chase then they belong in the Hound Group, to be judged using the criteria applied to hounds.

  The hunting with hounds of the wide cervid family is no longer seen as acceptable in many western countries; hunting them in specially-designed ‘parks’ was abandoned centuries ago. Culling them through the skills of finders or lymers/tufters could have welfare benefits. Desert dwellers are unlikely to give up gazelle-hunting and moose will long be hunted in North America. But behind all this mix of custom and preference lies the vital matter of conserving this group, if only to ensure that when the solar flare changes the way we live on earth – as inevitably it will one day – at least we will have the means to hunt for food and the need to protect such a source, however cold-blooded that may sound. The cervid group of quadrupeds are the most admired quarry for sportsmen the world over – this alone could one day ensure their survival.