The people I grew up around called all spoted cur dogs leopards. In La. and Miss. they called the spoted dogs leopards and the solid colored dogs catahoulas. Now days, the spoted stock dogs are catahoulas and the american leopard curs are the east coast, open on track, tree dogs. They are said to of been around for many years but were very rare untill Richard McDuffie brought them back starting in the 60's. The funny part is, the three main dogs he used came out of Texas. A reliable source told me they came from Cowboy Williams and were July Catahoula crosses. That might be the reason for the double coat. The UKC registers the as American Leopard Hounds.
X2
I wrote an article on this very topic:
http://thehoundsmen.blogspot.com/2008/12/catahoula-or-leopard-cur-dog-or-hound.htmlAnd the one thing I didn't mention in the article because it's politically controversial is that it was, in my opinion, more about ribbon chasing than anything else. The guys breeding for field trials were slowly but surely breeding them into coon-dogs, until one day everyone looked around and was kind of forced to ask the question "Hey are these really curs anymore? They hunt like hounds now." Which was exactly what they wanted because the hound trial guys don't like letting cur-dogs play "their" games... as if that would somehow be an insult to the la-dee-da hounds or something (it always strikes me as odd when you have rednecks getting all snobby with each other)
So they were all too eager to have their dogs reclassified as hounds, it allows them to play the coon-hound game, at least with less condescension
Good article! It is accurate according to the research I have done also.
Ribbon chasers? It’s your opinion but after researching leopard dogs, that’s about the only conclusion a person can come up with for the reclassification and the way they have been bred in recent years. Just another coon dog now a days it seems.
Give me a old school leopard dog and I will show you a good leopard dog!
