One of my favorite subjects...
"labels" are just tools by which to market an animal for sale... but this is some of what I know about the working dogs of Florida....
Been able to spend a lot of time over the years with some sho enough Florida Crackers... their family helped settle Florida back when there were still indians roaming around... can not begin to tell you some of the stories I have heard from these people... To understand their dogs, it helps, first, to understand the people that used them...
Cattle/hogs were freeranged back in the day, no property lines, no fences... A man's "mark" (along with his reputation to defend it)was all that showed ownership of livestock... Rustling/stealing livestock was not uncommon and that created an atmosphere of distrust between many ranch families that still is evident today believe it or not... I know of neighboring ranches that will have nothing to do with each other because they believe their great, great, great grand-dads "stole" a few cattle from each other lol... crazy...
Many of the old families that are still around, are still quite reclusive... Hard to befriend(trust me)... but if you can gain their trust, they have an absolute wealth of knowledge about "The Way It Was"(book I highly recommend on the subject)... Many of these same old ranching families have sold off their land, downsized over the years, yet still remain just as secretive/protective of the dogs that have helped their families survive for hundreds of years...
Florida curs are a mix of alot of dogs, the old blood dogs I have seen all seem to have a distinct "look" to them based on the ranch they came from... the original dogs apparently had a much colder nose than what is necessary today, as working cattle before the time of fences often involved tracking cattle for miles before one could even begin the task of penning them up... The same dogs that were used for this also worked hogs, and were even used to hunt deer with the men shooting from horseback... stories of these same dogs tracking down day old tracks of indians exist... There is no doubt that the old Fl cow men liked their dogs rough... but most seemed to have a mixed pack of looser bay dogs with a few meat heads to catch hogs/ornery cattle with... The broad, "box" head of a Florida cur is an unmistakable trait with the breed...
One conversation in particular that stuck with me... I was talkin' dogs with two old timers and was asking them where their family got their dogs from... they laughed and both agreed that whenever they could not find a good cur dog, they would just make one by crossing a hound with a bulldog...
In my travels, I have met some truly "historic" Fl Crackers that still have the dogs of their ancestors... I've accidentally stumbled into many of them... haha, and it's amazing how protective of the dogs they can be... often times, they don't even want you lookin' in their pens unless they really know you
I have seen pens full of GORGEOUS dogs, that look unlike anything I could compare... distinct lines of animals breed by each individual family for generations...
Do to time constraints(work seems to always get in the way
), I have been unable to thoroughly scour the state to document all these amazing animals... In my opinion, Florida holds a treasure trove of working dog genetics that for the most part, is undiscovered...
I could go on and on, I wish I had pictures to show you of just some of the examples I have seen... What I currently hunt is straight FL cur from south FL cattle country... good examples of what a Florida Cur generally looks like(maybe a "tad" more refined... but still similar
)
That hound with bulldog remark sure struck me, Jude Hart was orginally from Florida, he came over by wagon with his family and his dogs, the dogs that i got from Lavon Davis that I bred and fooled with for about 10 years used to throw a lot of white hound like markings on the chest and feet and were almost white white yellow, I was inbreeding them heavily as i had no other dogs and they got lite as heck and had the hound type resemlance ear markings and that dewlap, i have seen those traits still showing up on pictures of blackmouth curs on here, some owned and still own dogs that trace back to Jude hart and Lavons dogs, so it makes sense that if Jude came from florida his dogs might have been created like that and had hound influnece in them, all i know is those dogs hunted as a rule way way wider and trailed more than the usual cowdog types i was fooling with from down here, I been searching southern airboat about the Partin dogs and ranch as well and it is very interesting as well about there strain of dogs as well, thats why I love the internet nowdays, you can figure out who was where and what dogs they had and almost always if they had there own strain going or bought dogs or what the deal was, plus now you can go back and spot the promoters created bloodlines and stay away from them, why would anybody want to crossbreed to different strains of black mouthcurs i have never figured out, if they were working in florida for the crackers they wood for sure work in texas, south texas has no history of cowdog strains, almost all of the cowdogs came out of east texas and la and florida if u look closely and seperate out the hypes. Thanks to all of u guys for posting up, pretty crazy to think dogs from Florida had such an influnce in texas, they had to walk behing a wagon to get here and hunt and work cattle along the way!!
