These are just my opinions & do not mean much but I have had silent curs & Plotts for a long time. I believe it is a 100% genetic if a dog opens or is silent. I have run silent curs with my plotts for years & it has never made them open. There are some lines of hounds that might be silent but that is the exception to the rule. It is a trait that can be bred for. Now I do think open mouth dogs do seem to be a more dominant trait then silent, for instant when you breed a open mouth dog to a silent dog, it seems like they are more open then silent. I have seen 2 plotts(one I owned & 1 a friend owned) that came out of open mouth parents & for some reason these dogs ran silent. You would only hear them when bayed.
Thanks for the information. I was checking into a line of blue ticks in my area that the last 2 generations of parents/grandparents had been silent so I was wondering if more than likely the pups would be or not. A friend of mine owned a GSP with a little bit of hound blood. Coolest dog I've hunted behind. He was silent until staring at one, bayed semi tight but was smart enough to know when to back off, but he had a hound dog bawl. It made it so easy to tell when he was on one and helped when the tracking collar messed up. I wish I could have gotten a pup out of him before he died.
