American curs, feists and treeing hounds

The breeds

These dogs were bred for a job, written down late, and never entered in the register India uses. Every page here reads the standard that defines the dog and then reports what an Indian buyer can actually check, which is almost nothing.

Black Mouth CurFive registries define this breed and contradict each other, OFA holds zero records across all 1,287 of its tables, PubMed holds...Black and Tan CoonhoundA trailing and treeing hound built to work at a distance and tell you where it is by giving voice. What the three registries that...Bluetick CoonhoundA cold-nosed American scenthound whose registries cannot agree how big it should be. What five breed standards actually say, what...Catahoula Leopard DogLouisiana's state dog by statute, and the only breed whose enabling law names a private registry: a merle-patterned working dog...Mountain CurAn American treeing dog with four written standards that contradict each other, a 1957 studbook kept in Tennessee, zero rows in...Mountain FeistA 5 to 14 kilogram American squirrel dog with two written standards that disqualify each other's dogs on ears, no Indian seller...Plott HoundNorth Carolina's state dog, one of the very few American hounds with a documented German origin. Six sources tell that story and...Redbone CoonhoundA solid red American coonhound with a documented Georgia foundation, one PubMed paper to its name, and an Indian price that two...Stephens StockA little black Kentucky tree dog that three American registries call a breed, its own parent association ignores, and whose...Treeing CurA breed by both conditions of the test, with a written standard from 1998 and a register that will admit a dog up to half...Treeing FeistThe word feist is a type term and its own breed standard says so in the first line. The dog is nevertheless a breed, and it is...Treeing Tennessee BrindleA brindle American treeing cur with a UKC standard from 2017, an AKC register with no AKC standard since 1995, and the rarest...Treeing Walker CoonhoundThe coonhound the AKC standard itself calls the people's choice, with three recommended health tests, one named disease risk, a...

Compare the breeds side by side

To compare these 13 breeds directly, read across the table rather than down the guides. Heat tolerance is a Bonbeno rating out of 5 for Indian conditions, and the reasoning behind each one sits on the breed's own page.

What matters in this group

The points below are what the evidence on these 13 guides actually supports, not what the category is assumed to mean.

• The standards in this group were written around performance, and they say so. The Mountain Cur was declared a breed in 1957 when the Original Mountain Cur Breeders Association gathered the McConnell, Stephens, Ledbetter, Arline and York strains, and the United Kennel Club recognised it on 1 November 1998 alongside the Black Mouth Cur, the Stephens' Cur and the Treeing Cur, adding the Treeing Tennessee Brindle on 1 July 2017. The Treeing Cur standard states that cur breeders had little interest in standardizing the looks of their dogs, they were only interested in performance, accepts any colour, and its register admits a dog up to 50 percent coonhound in the first three generations. The UKC registers a Mountain Cur whose three-generation pedigree falls short as a Treeing Cur instead, which is a register drawing its line in public. The feists are the same tradition at a quarter of the size. Their UKC standards open by defining feist as an ancient word for a small, often noisy dog, and the Continental Kennel Club will register an undocumented dog as a Feist on five photographs but not as a Mountain Feist. Every dog here has a written standard and a gatekept register behind it, which is Bonbeno's two-condition test, so none belongs on the types page.
• The working style is the line between a cur and a hound, and the standards draw it in their own words. The UKC Mountain Cur standard describes a fast, hard hunter that runs the track with its head in the air rather than nose-down like a hound, open, semi-open or silent on track, with a clear bark heard a long distance; the National Kennel Club calls the tracking style much different than hounds but faster. The Stephens' Stock Cur carries its head high on track, the Treeing Cur finds game using its eyes, ears and nose, and the Black Mouth Cur standard prefers silent trailers and forbids a dog to be open like a hound. Both feists hunt by sight, sound and scent and are virtually silent until the game is treed. The five coonhound-family breeds here do the other half of the job. The Black and Tan runs his game entirely by scent, the Bluetick was kept for patient, nose-down work, and the Treeing Walker, Redbone and Plott standards make an open bugle, bawl or chop the working voice. What every one shares is the tree. The Catahoula's standard describes a dog capable of scenting, trailing and treeing game or baying and herding feral hogs and cattle, so it sits here and on the herding page at once.
• The paperwork reality is the same for all but one breed here, and the pages establish it with controls. The FCI's letter M index carries eleven breeds and no cur; its Group 6 register holds exactly two American scenthounds, the American Foxhound at 303 and the Black and Tan Coonhound at 300, with zero occurrences of Treeing, Cur or Feist. The Kennel Club of India issues pedigrees against FCI nomenclature, so a KCI-registered Mountain Cur or Redbone is a document for a different dog, and only the Black and Tan has a route. OFA holds zero statistics rows for any UKC cur across 13,976 rows and 770 breed labels; every hit on the string CUR sits inside a curly-coat entry, FEIST appears zero times, and the codes MCR, BMC and TBC exist without a published row because OFA needs 100 hip evaluations, or 50 elsewhere, before printing one. The Catahoula is the one cur landrace with numbers, at 972 hips and 18.1 percent dysplastic, beside the Black and Tan's 985 at 16.0 percent and the Bluetick's 146 at 17.1 percent. PubMed cannot count the curs at all. The exact phrase Mountain Cur returns seven curcumin papers, a bare search for cur returns 5,446 records because CUR abbreviates curcumin, and four clean spellings of Black Mouth Cur return zero.
• No Indian market exists for any breed here, and the pages show the shapes an absent market takes. PetBuy prints Rs 8,000 to Rs 35,000 for the Mountain Cur and the Black Mouth Cur beside its own counter reading Listings 0. The top Indian result for the Black Mouth Cur advertises KCI-certified puppies and renders a Bernese Mountain Dog, a Border Collie and a French Bulldog. Google's AI answer for the Mountain Cur states that no local price exists and then converts a dollar band at 84.00 in one sentence and 83.33 in the next. For the Treeing Cur, the Treeing Tennessee Brindle and both feists, the Indian template sites have no page at all, returning HTTP 404 or a soft 404 titled Dog Breed Not Found. The coonhounds get the other treatment, a monthly cost row of Rs 3,550 to Rs 5,400 printed identically for the Plott, the Treeing Walker, the Redbone and a Whippet on one site, on dogs it says eat 1,600 and 800 calories a day. Behind it is one instrument. DGFT Trade Notice 22/2022-23 makes dogs a Restricted import and states that applications for trading or breeding purposes shall be duly rejected, and the Mountain Feist breeder ranking for the breed states that it does not ship pups and places only into hunting homes.
• What the job leaves behind in an Indian home is the buying decision. The Mountain Cur's Cumberland Plateau homeland averages 13.67 C with no month at or above 28 C against seven in Chennai, and the Plott's Waynesville runs 12.08 C, earning a heat rating of 2. The southern range sits closer to home. Kentucky's July wet bulb of 21.71 C is 0.15 C below Bengaluru's May peak, Jackson, Mississippi reaches 24.00 C, and South Mississippi runs 81.6 percent humidity all year, damper than any Indian metro. The instinct does not switch off. Two standards name a strong treeing instinct on all game, which in an Indian city means macaques, palm squirrels, cats and other people's small dogs, with a voice built to carry a valley. The Continental Kennel Club recommends the Mountain Cur be reserved for working and hunting homes. Several standards prefer a bobbed tail or permit dewclaw removal, and Second Schedule Part II paragraph 6(8) of the 2017 Rules forbids both. Deafness is a disqualification in the Mountain Cur, Black Mouth Cur, Stephens and Treeing Feist standards with no prevalence figure anywhere, while 38.8 percent of 214 BAER-tested Catahoulas were deaf in one ear or both. The Indian Pariah Dog does the same work in the same shape, already adapted, for nothing.