When she was found as a stray, she had recently had a litter of puppies, still had milk. I really wish there was some way to find out more about her history.

She was also adopted once and brought back to the shelter for being dangerous with cats, but we worked a lot with her in the beginning and she’s fine with our cat now.

oh yes, and longdogs, too. Our new friend/aquaintance, Zac, a falconer (without a falcon) who just moved to Las Cruces, has a New York bred lurcher that looks exactly like a whippet with a bit of a bushy tail… but she has zero whippet behind her. Weird.

That event was also the first time I ever saw a border collie sheep herding trial. Those dogs were something else. All business. I remember one who was (barely) patiently waiting to get out there and you could almost here him critiquing the dog he was watching (who blew it).

I mispoke earlier. Emily was a whippet/deerhound cross, hence her small size.

I really liked the lurchers but recall being informed that they weren’t the best choice for a household with small animals like cats.

I wonder if breeding them to work smaller game has some effect on developing a different sort of sighthound type from the working landrace sighthounds I mentioned earlier?

I left out a type of sight hound that could have deerhound in it. It’s the longdog, which is a mix of sighthounds.

When hunting deer with hounds was legal in Britain, they preferred to use specially bred scenthounds for that purpose— generally dogs of the foxhound type. I don’t know whether anyone used lurchers or other working landrace sighthounds on deer in the decades just before the hunting (British English for using dogs to kill prey) ban.

I live in California, where deerhounds are brought into the open field to hunt jackrabbits. Our breed has sent a bitch twice to the Westminster Group ring who was pointed in NOFCA, and who I’d seen take a jackrabbit.

But if you don’t live in the West or mountain states, it’s virtually impossible to test your dog in the open field. I applaud deerhound and other sighthound people who find venues to challenge their hounds anyway — Rory lived in New Jersey. One of his sisters, Wyvis, was a brilliant open field hound here in California. That was an incredible coursing litter — not that surprising, because their dam, Sophie, was a great courser, too.

I spent some time with a charming, adorable puppy who was a Deerhound/Borzoi/Greyhound mix who came into rescue from someone breeding for hunting. If she hadn’t already been adopted, and I were able to have another dog, I’d have snapped her up in a hot second.

In the imaginary world in my head, the schism between working and “other” sighthounds would cease to exist and we’d all breed the dogs we love for function and companionship and health.

In the real world, most “show” breeders want nothing to do with hunting breeders, despise them for creating mixes, and — often with justification — deplore the way they treat their dogs. I’ve seen far worse hunting sighthound rescue situations than I’ve ever seen in a show breeder, BUT… part of that is probably because we’ve let the worlds diverge so far.

It’s kind of like East Germany and West Germany. It would be very hard to reunify the sundered world of sighthounds. But I’d like to see it happen.

I don’t believe it will, however.

They are used as coursing hounds for foxes, hares/jackrabbits, coyotes, and even Kangaroos. However, the working forms of these dogs are still interbred with other sighthounds and other breeds and exist in the staghound, lurcher, and Kangaroo dog lines.

The Red Deer of Europe is related to the wapiti, but it is quite a bit smaller. I’ve seen old paintings by George Stubbs of hounds swarming stags in a painting called ‘The Grosvenor Hunt.’ William Pierce Stubbs painting a sighthound catching one of these animals.