In the Eyes of the Artist – The Beagle

Text and illustrations by Ria Hörter

Fourteenth-century engravers, 18th-century painters and yesterday’s photographers all show us dogs as seen through their eyes. Their work is an enlightening way to follow the development of breeds and how they were seen…

The Beagle – The World’s Smallest Scent Hound

Reduced Foxhound

The hunting of hares with small scent hounds is over 2,000 years old. Xenofon (ca. 430 BCE), a Greek writer and passionate hunter, used relatively small scent hounds “… that followed the smell of the game with their noses to the ground.” Other writers described “the small hare hound” as a reduced Harrier, which would have been a reduced Foxhound.

In his unsurpassed work Cynographia Britannica (1800), Sydenham Edwards wrote not very positively about the Beagle: “Of the hound tribe the Beagle is the least, and is only used for the purpose of hare hunting. Their method of finding is very similar to the Harrier, but they are far inferior in point of swiftness.”

About a century later, an unknown writer stated in the Swiss Centralblatt für Jagd- und Hundeliebhaber (Manual for hunting and dog owners) that in earlier times there was no dif- ference between the Beagle and Harrier.

Roman Province

When it comes to the arrival of the Beagle in England, we must work on assumptions. It has been taken for granted that the Beagle’s history started in Greece, and that they arrived in the British Isles – a Roman province from AD 43 to 410 – with Roman soldiers. Others think that small scent hounds came to Britain in the 11th century with the Normans.

If the last-mentioned theory is correct, the Beagle would be a reduced Southern Hound in which “Southern” is not southern England, but southern France, the country of origin of large scent hounds.

Another theory is that the Talbot Hound, brought to England in the 11th century by William the Conqueror, was an early forefather of the Beagle. Possibly, the white-colored Talbot was crossbred to the black-and-tan Irish Kerry Beagle.

The large Kerry Beagle, Northern and Southern Beagle, and the diminutive Pocket Beagle or Glove Beagle were all divergences from the breed and outside the scope of this article.

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Posted by Alex on Feb 21 2018. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.