Texas Wildlife July 2011
by
Henry Chappell
Old Yeller may have been a Blue Lacy. After all, a Lacy needn’t be blue.
Of course we’re talking about a fictional dog, so it would be more accurate to say that a blue Lacy may have served as the inspiration for Fred Gipson’s novel Old Yeller.
Travis, the young protagonist, referred to Old Yeller as a “cur-dog.”
“He was a big ugly slick-haired yeller dog. One short ear had been chewed off and his tail had been bobbed so close to his rump that there was hardly stub enough left to wag.”
The yellow coat, bobtail, strong treeing and herding instinct, and courage suggest the mountain cur type. But the yellow blackmouth cur of the Deep South possesses all those virtues too, and you’ll occasionally see one with a bobtail.
(By the way, forget the movie. Read the novel. If you don’t cry, see a shrink.)
Still, historical evidence suggests the Lacy.
In 1858, the Lacy brothers, Frank, George, Erwin and Harry, moved from Kentucky to the granite hills near Marble Falls, Texas. If they didn’t bring mountain curs from Kentucky, they certainly would have been familiar with the type. In any case, the brothers set about developing their own working dogs suited for stock farming, ranching, and hunting in Central Texas – dogs that could bay the biggest, meanest hogs and the wildest cattle, tree raccoons, squirrels, bobcats, and cougars, and track wounded game.
According to legend, the blue Lacy line began with greyhound-scent hound-coyote crosses. Each generation’s breeding stock was then chosen for natural herding and hunting ability. Given that many of their neighbors were fellow Southern yeomen, working curs would have been locally abundant. Surely, the brothers also crossed to the best of these dogs and neighboring hunters and stockmen bred their best to Lacy sires and dams.
In any case, the result was sleek, medium-sized cur, often gun-metal gray or slate in color, and beautifully adapted to stock herding and hunting in the Texas Hill Country. It’s certainly not a stretch to say that the curs Fred Gipson knew around his home in Mason probably carried Lacy blood.
For more than a century, Lacys or “Lacy Dogs” were indispensable to the rural economy of Central Texas. But, just as the similar (and perhaps slightly related) mountain cur nearly disappeared from the Southern Highlands as mountaineers abandoned their self-sufficient culture for the cash economy, the Lacy breed suffered with coming of mechanization and the decline of family-owned ranches.
By the mid-1970s, true working Lacys were scarce. Until 1976, when the Animal Research Foundation registered a Lacy named Preston’s Big Blue, no official registry recognized the breed. Since then, the breed has steadily recovered as organizations such as the Lacy Game Dog Registry, the Texas Lacy Game Dog Association, and National Lacy Dog Association have worked to restore the breed through careful registration, testing, and judicious breeding. Currently, there are several thousand registered Lacy Dogs – a small number compared to better known hunting and herding breeds, but more than enough to ensure healthy genetic diversity.
The modern Blue Lacy stands 18-23 inches at the shoulder and weighs 30 to 55 pounds. The tight sleek coat requires minimal grooming and can be the archetypal gun-metal or slate gray, yellow, red, or tricolored. Yellow Lacy Dogs look much like long-tailed mountain curs.
Although they’ve long been favored by stockmen and hog hunters, Lacy Dogs are gaining a reputation as superb trackers of wounded deer, and they’re increasingly popular with tappers who count on their help finding predators that have pulled the trap chain and drag well away from the original trap site. Once it finds the predator, the compact Lacy can bay it in the tight brush until the trapper arrives.
Marlo Riley manages the Covered Gate Ranch, near Helotes, Texas. Since 1998, she has owned and maintained the Lacy Game Dog Registry (LGDR). Marlo grew up bow hunting and rodeoing. After she married and started a family, she worked shelties in dog shows. Along the way, she heard about the Blue Lacy. A search for a Lacy puppy, led her to the LGDRA and the owner, Larry Boyd.
“I just wanted to get started with a puppy, but after we talked a while, Larry said he had Lyme disease and couldn’t keep the registry anymore,” she said. “He handed me the files and I started traveling Texas and meeting people and dogs.”
Only later, as she researched Blue Lacy history, did she discover that her great-great- grandfather was none other than Frank Lacy, one of the breed’s founders.
Nowadays, Marlo’s Lacy Dogs work cattle and wild hogs, track clients’ wounded deer, and occasionally work quail and retrieve doves.
“I only keep as many as I can work and train,” she said. “There have been times when I have trained some and matched them with other people until I found dogs with the qualities I wanted.”
Not surprisingly, Lacy Dogs work cattle and hogs in the same manner as most of the other cur types. Unlike European herding dogs, which “heel,” Lacy Dogs typically work ahead of livestock, baying to intimidate the animals into bunching. Riders can then push the animals from behind while the dogs keep them bunched and lead them into the pen.
Marlo describes the Lacy’s herding and handling qualities as “halfway between a Catahoula and a border collie. Whereas the average Catahoula would chew up a flock of sheep getting them into a pen, and a border collie might lack the grit to deal with the wildest cattle, the Lacy can safely handle gentler livestock then get tough with a mean mama cow.
In “Hog Dogs,” a 1956 article by Sam Harris, in True West, Jake Winkel, a Llano County stockman, describes typical Lacy work on hogs:
“A dog sets a pig to squealing, and whole family of hogs rushes to its recue. Fifteen or twenty rush in. That’s what we call ‘rallying’ a bunch. The dog circles to get them bunched … keeping just out of range. He torments and tantalizes, gets them to chase him, and the first thing you know, that bunch of hogs is headed for the corral.
“As they go into the corral, the hogs think they’ve got a chance to gut the Lacey [sic], seeing they got him against the fence … but he jumps over the fence lightly. By that time, we’ve rushed up and locked the gate behind them. The dog does it by instinct. We don’t teach them.”
Good Lacys also tree readily, and, like other curs, they’re typically hot-nosed, silent or semi-open on the track, with a hard, chopping tree bark. In other words, unlike a hound, which picks up a cold trail and follows it to the end, barking all the way, Lacy Dogs search for fairly hot scent, then pursue to drive the game up a tree as quickly as possible.
Most Lacys possess strong retrieving instinct. Started young, they can be trained to retrieve doves and other game birds, though you shouldn’t expect the flash and precision demanded of retrievers.
Marlo doesn’t consider a dog fully trained or “finished” until it’s about four years old and has demonstrated proficiency in all types of traditional Lacy work. For the first few months, her pups simply get acclimated and properly socialized.
“Between seven and nine months, I like to kick in more hunting – treeing squirrels, that sort of thing. I’ll even introduce them to hogs,” she said. “I’ve had year-and-a-half old dogs that a lot of people would call finished, but a dog really needs more time and experience to reach its potential.”
Despite their toughness, Lacy Dogs respond poorly to yelling and harsh discipline. A gentle but firm touch gets results. Like most working dogs, a Lacy does best when made a member of the family.
In 2005, the 79th Legislature of the State of Texas designated the Blue Lacy the official state dog breed of Texas.
Is a Lacy right for you? If you have work for one, and room in your heart and family, Marlo Riley is delighted to answer the question. “If you ever own a Lacy, you’ll probably always have one.”
GET GRIT
Lacy Dog Game Registry - http://bluelacydogs.org
Texas Lacy Game Dog Association - http://lacydog.com/
National Lacy Dog Association - http://www.nationallacydog.org/lacydogs.html
