Cur

The cur was a breed of dog used by cattle drovers in England, now extinct. The same word is used in the United States for a type of short-haired hunting and herding dog, and in everyday speech for a mongrel, especially an unfriendly one. The word is thought to come from the Old Norse kurra, to grumble or growl.

History

The English cur, also called the drover’s dog, was described by Ralph Beilby and Thomas Bewick in A General History of Quadrupeds in 1790 and by Sydenham Edwards in Cynographia Britannica in 1800. Both present it as a dog kept mainly by drovers to drive cattle. It was common in England, particularly in the north, and almost unknown elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Edwards thought it was probably a mixture of collie, lurcher, English Mastiff or Great Dane.

It is not certain when or why the breed died out, but it probably disappeared in the middle of the 19th century. Some modern writers believe that the cur, and not the collie, was the dog crossed with the dingo to make the Halls Heeler in Australia. If so, the cur is an ancestor of the Australian Cattle Dog and of the Australian Stumpy Tail Cattle Dog, which would have inherited its bobtail.

Appearance

The cur was larger, stronger and longer in the leg than a shepherd’s collie, with a shorter, smoother coat. It was generally black, brindled or grizzled, with a white neck and legs and sometimes a white face. The legs carried some feathering and the ears were half-pricked. Many curs were born with a short, stumpy tail that looked as if it had been docked, and this was the breed’s defining feature.

Temperament

Curs were heelers: they nipped the heels of cattle to move them on, then ducked under the kick that followed. Writers of the time called them cunning, clever, always busy and restless. They were said to know their master’s cattle from a stranger’s and to sort the strange animals out of the herd.

American curs

In the United States, cur is short for cur-tailed, meaning a dog with a natural bobtail like that of the English cur. It describes a distinctive type of short-haired dog developed in the South for both hunting and herding. Many early dogs of the type had bobtails, and some still do.

Several cur breeds have been standardised and some are recognised by the United Kennel Club. They include the Black Mouth Cur, the Blue Lacy, the Catahoula Leopard Dog, the Mountain Cur, the Stephens Cur, the Treeing Cur and the Treeing Tennessee Brindle. These dogs herd livestock and find strays in thick scrub, and hunt squirrels, opossums, raccoons, feral pigs, cougars and black bears, working by both sight and scent. They vary a great deal in size, from 30 to 64 cm (12 to 25 in) tall and from 18 to 43 kg (40 to 95 lb).

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