Lots of folks have been offering up their coonhound stories. I'd like to share a few...
A gentleman from Oklahoma told me about his Dad who had coonhounds (Walkers and Redbones). The boys would get together for a night of "hunting" which involved drinking around a campfire, talking, and listening to the hounds chasing coons. There was no actual hunting done by the men, just the dogs. Part of the enjoyment was listening to the hounds calling and identifying which dog was which by the sound of their voice... "Yep, there's Ol' Red." or "Uh huh, that's Ginger".
At the Cider Days at Belmar this past weekend, a man came up to Gigi and knew immediately that she is a treeing walker coonhound as he grew up with them. As his story was told, he used to hunt coons with a native american kid whose family bred coonhounds and fighting chickens in upstate New York in the 1960s. They would take the dogs out to hunt coons. So the dogs would tree the coon and the hunters would put on their track shoes to chase the sounds of the dogs when they treed to coon. They would shoot the coon out of the tree and the dogs would go wild over the carcass - a big bloody affair apparently. And the biggest question: What does racoon taste like? Pork.
