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Great Plott!The toughest dog on the planet makes its debut at Westminster.

By Richard B. Woodward
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2008, at 2:02 PM ET
A 2-year-old Plott hound

The Plott hound, one of four breeds making its debut on the green carpet this week at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, is unlikely to melt the hearts of television viewers. In pose-offs against bassets and dachshunds, two of its cuddlier rivals in the hound group, it will be hard for the high-strung animals to look anything but ill at ease. Weighing 50 to 60 pounds, with a homely mien, a thin, brindled coat, and a sinewy profile, they aren't noticeably prepossessing or much good as indoor pets.

But those who can appreciate a more rural, less homogenized America should be rooting for the Plotts whenever they step into the ring. One of only a handful of breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club as having its origins in this country, the Plott hound has been the state dog of North Carolina since 1988 and a common sight for more than a century in eastern Tennessee, where, by one owner's estimate, "about every third dog tied up back of someone's house is a Plott."

Unless you've hunted black bear or wild boar, or you've spent a lot of time in the Smoky Mountains, you've probably never heard of, much less encountered, a Plott hound. Not withstanding the newfound respectability afforded Plotts by the Westminster initiation, dog encyclopedias seldom give the breed much ink.

Its reputation for courage and stamina, however, is anything but regional. Outdoorsmen from as far away as Africa and Japan hold the Plott in near-mystical esteem as perhaps the world's toughest dog. Bred to track, run down, tree, and, if necessary, grapple with a baying 500-pound bear eight times its size, it is often overmatched but rarely chastened by that fact. Inspect the coat of one that has worked in the woods for a year or more, and you will likely find slash marks from a bear's claws or a hog's tusks. Plotts routinely will stay on game, alone or in packs, for days at a time. Willing to sacrifice themselves before they'll run from a showdown, they are the ninja warriors of dogdom. By comparison, the beagle is a layabout, and the pit bull a pansy.

Writer Cormac McCarthy first told me about the breed. He has hunted with them in Canada, and some 20 years ago he attended the annual Plott Days festival with his brother. This celebration is now a family-friendly affair held in the Midwest. But back then, the event was in the Carolinas and semi-illegal, as the organizers tested the dogs in various controversial ways, most notoriously in the Elizabethan rite of bearbaiting.

"It wasn't particularly gory," McCarthy recalled. Although he estimates that some 300 Plotts hurled themselves at a staked bear over the course of a day, the result was that "the bear got chewed on a bit, and the dogs got cuffed around." His admiration for the breed is expressed in a terse judgment: "They are just without fear."

The cult of the dog is best sampled in back issues of the annuals published by the National Plott Hound Association and the American Plott Association. Along with photos of deceased bear, boar, mountain lion, and raccoon draped over pickup trucks, the pages are filled with moving encomia to the mettle of old Plotts, living and dead. Owners will often boast about their dogs when they've "pulled hair" (bitten a bear). Breeders may hyperbolize the tracking nose of a beloved stud ("able to cold trail and jump a bear, after the track has been boohooed, foot raced and gave up on") or relate harrowing tales of a season just past. ("I had four dogs injured before the bear was killed. Susie, Betsy, and Chuta ... were all bitten badly. The bear had Chuta's whole head in its mouth but she survived.") Fans write in from five continents, and breeders advertise from pockets throughout the United States.

These are not the sort of people who frequent Westminster. The hunter's needs for performance are not easily aligned with those of the dog-show world. The AKC cares about tracking a strong breeding line, however, and the pedigrees of the Plott are clear enough through centuries of North Carolina history. No other American hound shares its ancestry, which is from German rather than English stock. Most canine bloodlines have dissolved into the mists of folklore. Not so the Plott's, which are well-documented. It is one of the few dogs in the world named for a family whose descendents have continued to maintain the breed.

Madeleine Plott still lives on Plott Creek Road outside Waynesville, 50 miles southeast of Asheville, N.C. (Her house is not far from the Plott Balsams range or from Cold Mountain, the destination for the returning Civil War solider in Charles Frazier's best-selling novel.) She is the French-born widow of Lawrence Plott, whose family has been breeding dogs in the Carolinas for centuries. Johannes Plott, who emigrated from Germany or Bohemia in 1750, settled in what is now Cabarrus County. He brought along a prized group of big-game hunting dogs. Whether they were related to the Hannover'scher schweiss-hund, as Lawrence Plott believed, is unclear. But records clearly indicate that their short, boxy ears and barrel chests differed from those of the droopier, less muscular English foxhounds popular in America at the time.

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Richard B. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.
Photograph by Dominik Hessenmöller, courtesy Wikipedia commons.
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Comments from the Fray

I've hunted extensively with both Plott hounds and Dogo Argentinos, and, with all due respect to the author, there is no comparison; the Dogo Argentino is the far superior hunter… I did appreciate the quotes from Cormac McCarthy, one of my favorite writers. Of course, his statements just proved what I've always said about him: he is a Tennessean, not a Texan. No Texan would prefer a Plott to a Dogo.

--tysloth

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In defense of Plotts...I grew up in the country in upstate South Carolina, and we were blessed with many dogs of various descriptions. A few were purebred but most were not. Our Plott, Polk, was by far the most intelligent, laid back, greathearted, and loquacious dog I have known. When I would return from work or school at the end of the day, Polk would greet me with a sweet modulated rumble that was neither bark or howl, looking me straight in the face, for minutes on end..........I swear he was telling me how his day had gone. He was an excellent watchdog, without being aggressive or highstrung in the presence of strangers. He did love to wander, and visited neighbors for miles around. He did not bother their dogs or eat their chickens.

--JTT

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Hounds do not fare as well on the adoption market as lab and retriever mixes, since many people erroneously think that they make poor pets. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Mr. Woodward points out, this is a homespun breed: its lack of general popularity means it has not been overbred and does not suffer the health and behavior problems that plague so many more ubiquitous breeds.

--clere

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