Hi all! I'm new here, but I only came here for one purpose, so I thought I'd get right to it, rather than posting an intro. Hope that's ok.
I don't hunt, and I don't know anybody who hunts with dogs since my dad passed last summer. And he was a Beagle guy.
What I do, is rescue dogs. Specifically, I'm a volunteer for a dog rescue in S.E. Michigan. I just got a new foster dog - the shelter we pulled her from called her a Treeing Walker Coonhound. Looking at the picture they sent, I'd agree:
However, when I got her here, her ears seem too long and set too low, and her dome seems too high to be a Treeing Walker. The shape of her head looks almost bluetick, except for the coloring:
Here's one more picture that shows her overall body structure, and a better view of the shape of her ears and dome:
What do you think? Is she a Treeing Walker or something else? The main reason I want to know is to get a sense of what breed characteristics (in terms of temperament) might influence finding the right family for her.
(Side note - you'll see that she's extremely emaciated. She was on the street a long time before being picked up by animal control. As a tender-hearted rescuer, I want to plead, plead, PLEAD with you all to microchip your dogs. Most of the hound-types in shelters are there because they got lost during a hunt. Most of them don't make it out. "Kacey" got lucky, and got taken in by a rescue. Most of them aren't so lucky.)
(Side note 2 - because of the circumstances we've seen in side note 1, our rescue doesn't adopt out dogs specifically for hunting, although I myself am not anti-hunting. It's just that we see too many of these poor hounds die in shelters, every day. Besides which, from what I've seen Kacey probably isn't a good hunter - f'rinstance, she treed a squirrel in my yard (after not noticing it until she was within 3 feet of it!), looked at it a minute, then got bored and wandered off. Didn't "tell" me about it (bay), either. Maybe that's because it wasn't a raccoon, but still...)
I hope posting this is ok! I checked a few other boards for coonhounds, but most of them were really inactive. One only had three posts since 2009! Another hadn't had any posts in about 3 months. If you don't want me here, feel free to tell me to go away. It's nothing I haven't heard before.
Thanks for reading!
Karen