Reply To: Black Mouth Cur “purebred” or no

[Jennifer]

Not that it matters with regard to Darwin’s Dogs, but FWIW, Black Mouths are recognized by the UKC, and I know that Embark, at least, does test for at least some of the UKC-only Cur types, such as the Mountain Cur and the Catahoula–I’ve seen both those breeds repeatedly turn up in individual dogs’ Embark breed ancestry results. Not sure whether Embark presently has enough Black Mouth DNA on file to reliably test for Black Mouth ancestry, but if nothing else, the fact that they’ve successfully tested for other Curs demonstrates that just because a breed isn’t AKC-recognized doesn’t mean it doesn’t still constitute a genetically distinct population. Even if it’s the case that working Black Mouth breeders might be a bit loosey-goosey in the sense that maybe sometimes they’ll use a great working dog in their breeding program even if they know that individual isn’t pure Black Mouth, occasional occurrences of that type probably wouldn’t significantly affect the genetic distinctiveness of the breed. Just as an example, all the commercial dog DNA ancestry tests are able to recognize working (ABCA-registered only) Border Collies as Border Collies, even though it’s well known that the ABCA sometimes “ROMs” (registers on merit) dogs whom they know fully well aren’t purebred BC by ancestry, so long as those dogs have proven themselves as great sheepdogs who work in the BC style. So something like that might well be true of Black Mouths, too. “Cur” in contemporary American English actually more often refers to that specific group of Southern-origin, multipurpose farm dogs who are especially known for their treeing skills, rather than to its older meaning of “any old mixed-breed dog.”

OTOH, shelter-adopted dogs who were labeled at shelter as “Black Mouths” based on nothing more than happening to have several physical features of that breed are another story, and no reputable commercial ancestry test would use such dogs in their reference sample pool. I know a dog that was sold at shelter as a “Black Mouth Cur” but tested as a GSD/Boxer mix, which I don’t doubt, since while the dog does look a fair amount like a Black Mouth in pics (as you might expect from a GSD/Boxer mix), in real life it’s improbably huge compared to one (over 70 lbs.), bounces clownishly around like a Boxer, and shows no hunting instincts whatsoever. That kind of thing happens a lot–shelters labeling a mutt as some improbably rare breed because it helps them sell faster “and besides, it just *looks* like one…”