Then beginning about three hundred years ago, people of western European descent began exploring and settling the Appalachians, and of course their dogs came with them - mastiff types such as boarhounds (now called Great Danes), large scenthounds such as foxhounds and bloodhounds, sighthounds such as greyhounds and wolfhounds, and shepherd dogs and flock guardians. All these animals can and do interbreed, and they left their stamp on the various indigenous types of dogs.

But in the last fifty years or so, there has been a massive dumping of purebred dogs … Dalmatians, Rottweilers, Shepherds, Pit Bull Dogs - you name it. Because people fall for the premise that AKC registration means something, and because AKC registered dogs are so readily available, people buy them by the hundreds of thousands. Then when the inbred AKC collie doesn’t turn out to be Lassie, or the shepherd to be RinTinTin, or that cute little cocker that looks just like Lady turns out to be a biter with demodectic mange, the people dump that dog in the woods, take their credit card down to the mall pet store, and get another one. The dumped dogs are almost always reproductively intact, and so they add a new litter to the feral dog problem at least once a year.

Just a side note: there used to be Black Panther sightings happening on a regular basis in this part of Indiana, I know people that have seen them. This doesn’t happen as often as it used to and local folks attribute that to the increase in the human population. People talk about Black panthers around here like they talk about deer and rabbits. They are simply just another animal in the woods.

True Carolina dogs of the original type - not mixed with more modern breeds - are almost always some medium shade of fawn, like a dingo, and they do not have the black markings so typical of wolves and dogs that are descended from wolves. They also have a deep, narrow chest, something like that of a sighthound, and very large triangular dingo-like ears. There are very - if any - purebred Shellheap dogs left; even the ones shown in pictures at the dog breed info webite mentioned above clearly show the influence of shepherd, chow, and retriever.

Of course that is true of any pariah breed - our species is nomadic, and we have taken our fellow nomad, Canis familaris, with us everywhere we have traveled. Pariah digs of one kind or another live on every continent except Antarctica.

http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/caralinadog.htm

They don’t play well with other dogs. Males make the better pets, as they will accept multiple masters. Females are “meaner ‘n hell” as my father would say.

I saw something very similar to whatever is in those pictures.

It was alone.

Are these the ‘yaller dogs’ of the Appalachians, spoken of by the former owner of Blue? If so, they maybe nearly indigenous, brought over by the early colonizers from Asia. Very similar to dingos. Of course, breeding with domestic dogs has altered those populations some.

I don’t hate people, and I understand people wanting to protect their families and neighbors. Humans do that. That is just natural behavior for the species.

I hate people. I understand the first guy who killed them, I mean they were attacking his dogs. Kind of like self-defense.

But now that the public knows there’s wild-dogs, they automatically want in on the killing.