The English Foxhound is a breed you will almost never meet in a town, and that is not an accident but a direct consequence of how it was bred. The cynological standard sums up its purpose in a single line: a pack hound for mounted hunting. Not a companion, not a guard, not a solitary athlete — a unit of the pack. For centuries foxhounds were bred not by individual breeders but by hunts kept as whole establishments, and their pedigrees were recorded in a stud book of their own, separate from the general cynological system. That is why the breed has spent more than two hundred years almost entirely outside the world of shows and family homes. Find out more on Tvaryny.
A breed that barely exists as a house dog
The shortest way to understand this breed is to look at the official registration statistics of the British Kennel Club. In the comparative table of Hound group registrations for 2016–2025, the "Foxhound" line looks like no other line in that table.
| Year | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foxhounds registered | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 6 | 5 |
Five consecutive years — from 2017 to 2021 — without a single foxhound entered in the British stud book. Across the whole decade the total comes to fifteen dogs. For comparison, in the same table and for 2025 alone the Beagle passes a thousand registrations, the Whippet passes three thousand, and the Hound group as a whole passes twenty thousand. The quarterly figures for early 2026 show zero for the Foxhound again.
The American Kennel Club places the English Foxhound 201st in popularity out of 210 breeds. And that is despite the fact that the living population of the breed has never been tiny: the official Fédération Cynologique Internationale notice recalls that Great Britain once held more than two hundred and fifty packs of foxhounds. The dogs existed — and still exist — in their thousands. They simply do not live in families, and they are not registered where people look for them.
The pack as a breeding establishment: the real peculiarity of the breed
In an ordinary breed the unit of breeding is the breeder and his kennel. In the foxhound the unit of breeding is the pack. The dog belongs not to a private person but to a hunt, and it enters the stud book under the name of the kennel, not the surname of an owner. This is not a figure of speech: the rule is written into the text of the stud book itself.
The second volume of the "English Foxhound Kennel Stud Book of America" (for the years 1909–1914, compiled for the Masters of Foxhounds Association of America) opens with a note: hounds are in all cases considered to belong to the kennel where they were entered, whether they were bred there or bought from another establishment. And if an already entered hound passes into another pack, the name of the kennel of original entry is to be kept before its name. Hence entries that do not read "Rex, owned by so-and-so" but "Belvoir Whitaker, 1906" — pack name, hound's name, year of entry.
The same volume shows how firmly the boundary of the book was held. The compiler writes explicitly that he decided to admit no hound that could not be traced back to the English Foxhound Stud Book; and that in the one pack where an American outcross had been used, every hound carrying that blood was printed in italics with a note against its name. Foreign blood was therefore not forbidden, but neither was it dissolved in silence — it was flagged in print. That second volume covered fourteen packs.
What this means genetically
The consequence is twofold. On one side, a closed exchange between a limited number of establishments: you do not buy a foxhound from an advertisement, hounds are exchanged between packs, and any successful line spreads quickly through every kennel in that circle. On the other, selection carried out for centuries on working rather than show criteria — and those criteria were formulated with remarkable precision.
The classic manual on running a pack is Peter Beckford's "Thoughts upon Hunting", published in 1781 — that is, before the first volumes of the stud book. Beckford advises examining in a stallion hound the size, shape, colour, constitution and natural disposition — and, in the same list, fineness of nose, stoutness and manner of hunting; and he warns never to breed from a hound that lacks stamina, has an indifferent nose, or runs cunning instead of holding the line. There are also rules that amount to managing a gene pool: do not put an old dog to an old bitch; make sure both parents are healthy, since unhealthy ones will not produce healthy stock; and above all do not be prejudiced in favour of your own line, but send your best bitches to the best dogs, wherever they may be.
That last piece of advice matters most. The rule "the best bitch goes to the best dog, even if he is in the neighbouring pack" turns dozens of separate hunts into one shared population with a permanent exchange of blood. That is why the foxhound is, to this day, not a sum of isolated kennels but a network of establishments inside which pedigree runs without a break.
"Couple", "entry" and "walk": three words that explain the breed
The couple. Packs are still counted not in hounds but in couples: twenty couple means forty hounds. Beckford reasons in exactly this unit: in his view one should never take more than twenty to thirty couple into the field; for an establishment hunting three or four days a week he considers about forty couple the best number, of which thirty to thirty-five couple are made hounds and eight to twelve couple young ones. The unit is not abstract: a "couple" is also a physical object, the double collar linking two hounds. Young hounds, Beckford writes, should be "put into couples" and walked that way among sheep; for the most unruly the couple is even left on the neck in the kennel; and one must see that it is not too loose, or the hound will slip his head out of it. A refractory youngster, he adds, is coupled to an old hound rather than to another young one.
The entry. To "enter" a young hound means to bring it into the working pack: in Beckford, once the young hounds are used to the kennel, know the huntsman and answer to their names, they are added to the grown hounds gradually, two or three couple at a time, until all have hunted. Hence the "entries" of the stud book: what is recorded is not the fact of birth but the fact of the hound joining the working strength of the pack. The breed keeps its records by career, not by litter.
The walk. Foxhound puppies are traditionally not reared in the kennel. They are sent out "to walk" among the farms of the hunt country, where they spend their first year in ordinary rural life among people, livestock and machinery, and then return to the pack. Beckford, who doubted the practice himself and tried rearing a litter at home, described the result without flattery: those that survived the hardships of the walk were afterwards fit for anything and afraid of nothing, while those reared with excessive care grew up weak and timid. This is the real source of the foxhound's proverbial good nature: the breed is not "gentle by chance", it is systematically socialised through its first year and has for centuries been culled for the least hint of quarrelsomeness in a group of dozens of hounds.
The English and the American Foxhound are two different breeds
The confusion is persistent, while the breeding and the paperwork are entirely separate. The American Foxhound has its own FCI standard (No. 303, country of origin the USA), and the text of that standard takes the English hound as its reference point: the American chest is to be "narrower in proportion to its depth than that of the English hound". Another relative is the Harrier, whose standard names the foxhound directly: the Harrier is described as "less powerful and more refined than the Foxhound". The Harrier also belongs to a different section: not to the large hounds but to the medium-sized ones.
The English and the American Foxhound are two different breeds · 7
| Criterion by the standards | English Foxhound (FCI 159) | American Foxhound (FCI 303) | Harrier (FCI 295) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Section of Group 6 | 1.1, large-sized hounds | 1.1, large-sized hounds | 1.2, medium-sized hounds |
| Height | Approximately 58–64 cm, no split by sex | Dogs 56–63.5 cm; bitches 53–61 cm | 48–55 cm, preferably 48–50 cm |
| Skull | Flat, of medium width | Broad and full | Flat, occipital bone slightly marked |
| Stop | Slight | Moderately defined | — |
| Ears | Set on high | Set on moderately low; a high set is listed among the faults | V-shaped, rather short, set on fairly high |
| Feet | Round, close-knit, strong | "Fox-like", with well-arched toes | — |
| Judging scale | No scale of points | The standard carries a 100-point scale, 15 of them for feet | No scale of points |
The simplest practical marker is the ear. What is the norm in the English hound (a high set) is written into the list of faults of the American standard. The second marker is sex: the American standard separates the heights of dogs and bitches, while the English gives a single range for the whole breed.
The fox-hunting ban: what the law says and what became of the packs
Interesting facts about the breed
- The stud books of the breed issued by the Masters of Foxhounds Association of England go back to before 1800 — long before national kennel clubs appeared.
- Packs are counted in couples. As early as 1781 Beckford wrote of an establishment of "about forty couple" — that is, roughly eighty hounds.
- A "couple" is not only a unit of counting but an object: the double collar in which young hounds were taught to walk beside their elders.
- In the stud book a foxhound "belongs" to the kennel where it was entered, not to a person; on moving to another pack the name of the kennel of original entry is kept with its name.
- The American stud book of the early 20th century admitted only hounds traceable to the English book, and printed those with an American outcross in italics with a separate note.
- The standard of the American cousin measures the chest by girth and considers 71 cm a good girth in a hound 58 cm at the withers — while specifically stating that the chest should be narrower in proportion to its depth than that of the English hound.
- The Harrier standard defines that breed through the foxhound: "less powerful and more refined than the Foxhound".
- The Fédération Cynologique Internationale recognised the English Foxhound only in 1964.
