My eleven year-old grandaughter with the family purebred bloodhound which is not yet one year-old, so the damned thing should be a wonder indeed when it finally grows up.  It actually lives in the house along with a yellow Labrador retriever and a laidback tomcat, and no, it is not trick photography ... LOL !!!

So it's true. Everything is bigger in the United States....

In the 1950's and 1960's such dogs were paired up with inmate 'trusties' at the then infamous Louisiana Angola State Penitentiary to form tracker teams to pursue escapees in the very forbidding wilderness surrounding the prison grounds.  Amazingly, prison guards were authorized sub rosa to issue firearms to the trusties early in the pursuit and in instances where the fleeing convicts had reputations for exceedingly violent misbehavior toward fellow inmates, the guards would hang back while implicitly encouraging the trusties to 'terminate the quarry with extreme predjudice' once cornered.

The more notable incident occurred in the densely forested hills on an autumn day where a pair of sociopathic escapees took shelter in a depression they had hollowed out beneath a fallen log.  While the dogs were baying, all of the pursuers -  guard and trusty alike - finally caught up and immediately lined up in the classic 'L' assault formation.
The guards relinquished their repeating shotguns and full-automatic Thompson sub-machine guns to the trusties who immediately commenced a rural version of the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Depression-era Chicago.  The number of rounds fired probably approached a full day's expenditure by those U.S. Marines defending Wake Island during the Japanese amphibious invasion.