France has 8 million dogs of 330 different breeds, and half of them are hunting dogs. Those hunting dogs can be divided into 150 different breeds, and our favorite of them (if only for its name) is the Billy, a large hound named after the Chateau de Billy in Poitou in the Atlantic coast region of France.

Built like a Division One athlete, the Billy is of the Chiens d’Ordre, which is to say it’s one of the Grand Venerie scenthounds bred exclusively to hunt chasse à courre (large prey), and s/he can cover up to thirty miles a day in pursuit of it.

We may never know why the breed’s creator, Monsieur Gaston Hublot de Rivault, decided to develop the breed after hunting for a decade with other breeds, but it hints at his belief that he could build a better mousetrap, so to speak, by combining the three original strains of the Poitevin, the Montemboeuf, Ceris and Larrye, presumably dogs with which he’d been hunting.  The aforementioned breeds are now all extinct, but nearly forty years after he formed his first pack at his Chateau, de Rivault had fully established his own pale colored hound. The year was 1914.

WWII had been devastating for the breed, and it had to be gut wrenching for de Rivault, now an old man, to see what remained of his pack of Billys disbanded and scattered throughout France. Some sources write that by the time de Rivault’s son, Anthony, determined to revive his father’s creation, he could find only two Billys out of the ten said to have survived. Undaunted, he used the pair to be the foundation of the breed’s rebuilding,  and judiciously incorporated Harriers, Poiteins, and Porcelaines to resurrect the large bodied, white or white and lemon hounds with the melodious voice he recalled from his younger days. By the 70s, the younger Rivault had enough hounds to form several Billy packs.

Only a rare breed breeder can understand how it must have felt to have saved such a breed, dogs descending from lines leading back to the monks of the Saint Hubert Monastery in the Middle Ages. Writing that the Billy is considered the most elegant French breed may be fighting words among owners of other French breeds, but certainly the Billy may have been the last breed to come from the large scent hound type favored by ancient French nobility and royalty.

The breed remains exceedingly rare outside of France, but its numbers are now stable. The breed was recognized by the FCI in 1973 , and by the UKC in 1996.

Image: Billy Hound by © Deviddo | Dreamstime Stock Photo