They were once used in Cuba to track escaping prisoners and runaway slaves, and probably served the same purpose in some parts of the South before the Civil War, but in our country they were employed simply to track the negroes and were trained not to harm them, for, aside from the cruelty of the act, it was against the interests of the slave owner to injure his own property.
— from The Boy Patrol Around the Council Fire by Edward Sylvester Ellis