Hot pursuit makes this hound top dog.

Byline: Matt Cooper The Register-Guard

If dogs were cars, Bill Martin's would be a Porsche.

His dog - DC Mia's Firestorm is the official name, but you can call him Tai - goes from zero to all-out in the span of a sneeze. The engine? Back legs bulging with muscles to make a sprinter salivate.

And cornering? Tai changes directions quicker than a weather vane in a windstorm.

Put it all together, and you've got the top pharaoh hound in the country, when it comes to chasing things down. Tai earned that title from the American Sighthound Field Association after besting 116 pharaoh hounds in competition last year.

Tai and his breed belong to a class of dogs called "sighthounds," and sighthounds like to chase things the way that rock stars like to break them. In fact, Martin, a 53-year-old Eugene artist, can't let his dog off leash - "he'll go out and find a cat or a squirrel," he said, "and I never know where he ends up."

Tai's arena is an open field, where he competes in chasing down a plastic bag about the size of a rabbit that is pulled in a way that resembles prey on the run. It's called "lure coursing," and simply put, it's what these dogs were born to do.

"You've never seen dogs happier than when they're lure coursing," Martin said.

Martin and his wife, Cynthia Guinn, executive director of the Oregon Research Institute in Eugene, took the sport up three years ago.

She trained Tai; he handles him at competitions.

Sighthounds chase the bag through courses of up to 1,000 yards long, earning points for speed, agility, endurance, following ability and enthusiasm.

Tai may be a tad overstocked in that last category. While other dogs pounce on the plastic bag at the end of the race, he prefers to head back out and run the course again, with Martin trailing behind, calling his name in vane.

Some judges frown on that, others applaud it. "A lot of dogs can barely make it around the course, so when you see one that's not even winded, some of the judges give them points for that," Martin said.

The association has run these competitions for more than 30 years, but Tai's breed goes back a ways further. Pharaoh hounds, one of the oldest known domesticated dogs, originated in Egypt and were depicted in temples dating to 4400 B.C., according to the Pharaoh Hound Club of America.

Tai and his breed are intelligent, friendly and playful, but they can be shy around strangers and, according to the club's Web site, they don't like it when strangers "cover the dog's eyes in any way" - but who would?

Once each month, Martin, Guinn and Tai make the six-hour trip to Seattle or the 10-hour trip to the Santa Cruz, Calif., area for competitions. In gearing up for those, Tai gets a number of runs weekly, although Martin withheld what he believes is a crucial detail of the workout, lest Tai's competition take note.

Tai is on no special diet, but he wears his 50-pound, chestnut-coated frame quite well: He won "Best of Breed" at the Rose City Classic Dog Shows in Portland last month (the event will be televised on Animal Planet on April 16.)

Away from competition, Tai's basically a total couch potato, Martin said.

He sleeps on the bed, breaking from naps occasionally to bark at the neighbors or play a game of tug.

In other words, Tai is like any other dog ... save his head-turning ability to chase down a plastic bag.

"He just wants to be with us, as you can tell," Martin said, as Tai rose on his back legs to lick Martin's face. "I'm real proud of him. I can't wait to get him back out there."

CAPTION(S):

Bill Martin's pharaoh hound, Tai, loves to nap when it's not running at breakneck speed.