At the end of the show, there WAS a hound remember? It was the one the 2 restaurant owners had. It was never put down, they didn't have the heart to do it so gave it to the 'bad guy who blew up in the end' (I can't remember names !)

The paw prints would have been from that animal.

See this was part of the beauty of how they handled this show. Everyone expected, like with the original, that there would be a normal dog 'made up' to like like a monster and that there was no 'monster sized dog'.
Then we discover HOUND is just an acronym for some experiments to do with the gas, so we rest our minds at ease that there's no dog at all. Smart 'Moftiss' changed the meaning of HOUND from the original that WAS a dog.
Then right at the end, we find OMG there IS A DOG, a mutant dog that IS that big!!

They add so many twists to things that if you are trying to follow everything clearly & logically it takes a few watching sessions to get everything possible out of each show, and even then you probably miss things.

AAAARHH yeah, I remember now...woops, forgot about other giant dog!

Cool - how did you hear about that?

Sherlock Holmes wrote:

Cool - how did you hear about that?

Listen to the commentary on the link I posted.

They do take poetic licence throughout all the shows but as they say it's a TV show meant for entertainment.

Ahhhh!!!!!!!! :O sherlock can't get it wrong :'(

Sherli Bakerst wrote:

This isn't so much an error in continuity as something out of character: When John and Sherlock are discussing the demise of the innkeepers' dog, Sherlock says there's no reason not to believe their assertion that they had it put down.  But it seems to me that Sherlock wouldn't/shouldn't take their statement at face value, that he'd investigate whether or not it was true to ascertain for himself the veracity of what they told him.  It couldn't be that hard to ask local vets about it, could it?  So I see that as not being typically Sherlock.

I think the fact that they were being investigated by the big bad Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Lestrade was probably thought to be a big enough scare to them that they wouldn't have lied about anything. They seemed genuinely cooperative with Lestrade, Holmes & Watson. So there was no real need to launch into that investigation straight away.
Soon afterwards, Sherlock had the idea of some kind of drug/mind altering event & the investigation turned that way. So there wasn't really time to check that part of the story out.
Let's face it did ANYONE here think that they were lying when you FIRST viewed it? I doubt it (although someone will say they knew it all the time) because the gay couple had said from the start that they did it for publicity; so we would assume (as Sherlock did) that this was a small red herring. We already had the lab in our sights, as producing this gigantic hound.

Yes, in hindsight Sherlock should have checked every detail along the way, but at that stage of the investigation we were talking of a GIANT hound, a vicious man eating monster with those huge paw prints; hardly the kind of dog those 2 would have been able to handle.

In the other fandom I'm involved with, set in the Old West (of the US), the heroes travelled mostly by horse and carried saddlebags with their belongings in them.  Such as formal suits complete with derby hats, tea kettles and mugs, and all the rest of their stuff.  So they became known as "magic saddlebags" because just looking at them, there was no way they could contain all those things all together.  Maybe John has a magic suitcase!

Sherlock Holmes wrote:

Haven't watched it for a while but...

The guy they met at the pub who was doing all the tours and telling people about the hound....so the hound wasn't real...but where did he get his massive paw print thing from??

The paw print was fake ;) He had to have something to show to people...

Hmm. Most likely a continuity error, but still...