Mr. Tarver in Wheelock has stopped buying hogs for good. He Said that hog plant owes him $17,000.00 in back hog sales. I am not sure who he was buying for. Mr. Tarver, Sr. is a real good guy hate to see him stop. Anybody aware of a buyer east of the Bryan-College Station area. Just starting to see good signs of hogs activity, been dropping feed in my traps. Have not started setting traps until I find something to do with the hogs.  Hate to start killing them, but have to do something before they run out of acorns and hog pecans and start tear up the pastures.

I have been bit a few times by a few good old boys.  They don't take anything off my place (horse, dog, cow, rifle) without a written agreement. If they purchase the dog I give them 3 working day to have a vet check. You can use a hand written piece of notebook paper or even a brown paper sack if you can't find anything else. Tells them when I want the dog back, if the dog is killed while in his possession he is responsible for full payment. If the dog is injured what vet to use and they are responsible for the cost of all veterinary care. I am even getting Leary of taking checks anymore. I try to see there drivers license for there information. Seems like a lot of work for a few hundred dollar dog, might just save you some money in the long run

Both are good with the right type of dog. Not to upset anyone, Different people use terminology in different ways. Some people have bay dogs that I would consider running catch dogs.  I don't know if you have ever noticed at a bay event, someone will bring a pair of what they consider bay dogs that have to be pried off the hog every time. They might be great hog dogs but they are not bay dogs. I have had dogs that bay tight and had some that bay loose. One I heard the other day was a gritty bay dog. The dog would catch hogs under 125 lbs. I never used a bay dog to catch a hogs. If there is a good trainer out there please correct me. You can train or allow your bay dog to get involved in the catch. This is neither right or wrong, it depends on the number of dogs and how you like to hunt them. If you have a dog that tracks, bays and catches it is not a bay dog in my book. If you have 4 or 5 true bay dogs I have never had a problem shooting over them. If what some call a bay dog is tying on to a hog they are most likely going to get cut. If your dog bays then goes in after the catch dog, would you consider it a help dog or bay dog. I have had very few true bay dogs cut up real bad.  I trap or shoot most Of the hogs I catch now. I  allow very few people to bring guns when dogs are used. I don't think you can say one method is safer than the other, Old hunters will tell you a dogs safety depends on the person hunting them.

In the hunting world a dog is a tool, like a racket to a tennis player. There is a difference between my pet dogs and my working dogs. I know of several dogs killed working in the cattle pens at feed lots. Does this mean we should quit raising cattle. Hog hunting with dogs has come a long way in the last twenty years.  I hate to say in the old days, but I will, there were no cut vests, collars or 4 wheelers. To me the greatest thing to come out is the dog tracking devices. In the past I spent more time hunting dogs than I did hunting hogs. I can't tell you the number of dogs killed or wounded when they caught up with a hog in the swamps and you couldn't find them for maybe an hour or two. You had to quarter hogs and carry them out on your back sometimes a few miles. I didn't get involved in hog hunting as a hobby, forty something years ago I started because I didn't want to be hungry. Let Obama keep going, these fancy pants dog breeders sure will show up at your front door for a pork chop. I have seen it before, let times get a little hard, people start loosing there jobs and they aren't quite as high and mighty with an empty stomach.  So the history of hog hunting is not much different than any other kind of hunting, people got hungry and killed an animal to eat. Unless these dog breeders are vegans, they eat meat.  Tell them a cow is murdered every time they eat a hamburger. Even better, offer to take them to a slaughter house a watch a cow get killed and processed. That will make there day.

Have you filled for disability yet! Would give you more time to hunt.

It is my opinion, right are wrong that hogs become condition to being hunted. They know the differance between hunting dogs and the border collies we use to work cattle. You go out with an atv and a bunch of cur dogs and that hog will break and run before you get within five hundred yards of them.  I have gone out dozens of times to move cattle on horseback and the hogs just stand there with the cattle. Several times I have pened cattle and the hogs go right along with them into the pens. I have moved cattle from one pasture to another with five border collies and half a dozen large pigs stay right with the herd of cattle. we have several spring fed creeks that at anytime if you ride up on them,there will be 8 to 12 hogs, layed out in the water and mud. They don't run they will for the most part just wander around the horse.

Make sure you have a way to pump your barrels out. even a proper working system will develop sludge in the bottom of your barrels after a period of time. eventually the sludge will reach the top of the barrels and start down the pipe to your leach field. This sludge is some nasty stuff. Remember clay does not hold much water, during the summer the water will evaporate. Take into consideration what is going to happen if you have two or three days of rain. Will your ditches fill up and back up into your grated opening into your septic system. I put in a 200 gallon tank if I remember right it took eight years before I had to pump it. Had 8 kennels 8' x 20', had 30 x 80 leach field. Plan for the worst conditions, days of rain and saturated ground conditions.

There should be a way to do it. I tracked escaped inmates with hounds, use a piece of there clothing to get them started. We passed lots of other inmates. the dogs could distinguish one person scent from another. we are not asking them to track individual hogs just male or female. Not a dog trainer though.

Heck! if that were the case we couldn't hunt from May to October. When it's hot, hunt at night or early in the morning. there have been several discussion on taking care  of your dogs in this heat in this forum. Lot's of good Ideas. Hey, maybe my wife will let me buy an offshore boat so I don't get bored during the months that it's to hot to hunt.

You need to check your homeowners insurance, I received a letter awhile back from my insurance company listing five types of dogs they deemed as high risk and if I own one my liability insurance would not cover any accidents. So I can't kennel pit bulls, Rottweiler, chows and can't remember the two others. I am almost twenty miles from the nearest town. The four acres around my house is fenced, have invisible fence five foot inside of that in case someone leaves the gate open. Have kennels with a 7ft fence around them. The problem is if you haven't noticed, these young kids with there pit bulls on this huge chain walking up and down the street being cool. They train these dogs to be aggressive and fight them. then they take them home a put them in a yard that the fence is falling down. then when the dogs get away and bites someone they can't understand how it happens. The city council should give you an option or requirements for a person to own a dog of this type, have kennel and fencing requirements. They should come up with these standards a require inspection by animal control. If a person meet  these requirements he should be able to have any type dog they wish.

I don't think it is just hog dogs. Take the pit bull, a few people have had there dogs attack kids or neighbors, It is on the TV or in the Newspaper for a week. I think the dog should be saved and the owner euthanized.  It all boils down to the owner, I have 2 dogs that are pretty aggressive have them on 2 acres with exterior fence and invisible fence five foot inside of that. when The front gate is open the dogs are kenneled. If the gate is closed you either blow the horn, call ahead or go away. We have had people starting to break into homes in our rural area. A guy about a mile or so down the road from me had his house broken into, they stole 54 guns in the gun safe, punch the lock somehow, then stole jewelry and electronics. He has five good size dogs in his yard, they must have been pointers, they pointed at good thinks to steal. I want my dogs to eat the sh-t anyone on my property illegally. You have to remember that hunting hogs with dogs in not a media or photographic friendly sport. People see dogs with blood all over them, pictures of wounded dogs and videos of dogs catching a hog and the hogs quelling loudly.  It looks lot worse than it is.

sure it can be done, I talked to the Vet that works at the horse breeding facility my neighbor has. crackerc is right , you would need at least a few Gyps they would be given a shot to bring them into heat. each dog would be given a shot a day apart for five days. One of the gyps would be were she needed to be when your dog is ready. I have breed border collies for cow work, Had an old girl have a litter at 14. She only had three puppies. Most gyps I have stopped breeding between eight to twelve. My dog don't have puppies every year either. It all depends on the condition and  health of your dog. Have her checked by the vet and see what he thinks.  I saw Charmaine James, world champion barrel racer's horse that was cloned from her gelding Scamper. this stuff is really amazing.

I guess we are still pretty lucky here in Texas. I can still ride up on groups of ten to twenty hogs at a tank early in the mornings at different times of the year. The cattle ranch down the road when there feeding cubes in the winter have hogs running off the cattle to eat the cubes. Most of the time I have five cow dogs with me so the hogs hear us coming. I can tell you forty years ago we had a couple of hound/ cur crosses to find the hogs. The other dogs would come from the dog pound. If the hog ate them up, pay three dollars for the next prospect. The guy that ran the dog pound would call us when he thought he had a good dog. Wouldn't PETA have a fit if the animal shelter did that now. You have to remember there were no GPS's or tracking devices then. some pretty good dogs would get lost on hunts. Some would end up at the pound, others would end up at some farm and they would call you to come get it, even if it wasn't yours. You young fellas thing people don't like hog hunters now. Anybody running after dogs, catching hogs by hand were considered white trash. It wasn't a sport back then, it was a way to add a few dollars for school cloths or shoes. My grand Pa was known as the Hog Man by most everyone, Farming sugar cane and selling hogs is how he made a living. He raised 14 children and about a dozen grandchildren on a farm in South Louisiana.

You can flush embryo's from most anything. I have had it done with horses and cows. Had a few embryo transplants on a show horse. Take the show horses embryo, fertilize the embryo, AI it in another horse and the other horse (jump mare) has a baby of the show mare. The show mare never misses a show. Texas  A&M has cloned horses and sheep. There are people who have samples of an animal frozen for the future use. Take a DNA sample of your dog and freeze it. Ten years from now you could clone the DNA and you would have an exact copy of your dog. These things can be very expensive though.

There is a big difference between pure Russians and crosses. I helped out a fellow that breed imported Russian Blacks. They have a lot different temperament than any thing I had ever seen. These hogs were between 200lbs and 300lbs. They were athletic, quick and plum nasty. I would be very careful in this heat to put my dogs in a high fenced area with a dozen trophy hogs. The first one or two might be OK, but as the dogs loose stamina running down trophy boar your odds are not good. Fresh trophy hog after fresh trophy hog your dogs are going to loose the advantage. I guarantee those pure russian boar will cull your pack for you.

UPDATE! Step Daddy has a new address,restraining order and trespassing summons.. The boys uncle stop by and thanked us and filled us in at the coffee shop this morning. I have made sure everyone that asks about it knows they were not hog hunters, they were want to be coon hunters.

Had an interesting experience night before last, about 2:30 am the dogs outside start barking. A few seconds later the two dogs in the house go ballistic. There is a car coming up the driveway with full light bar on the roof turned on. I am yelling at the dogs to stop barking when I open the door a sheriff deputy is standing there.  He tells me a hog hunter lost his six year old stepson on the ranch they are leasing next to me. Couldn't tell me whose ranch or how long the kid was lost for. I am pretty familiar with all the people around me and don't know of anyone leasing hunting land to hog hunter around me. I have been pretty successful at locking up most of the places around me, I have done a lot of free ranch work, welding and equipment repairs to get access to these ranches.

Now I am interested to see what is going on. So I crank up and follow the police car to a ranch down the road. The owners of this ranch have died a few years ago,  I know the guy that leases this place for his cattle, it's about 3,500 acres. To make a long story short, we get there and there are two fellow with about 20 hound dogs. So I start talking to them. They aren't hog hunting, they are coon hunting. They tell me were they started at, that's like 8 to 10 miles from were we are at and three or four place over. They were busy keeping up with the dogs and forgot about the kid. They have no idea were there at or when the last time they saw the kid. They have had a few cold ones to many. They have two ATVs at a fence line somewhere. The dogs crossed over so they left the ATVs there to catch the dogs. Can't tell you were anything is, first time they hunted here. Never came out in the daylight to look the place over. They were just drinking some cold ones and decided to go hunting. No sitter so they just bring the kid with them in the middle of the night.  Get a hold of about 20 locals send out 5 people at each ranch, about 45 minutes later one group finds the kid. He is asleep on one of the ATVs. The kid tells them his stepfather told him to stay there while they catch the dogs. Old step-daddy doesn't remember that. The kid has been asleep 2 or 3 hours and doesn't no he is lost. The ATVs are about fifty yards from an unlocked gate to a gravel county road.  So the next morning I stop by the coffee shop and the story ends up with 5 sheriff deputies,30 or so people at three in the morning looking for a kid, lost by his drunk hog doggin stepfather. You wonder were we get a bad reputation from!!!! And still don't know if they had permission to be there in the first place.

What about Sam Houston State Forest, they use to let you hunt hogs there. Look up for there requirements on line. That's not for from you.

Left the farm outside of New Iberia in 1974, never looked back. Got tired of duck hunting with 2#8 and a load of buck shot. The 8's to shoot the ducks and the buckshot to shot the gators before they ate my duck. Lots of good times and people, alway a cajun when your moma was Hebert. The farm is still in the family but katrina took its toll. Never saw FEMA, or trailers or free anything in our neck of the woods. About twenty of us kin folk went down three weeks later and worked for a week to clean everything up. Had a bunch of lazy A-S people of a more sun tan color sitting on there butts watching us work on clearing roads, repair levies and community activities. Central texas is great!!

I have close to 3g.southtexas but I didn't run a pipe all the way down my kennels in the rear to hold the barrel. I made a U bracket in my shop out of 2inch tube an concreted each one in so I can push mow around and underneath the barrels. I had the barrels inside the kennels they just seemed to always be in the way while doing something. I saw another fellows kennel and went home and remodeled mine, seems to make 10x10 kennel bigger. just my opinion.