Pecos21, What kind of hounds were you running back in the 80's and when did you go to the curs? What line of curs do you run? Do you think the length of your races in the 80's with hounds as compared to the current races with curs has anything to do with the fact that there are many more hogs now than there were in the 80's? What is the makeup of a typical hog in your area? Around here we had very few feral hogs until around 1990. That's when they really began to take off around here. We still have a good bit of Russian blood running around here. In the mid 80's a guy in town decided he would start raising Russian hogs, so he bought a pen full of brood stock. His pen didn't hold them for long hence our Russian blood.
The dogs I hunt with are not wide open. They will bark on a super hot track and after they see one, but don't just bark without purpose.
We used Running Walkers (foxhounds) down in Central Florida. And the hog population down there has always been large as long as I can remember. My dad ran hogs with dogs in the 70's and they caught lots of hogs. When I switched to Curs, we used Florida curs and Leopard dogs (they were the bigger leopards with the jugheads not like most of the NALC stuff today). I now run a variety of cur dogs. At this moment I have a Campbell Cur and an Outlaw Cur x Catahoula cross.
The hogs we had where the Pineywood rooters... decendants of the hogs the were brought to Florida by Ponce DeLeon. They had long snouts big teeth and could run like the wind for a long time. But when cornered they would fight. That is the reason I think the Cur dogs did so well because they caught them off guard. So the hog would back into a palmetto head and fight. That is reason I think I have success now...we have a lot of Russian blodd around Van Zandt County, TX. I am not sure how long hogs have been in this area. I moved here in '97 and was hunting them then.
