Good stuff Des, I've had the same issue you just described. These silent dogs are tough on starting pups, they tend to leave town and leave the young dog confused at first when they loose sight.
On the subject, I think it really has to do with the quality of your dogs and the abundance of hogs. If your dog likes a hog and you keep putting one in front of him, no problems, he'll figure it out no matter what you do. In our case, we don't have a ton of hogs around and it can make it real hard on young dogs. It can be a balancing act, you want to get them out in the woods but sometimes it might take all day to strike one hog.... that can leave plenty of time for a dog to get bored and find trouble. A perfect example is a friend of mine has had hog dogs for 15yrs, they've always caught hogs up till a few yrs ago. For about a yr, he lost his hog land and had to run on deer land(very, very few hogs), well those dogs hunted, and hunted.. and hunted... till they finally started running deer out of sheer boredom. Although he restarted them on hogs later on, those dogs(to this day) would rather run a deer than a hog.
The other problem I always run into is people wanting to "train" their dogs by running them with mine. Very distracting when you've got somebody else's dogs catching armadillos while your dogs are trying to hunt...
I guess being anal, like Bryant said, isn't such a bad thing if it results in caught hogs. The longer I've been doing this the more puckered I'm getting
