yes blackie was the best i have owned .....
he'd go til he couldn't go anymore i'd pick him up and he'd fall over i've fed him laying down in the barn several times .....
he'd relay til i left him and come home he;d finally quit and come home ....
but i haven't had another blackie
My best dog ever was named Yeller...He was to me what Blackie was to Larry.
When I tested my pups he totally surprised and impressed me. He was born great and he set the bar real high. He was a good hog dog at 7-8 months and a jam up hog dog at 12 months. I had another at the time that was almost as good but Yeller was on a higher level still...Yeller was 1/2 mtn cur and 1/2 bmc.
Even though he was my best I did not surround my breeding program around him for one reason. That was because of the no relations behind his pedigree. Instead I used his son who was 3/4 mtn cur. He started a little later than Yeller but he was finding his own hogs at 10 months old consistently. This pups name was buck and he was sire, grand sire, great great grandsire and uncle to most of my dogs. I used him because it narrowed down the gene pool with him and I still had yeller in on the deal. I never bred back to a bmc again so each generation kept diluting the BMC and the reason why I used the bmc to begin with was to bring size and a tighter mouth.
I also kept about half of the pack pure mtn cur.
I have had very good strike dogs but yeller was still the best for two reasons...he knew where to look for a hog and he knew where to find one...He also knew how to figure out a track and which way the hog or hogs went. He made it look easy...
This could be wrong but it is an opinion I have formed from my observations.
It has to do with being too far away from the norm and reproduction. Mother nature tends to bring all things towards a normal and we as human being will fight mother nature for whatever reason and the further from that norm the harder it is to reproduce it.
Yeller was pretty far off the norm with his intelligence for a hunting dog. This dog didn't just have a strong natural instinct but it seemed like he could reason. I had quite a few good dogs since him but not one like him.
Buck was Yellers son and he was born a coffee creamer color, I am talking about every hair on his body of this color which is unusual to have every hair the same color. He was born with green eyes and later they turned yellow. All his pigment was of the same shade and sort of pinkish which is also very unsual but he was a good hunting dog, but... he never reproduced a pup of his color or pigment. And this really surprised me because I line bred hard off of this dog. So, my personal theory on this is if it deviates to far from the norm it will be very hard to reproduce. I was not trying to reproduce his color or pigment but I figured it would pop up every now and then but never happened.
Just from that experience...it tells me that breeding can be very tricky.
These are my interpretations of my observations...right or wrong...
