Entertaining thread Mike, had a feeling it would be when I read it this morning
, At the end of the day, and after 8 pages, what are the facts, one is that every respectable dog man I know got started by getting pups or dogs from people that already had good dogs (GENETICS), another is that you can throw back several generations on the different traits in a dog. I beleive these good dogs that turn out from what we think is unproven stock are just drawing something genetically from dogs in there ancestry. Who keeps track of unproven dogs anyway, we make those assumptions because maybe the parents werent hunting dogs. How do we know that it wasnt traits from the great grand sire that allowed the dog to excell in the woods. All we are doing is putting them in the environment for these traits to be exposed. If you want to call that training, its a free country, but it all goes back to genetics, thats why you dont see any long range, cold nosed bulldogs and why you dont see very many lights out staight cur catchdogs. You can train all day, but for the most part, those traits just arent in the gene pool. When I use the word training, its just a figure of speech, we used to have an old gyp that I would still call a puppy trainer, seemed like she would come get a young dog that just wanted to hang around and before you know it, he would be out there hunting with her all day. She did this with just about every CUR we started with her. Keep in mind, we were hunting horse back and running a bulldog or a bulldogXcur loose as a catchdog. Why is it that she never trained the first bulldog or cross to go hunt? They were right there and had the same opportunity as the cur pups had. Could it be GENETICS
, just something to think about
