Runnin hogs or time to raise the bar?

Rueben makes an excellent point about enjoying good dog work. I too enjoy putting time into the young and letting them gain wisdom and talent from the older dogs in the pack but, this time of year is not the best for that. During the next several months I have the oppurtunity to make it or break it with a few farmers in my area, one of whom told me that dogs are ineffective and that catching more than 1or 2 hogs in a hunt is a fairy tail. I told him what me and a friend normally catch given a viable population and he told me he'd believe it when he saw it. At that I told him I would put up or shut up. Catching large quantities of hogs is as important to me as catching trophy hogs. Big boars are always deserving of a pat on the back, but my goal is to be able to drop dogs on a Wednesday morning at 6 am and have 10-20 hogs in my trailer by 5-6 pm on a ROUTINE basis.

To accomplish this I recognized that my good ol strike dog took to long and disturbed too much ground while catching one hog so thru luck and a couple gifts from a friend I started pouring my time into a few gyps who are able to not only find hogs but have the cow sence to bunch them OR recognize that a caught hog doesn't mean works over. The more pigs they got on the more they got on the shorter the races got and I then fully realized it wasn't the hogs so much as the dogs. I hunt a lot with a friend who also has very talented dogs but those aren't the hunts I'm Refering to. I'm talking me and the girls plus a catchdog.

I attribute the recent relative success to speed, brain and working knowledge.

I have lots of dogs that will "bay the hair off a hog" but the more I watch one particular gyp the less I care about what I used to. Even in front of a hog, she don't get excited, she just works em and keeps em worked.

That's what I'm getting at, I have decided I'm not gonna worry about "runners" I'm just gonna continue to raise my personal standards, see if it pays off.