There are some places where the hogs run bad & the dogs do not always stay on the same hog but keep switching. There are others where you can see the hog cross numerous times & know you are on the same one. Most of the time when you stay on a good boar for a number of hours & you just know you going to bay him any minute & all of the sudden the dogs are all split up running different hogs. Hogs cannot run very long but in thick cover, they can trot all day & in a lot of places, the dogs just cannot open up & run. If you can relay them & keep the pressure on, sometimes you can break that hog down. Most of the hogs that we have run for 20 plus miles & we caught them, they died within 10 minutes of tying them up. Every hog we have run a long distance, has always been a good boar. I can tell you this, if a hog wants to run, you will be lucky if you stop him with the same set of dogs you started him with. I told a guy one time that the dog that starts it, is not always the dog that bays it. lol We relay a lot, mostly because I have these sorry Plotts.
We must've been typing at the same time lol, you made a good point I forgot to mention about relaying dogs, more times than not the dog that jumps him isn't the one who bays him, how true that is, around here if a hog pulls a pretty decent lead over the dogs then he has the ace up his sleeve and can set a steady pace and in this thick cover that can extremely frustrating at times, especially once it starts getting hot, and also like you mentioned, just about every big hog boar or sow that I've ever caught in the summer time after a long race died with in the hour of being caught....
