THE GOING GETS TOUGH

My dogs are plenty rough. Any rougher and they would be running catch dogs and I would either have wrecked dogs all the time or be out of dogs entirely. Just last year I had one dog get a broken jaw and one cut down and bled out, and these are cur dogs. And thats hunting one or two dogs out, not packs, and no bulldog.

And I STILL don't catch every hog I get after. I do stop a large percentage of them though.

I think the hogs are smarter than they were as there are more people dogging them than there used to be. Every teenage kid around here has a bulldog/cur/cross in the back of his pickup and he will hunt off the side of the roads, poach, or hunt 20 acre spots. Most of the dogs are junk that they got from the pound or a mistake breeding someone had. They get after a hog, maybe bite it, then cause the hog to run. That hog survives and learns if it runs, it gets away. The hog that stands and bays is usually a caught or dead hog around here.

I think there is a misconception too, about a long RANGE dog that will go a long ways to FIND a hog and a dog that will RUN a hog a long ways. They may not be the same dog. My dogs don't range far, but when they get after a hog they usually stay with it for a while.

When I hunted with Noah a few weeks ago, I took Monkey to a strange place he had never been before, turned him out with people he had never been around and a pup that doesn't know whats going on yet.

Monkey found a hog bayed it, it broke and he bayed it again almost out of hearing. Noah turned his Ellie dog to him and they wound up bayed a mile off the property (more than that from where Monkey first bayed) and Noah caught the hog with his bulldog.

So my point is, a short range dog can stay with a hog until he gets it stopped. Its just how long or how far do you want one to go before its too far?? To me, a mile is plenty far enough. If they had gone 5 miles who knows if we would have gotten them back?

As far as loose baying dogs, I haven't had much luck with them here. I have a buddy that has one and he kept talking about 5-6 hour "races". Turns out his dog is walking next to the hog barking and the hog is going where it pleases as it has realized the dog isn't going to bite it. I saw this dog do this several times once going for 5 hours and across a 12,000 acre lease.

I want my dogs to put teeth on one to stop it, then back up and bay. They may get cut more, but I stop more hogs that way than with the loose baying dogs and I have had both.