Old man I understand your point of view. I think it's sound logic. I don't put all the time into my because I have to. My main reasons for it are 1 because by the time they reach the age that I want to do live hunts with them, I already have a really good idea of whether or not they are gonna be what I've bred them to be. I have been able to see who came by the traits I bred for in the most natural way. The ones that struggle or don't fit stylistically don't get to keep eating my groceries. The schooling in the controlled environment also gives them the head start. For example, I have given pups to buddies or other people that made really good dogs. But at a year old my litter mate was being productive where their's was just another warm body for a while. I didn't put all this training into my current young dogs. They are just now a year and a half old and I could cast them and find hogs when I layed them up for deer season. They weren't but 10 weeks or so when they went and fired up on hogs on their own. No grown dog for support, no coaxing from anyone, just an oh lookie here moment and it was all of them not just one. They leave and hunt hard right out of the box. I have had an old dog that had a big shoat caught and squealing literally 20 or 30 yards away from them and they wouldn't quit baying a sow to go to the caught hog. They all figured out to leave a caught hog and go to the next one within 3 or 4 hunts. I think where it goes bad is when people don't pay attention to the smaller details or observe how natural things are as they are working with their dogs. Many people have kennel blindness. That is devastating fault to raising good dogs.
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Excellent post...we can have an excellent strain of dogs yet there are things we can do to find the finer details...when you do these things you will most definitely have better dogs...out of 100 pups I don’t just want the top ten from a good line of dogs...I want the top two...I want to take them to the next level...meaning breeding the very best of the best...
Usually to get the best dogs we have to breed our own...like I said before...there is a ton of junk out there...
The thing about testing pups has a lot to do with keeping the best from what we can see at a very early age because most of us can not keep the whole litter...
I once had a line of dogs that were as good as any I have hunted with...they got that way because I tested every pup even though I could probably pick any pup and it would be a good hog dog...I picked the best I could and then I bred the best from those I kept...
I said I wouldn’t do it again because I spent some money doing it...turning good young dogs over just to purify the bloodline until it bred true...
But sometimes we need to sort of get back to breeding a few to get what we want...I have culled many plotts and Mt curs along the way...you guys that really know dogs know what I am talking about...
T-dog...I appreciate your writings...I know you know what a pup with great potential is...and you also know the importance of handling the pups in their youth and exposing them to different situations...maybe it is not necessary but very helpful...
From that line of dogs I had years ago...my brother wanted a blood tracking dog so I gave him a pup that was above average at finding scattered pieces of meat and was fairly laid back...he was consistently better at finding and good at trailing so at 10 or 12 weeks I let him have the pup...at two years he never trained the pup he named Trigger, much less take him to the woods...
He gives Trigger back to me and I put him in the bay pen and he looked like an old hand baying that hog...
I took him to the woods and he rolled out with the other dogs and they struck and they went in different directions and he took his own hog and swam the Brazos river after his own hog...someone called me and said they had my dog...so I drove around and picked him up...
The next weekend the dogs struck pretty quick and he takes his own hog and I followed the other dogs and my brother follows Trigger and he shoots a big hog over Trigger...he learned to pack up and he hunted the same as my other dogs with same grit etc...etc...
I share information so that anyone especially those that are new to the dog game...can read and just maybe they might find something useful...
The challenges of today...for many of us it is getting harder to breed good dogs because we don’t have enough hunting spots to hunt all the dogs we keep...I’ve got some nice young dogs and pups I just don’t know if I can hunt them as I should...
