Catch dog smarts are so important when it comes to being great. Great isn’t mythical or unachievable so why not aim for it. When I say catch dog smarts I’m referring to things like body positioning, if sent to an open field hog that’s running they take a proper angle and not run directly to where the hog is when they are sent. Another smart is understanding you when you are talking. I could say look Vegas, and he was scoping out where I was pointing if he didn’t see it before me, or listen Vegas and if he was panting he would shut up and listen. When you can send a dog and check them off of a running stringer of hogs from the lead hog all the way back to the fifth or sixth hog because that’s the one you want, it is way past fun. The dog I did that with was a year and a half old at that time and only had about 2 dozen hogs under his belt. The work started at home when he was a pup though and he had the brains and willingness to please to make it possible. To me there are soooo many reasons for the poor quality of catch dogs out there now. One, we have a lot of young hunters that until they started hog hunting, they had never fooled with performance dogs. So they aren’t educated about what potential dogs have, they don’t know what realistic standards to set, and they don’t know how to get the potential out of the dogs. The worst part is you can’t tell them
anything because they caught A HOG and now they know it all. I’ve also seen hunters that had been doing it for a period of time but didn’t know much more about dogs now than they did on day one and it’s because they are more into catching hogs than they are the dogs themselves. A lot of folks that run pretty rough dogs carry a catching dog that will go in and initiate a catch and the hog gets caught because everything piled on not because of a good catch dog. So many people breed a dog because it will catch to another dog that will catch and now there’s 8 or 10 dogs in the world that will catch instead of 2. There were no standards set that the dog had to meet before being bred other than it will catch. The only goal for the litter is for them to catch. None of the other criteria that is required to be quality are present. Now I’m not saying all young or new hunters are this way and I’m not saying rough dog hunters don’t have quality catch dogs. I know several young or newer hunters that will ask for and take any help they can get. I also know of some rough dog hunters that have exceptional catch dogs, Judge Peel comes to mind right off along with some others. These are just things I have seen over the years. So many things that people tolerate, some correctable and some not, that I refuse to. Fighting, refusal to mind, leash chewing/ air climbing/ backflips/ limb grabbing/ screaming, crying, barking post catch/ regrouping, ear chewing are all things that I can’t and won’t do. I’ll try to fix the things that can be but if it takes begging then I don’t have that in me.
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I think me and you could hunt together man...LOL...
that is why to this day,,, If I got some buddies that want to hunt with me (some not all) ,,, its sad to say but I drop them off on this side of the lease or property we on,, and Me and my son go our way to another part with our dogs... Good guys ,,, but don't think things thru when it comes to calling a hog dog and hog dog...
