Pit cur mixes

One thing I’ve learned over time is that ingredients make a recipe but only the baker can makes the cake.

No matter what they’re born as, they’ll only be as good as the effort you put in to them is what I mean. I’ve long been opposed to crossing bulldog into my curs, but the truth is that one of my all time favorite knuckleheads had 1/4 pit in him.

I’ve got a long list of good stories about him, but my favorite is the time he ran himself crippled.
The dogs name was Snicklefritz and he had gotten a horrible cut under one of his front arms. The tusk had cut up under the armpit and separated a bunch of the connective tissue. I treated it as best I could but he was unbelievably hard headed and wouldn’t stay off of it to let it heal properly. The wound took much longer to heal than I thought it should have and staying home on the chain was pure torture for Snicklefritz. Several weeks had passed since the wound had fully closed and he LOOKED like he was fully recovered, so when I was invited to hunt a rice field where the hogs run pretty bad I decided it’d be nice to have him along to anchor some of them running jokers.
As soon as we dropped the tailgate that evening, a few of my straight curs burned out of sight and fell bayed in a ditch with 1 minute of casting. I let Snick go from the truck, me and the fella I was with headed that way and caught that first hog. As soon as we had our hands on it, Snick let go and went to find the full blood curs which had rolled off the first hog as soon as snick had caught it. This exact scenario repeated itself over a dozen times in the next hour or two until, at the last hog, a monster sow in a rice canal, I noticed that Snicklefritz couldn’t climb out of the water.

I carried him out of the canal and found that his recently healed shoulder had COMPLETELY separated internally and he’d been running, baying, catching and rolling out on his good shoulder at top speed for at least half the hunt! By that last hog, his good arm was so weak that he couldn’t hold himself upright on it even if standing still.

I put him on the ground to make room for him on my ATV and when I turned to pick him up I couldn’t find him. As I scanned the area with my flashlight, I saw grass parting itself like a ghost was headed towards the woods! I ran him down and found this dog with his front legs laid straight under him, his face in the dirt and his backside up in the air, chugging like a locomotive, driving him on to find another hog!

I never did get pups out of him, but in hindsight, I’d say he sure taught me to humble myself a bit when thinking of genetics and cross breeds, and to thank the Lord for a good dog, no matter how he made them!