This has been some good reading gentlemen, so I’ve gotta question y’all may have the answer to. A few weeks ago I took a buddy out with me and we’re walking down the main road that goes in to multiple different properties. Well it’s about 6:30am, 75ish degrees, high humidity, and there was a bunch of dew on the ground. About 10 minutes in we come up to where there a big cutover on the left with some grinded mulch left behind. We see 3 shoat a laid up, only 50 yards from us. Well we decide to get low and wait to see if the dog’s hit on them. Right about then the dogs caught a hog that was on the right side of the road about 30yds off in some real thick stuff. By the time we get that once killed and back out, the hogs had slipped out. I watched them trot towards the woods in the back of the cutover.
I called all of the dogs over and they really didn’t seem to smell it. After 10-15 minutes they did try to line it up but the furthest they went was 200yds and they kept coming back. It was like they legitimately couldn’t smell it. These dogs have caught plenty of hogs so I have no doubt they would’ve taken the track if they could smell it.
Could this have been the dew on the ground? I was also told that the sign might have been too hot for them to line up with all of the fresh rooting that was around them
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Very well could've been mass confusion, last summer we looked plum pitiful hunting a section of the swamp north of me, this place was literally gutted in rooting everywhere you went and all the dogs turned out left out going every which a direction with intent in each step but not nere one of them got a track lined out and a hog jumped that day, here's something folks don't give a lot of thought into, and are quick to make the assumption that if your dog can't smell a hog as bad as they stink then you got junk, that's couldn't be further from the truth, a hog pen has a strong odor but a hog itself does not, hogs only have like 6 glands they excrete scents and pheromones from, and their body doesn't produce any natural lanolins, so there's not much for these dogs to work with to begin with, another you have to look at is the vegetation growth, the more dense the brush the more surface area of solid objects for scent particles and bodily scurf to adhere to if the area is wide open and void of very little vegetative undergrowth that scent will just disperse itself amongst the surrounding atmosphere, this very same instance has been a phenomenon in the bobcat hunting world since it was developed and that is spotting a cat visually and putting dogs down and they cant even smell their own breath, come back later and chances are they can move the track and sometime they can't, go 2 miles down the Rd an same dogs rig a cat that had crossed earlier in the evening, again this another one of some university study that can be found where it was proven, at least in man, that sudden and unexpected fear will actually change the scent of the pheromones the body puts out, I've seen exactly what you've just experienced so many times in just about every form of hunting you can do with a dog in the south, it all made sense after finding that study done, I've started to try and take notice that when we're running a hog, if it makes a road crossing Undisturbed by anything other than the dogs in pursuit that the dogs never really hiccup on the track much at the road crossing, but let that hog get spooked by whatever it may be and and it seems like more times than not they have some difficulty keeping it going at a steady pace unto they get farther along on it then it picks backup......
