Message #577149

[t-dog]

It’s early on in establishing a family from this cross. One of your best tools is to sit down with pen and paper and make some lists. One list is to right down what you are wanting to produce in style and type. Another list needs to be dogs that you have breeding access to out of this family. List the owner, list the dogs size and body type, list their style and even grade their style. By grade I mean on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the best, grade the attributes that are important to you. An example would be:

Dum Dum (male)
Bo x Betty
Owner - Myself
Color - Black
Was this dog was the norm of the litter/ or the exception/ or somewhere in the middle in style and ability

Body type - square head with decent muzzle length. Square symmetry with high tight flanks and deep, well sprung ribs. Muscular with decent leg ( neither exceptionally long or short).

Style - extremely rough a 9 on a scale of 1-10. Only barked a two hogs in his career or would be a ten.

Nose - 7
Bottom- 7/8
Brains - 9
Disposition- 9

Faults - couldn’t find hogs when there were non to be found. Should’ve invented one if he was serious about finding one.

Do each dog like this. You have to be able to be honest about each dog no matter the sentimental attachments. Some faults can be compensated for depending on what they are and how severe. I don’t care how related they are, every dog is not going to be the same quality, not every dog is going to turn out. Look at the Old Man’s young plott gyp that he’s wanting to send down here to me because he doesn’t want to send her to the Louisiana swamps because she isn’t a lab. All of her kin are hard footed hustlers. She too is a hustler but lacks the feet to do well in the rocky hills he hunts. She is one out a whole bunch but it goes to show there are always subtle differences from dog to dog even in an established line. She may or may not pass that characteristic on to her pups but why chance it’s if she has a sister that doesn’t have her problem and is of about the same caliber? She’ll do great things down here in flat Texas I’m sure. You are in a corner as I see it already. Your gene pool is very small so you don’t have much if any wiggle room. I see you having to bring in some outside blood  to continue this project and what you bring in will have to be dependent on what you are trying to accomplish in style and type and where the strengths and weaknesses of your current dogs are. If they are exactly what you want then you probably need to search hard for something that is as similar as you can get to them to cross into them. If they are a little lacking in an area then find something that could strengthen that weakness. I would recommend a family and not a single scatter bred dog for this. I would probably use a couple of dogs from an outside family and I would probably use a male and female. You could completely different results depending on what you use male/ female and you may not be able to tell any difference. You have to remember that at the end of the day, breeding is a crap shoot. All you can do with strategy and pedigrees is try to improve your odds of success. The rest of it is up to Mother Nature. So judge your pups strictly, keep them close so you can evaluate them with your own eyes. Don’t take the word of anyone else unless you know they have a stricter standard or is a better dog person. If 3 people watch a dog hunt and evaluate it, you will likely get 3 different evaluations. Being that it’s your breeding program, they need to fit your wants. Be smart enough to listen to other evaluations though. Do these things before you decide what your next breeding is. I’ve had the family I hunt for 25+ years. I NEVER think they are perfect or that they are exactly what I want them to be but I am proud of them and I know that slight tweaking is all I need to do with each breeding to make them better. I also have the next 2 or 3 breedings in mind before they happen. Sometimes those change according to failures or style differences or a different need that had developed. I have raised several very solid litters, but the litter of 7 month olds that I just raised are on course to be my best yet. They are shaping up to be the closest thing to my ideal type yet. There were 5 males and 3 females. All of them are put together very nice and seem to really want to work. I know one of them has found a hog twice already. He was turned out while the guy was mowing so he could run around. After not seeing him for about 20 minutes he went looking for him and the pup had a 3 legged sow bayed down behind his deer stand. The next time the guy had someone feeding for him while he was gone on vacation. The kid didn’t latch his kennel back good and the next day when he came to feed the pup was gone. He looked and looked for him and finally heard him. He went to him and he was down on the creek baying a boar hog and had already been cut. I’m getting the same feed back and videos from everyone I placed them with. The one I considered a cull was maybe the most beautiful of all and even she is going to make a dog. She just had a crappy personality (shy). I gave her to the biggest, ugliest sucker you can imagine so I’m sure that doesn’t make matters any better. He told me the other day she still is a little leary when he calls her. I told heck she thinks a Sasquatch is calling her. She doesn’t know if she’s gonna be pet or eaten! I hope this long winded advice helps. Good luck!


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