Lost another one today

Cracker, it sounds like he lived a good life. To be around at 16 years old after a career of hog hunting, speaks to his intelligence.

I would agree with you Thomas, on a lot of guys not truly knowing what a great dog can do. I have only seen a few that I would put in that category, and to be honest they probably aren’t as good as I think. Some of the stories I’ve read on here are just astounding. I have some friends that catch pigs, and to them that means their dogs are the real deal. I’m not one to knock another mans dogs, if they make the owner happy then that’s all that really matters. But I myself am very critical of my dogs. Maybe it’s a curse because I’ll probably never own one that I truly consider to be great, and that blows my socks off.

I also have to remind myself that I’m currently in a situation where I’m running some younger inexperienced dogs and I know that they need a lot more time on pork. But I’ll give an example of one thing that frustrates me. Being in what I consider good sign, and the dogs just not making it happen. I have a deer dog club that I’ve been hunting this year, and I’ve probably went 20-25 times so far. I have not yet caught one pig on that place. Typically every time I go out I will find sign that is a few days old and can’t find anything fresh. That part of the club is about 2k acres and the hogs I believe are usually just passing through it randomly. Well last Wednesday I made a run down there right after dark. I let the dogs hunt in front of the truck I while I drove probably .5-.75 miles down one of the roads in to a tract that doesn’t get hunted as much as the main tract (there is a 200ish acre tract that splits this tract from the main tract). I see a little bit of rooting on the edge of the road so I stop and walk in there and it’s a block of land that is roughly 75 acres that has some small pines that are pretty spaced out, and everything between them is waist high grass. I see a ton of rooting where it looks like a sounder has been staying in there. Some of the rooting was pretty old but some of it was fresh. I picked up a handful of the dirt and it was still loose, no clumping in it. I guessed that the oldest it could have been was from that morning. I had my 15 month old Ranger dog and his mom with me, and I waited for 20 minutes for them to do something. They acted like they just couldn’t really hit on anything, then finally trailed off 185yds. I start hearing some squalling and thought they must’ve hit a boar that was whooping up on them, I run in there and Copper is trying to pull something out of a hole. I’m guessing that it was a fox and that the squalling I heard was from it, and not the dogs. I got her to leave it alone and then waited around for a while longer and they never could line anything out. To have some fresh rooting or sign and the dogs don’t line a pig out of it is one of my biggest frustrations. I’ve had it happen before and I’m sure it will happen again, but to me there is really no excuse for a good dog to not pull a pig out of that. It was probably a 15-20 acre area that had the majority of the ground tore up and when I saw it I fully expected the dogs to light out of there like their tails were on fire and I expected that we would have a hog caught in just a few minutes. Unfortunately it didn’t work out like that lol.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk