Thank you Tweety for an awesome 6 years of service.
Tweety is not dead, but she has been retired from my active team so I'm feeling a little melancholy hope y'all will indulge me a public, and sappy goodbye note to her.
This little bob-tailed Mountain Curr has done all I ever asked her and more. I got her when she was 6 or 7 years old, and she hunted on average once a week for the last 6 years. She has started to slow down a bit and doesn't hunt out as hard as she did years ago. She also seems to take alot longer to recover from hard hunts, and her teeth are getting pretty bad. So I decided to retire her before she got hurt too bad. I also need to get a young dog to mix in with my geriatric team to prepare for the future. Hell - approximately 12 years of striking and stopping hogs should be enough right?
She is going to spend her golden years back with the family who helped me to get her originally. Chris and Brandee Krpec in Nada, TX. Thanks to Chris and Brandee, but esp - thanks to Tweety for all the years of great hunting. She was a solid strike dog that almost never trashed, and when she did she never barked at it - just crunched a few coons along the way. She would always honor another dog's bay and she never quit a hog - even sometimes when I wanted her too ;-) she also thought she was bigger than she was. She was tough as nails. No matter how big or bad the hog was, or how poorly the other dogs where getting whopped as soon as another dog put teeth on the hog she was always on it like a pirannha.
I could write tons of stories, or bore you all to death with all of the pictures of all of the hogs we've caught together - but I'll just post these 2, and say a sad farwell to this special friend. I'm gonna miss you my "tweety bird"..
Tweety found and bayed and held this hog all by herself for close to an hour before we could find her one hot morning a few years ago. Like so many other times she just wouldn't give up just because the help wasn't showing up when it should.