I like hunting right after a rain. The hogs are out rooting around.

If the dogs take off running down the road you need to not turn them loose until you are in the woods at least 50 to 100 yards to see if they will circle. Then I would get back on the road and see if they keep circling. I would repeat and get back in the woods. If the dogs want to run down the road I would try to stay off the roads as much as possible. Roading is good but I would go slow and watch the dogs. If the dogs cut in the woods stop and wait until they come back out. That way the dogs mind is on hunting and not on keeping up with the 4 wheeler.

To me everything we do as handlers should be to develop the dogs potential as hunting dogs and minimize any negative situations that could set the dogs back in there hunting style.

When I sold pups they were sold for 50 dollars or 75 dollars with no strings attached because I know some handlers can ruin a pup and I didn't want to fool with having to replace a dog or a pup.

In the mtn cur breed I have seen top notch dogs hunt for their current master and are as good as any I have seen but wouldn't hunt for anyone else for a month or even longer. My friend bought a well started dog that wouldn't hunt for him for about three months. We knew he was a very good strike dog and then one day he turned on and was back to his normal self.

The best way to buy a dog is to hunt with it 3 or 4 times without any other dogs and with the handler (seller) present and then negotiate the price and details. The next thing to do is to have the dog learn to trust you (buyer) so he will hunt at his best for you asap.

Like a previous post, someone mentioned that some dogs can be ruined by the new owner and that is another reason to charge more on a trial basis and I agree.

Of course there are dogs that will hunt for anyone right away if they have it in them to do so.

What really gets to me is the people who sell a sorry dog. The usual excuses are that the dog needs more time, needs to be hunted more often etc. etc..
If the dog is 1.5 years old or older a it doesn't hunt it is a cull.... It doen't need more hunting time...

For me a good hunting dog needs to show a lot of potential at 1 year of age with limited training/experience or I wouldn't buy it, and trashy, ran a deer for two hours on a pitch black moonless night by himself is a plus if you ask me. That just might be all the trial I need...

If I owned a dog that didn't show much potential at a year of age I would tell the potential new owner exactly what I thought and the dog would be given to him for free because if I didn't want it and I expect the other party should get the same treatment. It doesn't mean the dog won't hunt at a later date but I wouldn't keep it and it wouldn't be for sale. It would be free.

Nice looking pups. What is there breeding? They look comfortable on the 4 wheeler.

Just another way to make more money, or, you can call it paying for insurance.

you need you some pit cross's I was having hell here with the runners its like the dogs would strike and the hogs would bust through briars and all that thick number 2 and the dogs couldn't keep up with them in that number 2 but I found an austrailian shepard and pit cross no misses since stopping everyone of them in his tracks.

My friend uses 1/2 pit and 1/2 mtn cur and he catches lots of hogs but his dogs don't live as long.

My favorite time to hunt is the day after deer season. The weather is cool the weeds are down and the dogs have a fair shot at catching hogs. It doesn't matter too much whether they are runners are not when the vegetation is dead the dogs can catch up to them.

This lasts until the first days of April before the weeds get thick again. Another plus during the cold months is that the gators are somewhat dormant. I am talking about S.E. Texas.

Looks to me you got some up and coming hog dogs.

The kemmer mtn curs are bred to hunt and some have a ton of grit.

Marshall,

Looks to me like you have some good pups coming on...

Are you still hunting the sire and dam to the pups?

Great Story.  Great Pics.  Great Dogs.  Great Hogs.

But I'm not sure if I looked more at the dogs, the hogs, or the cleavage in the first pic! 

J/J!  Excellent post Christina.

Or the nails...

Just a good hunt with good dogs and family. Can't beat that.

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I also used the Nu stock and Dawn. 
But to make it alittle cheaper, you can buy straight sulfur and some mineral or baby oil and mix it yourself.
I bought a small tub of sulfur at tractor supply for about 6 bucks.
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Years ago an old time breeder gave me a recipe which it called for 1 pint mineral oil 1 cup malathion 50 and several inches of sulfur in the bottom of the container. Mix this up and rub it in to the dogs skin and hair. It worked but it was smelly.

This is an interesting topic.  I have seen both be very effective but accuracy is key regardless of speed.  I say that only because I have seen slow bulldogs that caught very hard and accurate be extremely effective and some that just run blindly in and hit like a line backer sometimes cost you and the hog breaks.  Ideally I want to run in as fast as possible and catch accurately even if that means he stops completely to asess the situation.  This is all in a perfect world though, a bulldog that catches good and doesn't miss alot and has manners is hard to find.

I agree.

me personally have never liked an rcd. part of the fun to me is the bay, and gettin to the bay with the bulldog. with an rcd i always felt cheated. i do lose alot of hogs. im different than most, the thrill of the hunt is better than the thrill of the catch. thats just me though. the catch is the icing on the cake. but back in may i was in a bind for a bulldog, found one in houston. hes about 40lbs that thinks hes as big as a bull. never seen a pit that wants to hunt as bad as he does. he will hunt out about 600yrds loops a 360 comes back and is gone again. i have tried to use him as a walk-in but he wears me out and cant break him from pullin. got a young pit that is of age now doin really well, hits like a freight train and will hold till dead. so guess what, startin this weekend ive got an rcd.

Is he cow broke? Just make sure he doen't catch a cow because once he does it will be hard to break him of it. I have seen 4 or 5 pits over the years take down cows and I mean one on one.

I reckon you can not really call him a running catch dog but I like this type of pack dog the best. If he barks it is a big boar and that will give the clue to get there quick with the catch dog. This type of dog usually will catch with a little encouragement. Also he should be gritty enough to keep a boar from running much.

This type of dog should help in keeping the pack healthier than a true RCD.

Well, if you decide to cull him I might take him off your hands if you are close to the Houston area...

I like that cross! One of the best catch dogs I ever caught behind was full lab!!He did not belong to me and he is still alive but retired!!

A friend of mine had a jam up RCD that was 1/2 rotweiller and 1/2 black lab.

He was a good help dog. He caught the sows and young boars. He would stop a big boar and bay until you got there and then he would catch on command. I would love to have one just like that.

Hog hunting is very challenging.

Sometimes too many dogs will put pressure on a hog and it will break. If that happens cut back on the dogs and see if that will work. It could be one dog that puts the pressure on and causes the break. Also, another way to tell if you have hi pressure dogs is if you are always only baying one hog.

Sometimes you can have loose baying dogs but the hogs will not hold bay. This calls for rough cur dogs that will do all they can to stop a hog. You might want to run a RCD with the pack. You will need protection on your gritty dogs if you decide to hunt this way.

Either way the hogs will look for the thickest cover and that will slow the dogs down but not the hogs. So, don't feel too bad when you have a few dry runs. Every hog hunter has these. It just makes it that much better when you catch a few...

She sure is a good looking cur. I hope she recovers enough to work cows again.

Awesome pics, thanks for sharing.

Plott or mtn cur as long as it is of super high quality.

It's not rocket science...

Experiment until you find what you want, then line breed the  out of that, then cull ruthlessly until you've fixed type, then cull/refine until you've removed the major faults. By then you'll be 90 years old and can only hope that the next generation won't squander or abandon what you've spent your whole life building.

Hybrid vigor and in-breeding depression are very real, but they are also very over-blown. I don't understand why horsemen and houndsmen keep having the line-breeding/out-crossing debate. Line breeding is the only way to create reliable/predictable type, period. Intra-breed-out-crossing proponents like Pat Burns conveniently forget that they can get a lot of jam-up dogs from out-crossing now only because of all the hundreds of years of selective line breeding that went into their hounds/terriers/bird-dogs before they were even born that created large pools of prepotent stock among various breeds/types from which they can now "out-cross" <sigh>. It's like a trust-fund baby that thinks you don't have to work hard to be wealthy... he forgets that his granddaddy had to work hard to make all that money.

I believe there is lots of truth to what you are saying. Part of the breeding problem IMO is that we as humans have a wide range of ideas as to what a good dog is or what a good hunting dog is supposed to look like. This is one reason we have such variation in hunting dogs.

Then you have the folks that breed brownie who doen't hunt or bay but the sire was a decent dog.  To me we should never do this but I have been guilty of it but only because I knew the line of dogs and the negative was minor. I also took into consideration that even though this dog was not of the best quality it was not an outcross so that was my logic as to why I did it. I have inbred and linebred to get where I wanted to be quickly but knew I couldn't make a mistake when culling.

I do not understand totally the genes as far as dominant and recessive but I do know that a lot of the hunting qualities in a dog are from recessive genes so when you outcross in another type of dog to the line we work so hard to establish, it is very possible we lose all what we have bred for for many generations in that one outcross. I believe this happens because a lot of the negative traits come from dominant genes. I know we can get the hybrid vigor but even that should be done with a not so distant relative.

ETHHunters

Didn't know about the swallowing but I have observed that a dog will stick out his tongue when he submits to your command or wants forgiveness and I let them walk up to me and lick my hand for the apology. Well at least that is my interpretation . A lot of my dealings with dogs is motions, hisses, snap of fingers etc.. and minimal verbal commands because most of the dogs communications are silent.

I used to do a lot of over kill in training and socializing of the pup/dog but over the years I have learned to get by with minimum amounts of it because I basicly know how much I need to get by. It is mainly knowing when and how much. If the dog is acting how you like then that amount is enough. If the dog is shy then you will need to do more and more often.