hog runner......I didn't mean the ones I had seen were straight catch dogs. They were just catchy which to me means baying too tight, putting teeth on a hog when its standing at bay, catching single hogs out of a group and busting the rest. Just a general lack of finess and stock holding ability. Thats what I've seen out dogs who carried the Ben lable. Sure you can "bay" hogs like that but you will end up with allot of single hog bays when there was a group to start with......AND is it really a bay up with dogs like that?...... or is the hog just too busy defending himself to run off like he wants to. To me a true bay up is when the hog (or cow for that matter) is standing relatively still and calm, paying attention to the dog but not defending itself from it.
A man can use those kind of catchy dogs for hogs and if he does not care about busting up groups of hogs and just wants to catch a hog or two. But you cannot use them on cattle because busting up the group will get a dog culled quick. Thats why you don't see many these "Ben dogs" in the back of a stock trailer with a few horses.
Waylon
Waylon, what kind of been dogs have you seen??? Not trying to be rude, but I have never seen a true Ben bred dog, work the way you are describing. What I have seen are dogs that are as rough as the animal they are chasing want to get. I would surely hope that my dogs would force a runner to stop rather than follow him until he wants to stop, because in this part of the country that would be never. The dogs I have seen pretty much work the same way on cattle as they do pigs, hunt them find them and group them if there is more than one. The only difference I have seen is with smaller hogs (0-100lbs) they will just catch and hold them. If a hog chooses to fight and try and break they will put teeth on them to keep him in his place, but if he wants to stand still they will loosen up and just bay him where he stands. I've seen my dogs bay from 2 to around 30-35 pigs and hold them in the pasture. While we do catch a lot of stag boars, a bay with multiple hogs is far from uncommon. As for who uses these dogs, when I began researching this line before buying one then several more. I went to some of the most experienced hunters and ranchers that I knew to see what they were using. What I found was that those that were serious hunters and had been doing it full time to help support themselves wanted a no nonsense dog that they could depend on day in and day out. While not all were Ben dogs a majority were. After having them for some time now I have seen the difference in those that hunt them and hunt other dogs. While I am NOT saying that this is the case in the responses to this post or others in this forum regarding this subject, I will say that from what I have seen are a lot of weekend warriors that either won't spend or don't have the money to spend on the dogs, so they knit pick and imagine any number of things to talk them down, wether it is about the dogs that they have seen or their account of the history of how this line came to be. The other thing I have seen are people claiming to have something that they do not. Had a guy on a hunt once that said he had a Ben dog, after asking how the dog was breed I figured out that the dog was a Ben dog because his dams great grand father on the dams sires side was supposed to be Ben bred, and blah blah blah. I guess I just think this subject has been beat to death already. If you don't like them don't hunt them, and if you don't like the price or can't afford it, don't spend it. Simple as that. A line that produced dogs that don't work would not have survived this long or be as sought after as they are no matter how good the hype was, and a pups will only cost as much as what someone is willing to pay for it. With the prices where they are, obviously some think they are worth it and like the way the dogs work.
Anthony
Two things,
The Ben dog I personally had came either directly from Three rivers, or within a couple generations. It's not that they didn't work, just didn't work as well.
That's the second time I've heard someone say force a runner to stop rather than follow him till he wants to, if the working mans yellers that you've seen " followed a hog till he wanted to stop" then I hope you shot them. A dog don't have to get toothy with an animal all the time to make em obey, but in my experience, that's all the Ben dogs I've seen have in their arsenal. Granted, I haven't seen them all.
