Message #378817

[t-dog]

I'm getting in here late on this subject. There's been lots of good reading. Patience is surely important in raising good dogs, but so is willingness to do your part. Reat and I hunt together and raise the same family of dogs. He is fortunate enough that he can allow his pups to run loose for a pretty good while before having to pen them. I don't have that ability because I live too close to the highway. That forces me to take pups to the woods and sit for a couple hours a couple times a week. This is to allow them to get familiar with all the sites, sounds, and obsticles of the woods. I do this before they ever know what a hog is. Each time you go out, they will venture a little further out. Then I start them in the bay pen. When they get to the point that they run from the kennel to the baypen without visiting other dogs or running off elsewhere then I stop pen work and start taking hogs to the woods for simulated hunts. Each trip gets a little harder as long as they handle it well. By the time I start hunting them on real hunts, they think they are already hog dogs. I say all this to say that all this is alot of work and most of the people I have been around just aren't willing to do it after a day at work or get out of bed early enough before the heat sets in. An old "DOG MAN" once told me "you don't make a good dog, you simply afford him the right opportunities, but you can rruin a good dog". I have always tried to remember that. You can't expect the dog to learn anything looking through the kennel or on the end of a chain.