Mis Brooks, a Lacy breeder, wrote this blog post about the difference between bay pen and woods dogs. Obviously it focuses on Lacys, but I think it does a nice job of comparing the disciplines:
http://workinglacys.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/venues-of-the-hog-dog/.
The TDHA Benefit was only Sadie's fifth bay competition. She is a woods dogs and definitely likes to have a pack baying with her. Plus she feeds off the commotion produced by wild hogs. If they stand there in a pen, she gets looser and starts to lose focus. I also think the crowd of strangers makes her a little uncomfortable.
I was pleased with her performance in the Two Dog. She has a long way to go, but she looped less and got decent scores from both judges. We also hadn't been there very long, she was still fresh and so were the hogs. By the time we got to the One Dog, she'd spent a lot of time in the heat barking at the pen, and the pigs were moving a lot less with the rising temperatures. But I think the biggest problem was she didn't have a buddy backing her up. So she ran in ready to go, but when the hog didn't move much and she didn't have another dog to feed off of, she looped back to the gate and decided to bark from there
I decided to scratch her. If she wants to stay in the pen, she has to do her job. With a little more practice, I think she'll do fine in the One Dog, but it's a very different experience from baying up in the woods with a pack.
Dogs don't generalize well. A classic obedience example is just because they can sit in an apartment doesn't mean they'll sit in the yard. Same goes for baying a pig. In my opinion, dogs will see it as two separate activities, so they may perform differently depending on the environment. Plus the best bay pen dogs have different strengths than the best woods dogs and vice versa. If you want the world's best strike dog or the world's best pay pen dog, I think those are two distinctly different dogs. But I also don't see any reason you can't run a woods dog at a baying, you just might not win every time out.
