the 2 most important things ive learned over the years messing with my pups is #1) SLOW DOWN, if you are not sure that you are going slow enough then slow down some more. You can learn ALOT about your animals and the woods in general by dropping it in granny gear and letting things happen naturally, no need to blast all over the lease running the dogs ragged. #2) have fun, not all pups are going to be fire on day one, some take time (how much time depends on how much patience you have). I personally do things alot different than I used to years ago, I will admit that my dogs now are overall a better caliber of dog than they were 8-10 years ago and because of that I have changed the way I raise and mess with them. 10years ago I would show em multiple pigs as they grew up, sometimes it worked great and others it didnt work at all, eventually I quit showing them hogs at the house all together and simply waited til I felt they could handle themselves in the woods then toted em with the grown dogs and turn them to bays until they figured it out, now days i will still do that here and there but not near as often as I did back then. Im not looking for the decent pups out of my litters, im looking for what I feel is the most natural based off different things that I see, one thing that I do that has helped me quite a bit is that when I start toting pups to the woods I generally drop 2 or 3 at a time and let them go be puppies (7-9mths), I may sit in one spot for an hour before they come back or it may be 10 minutes but when they come back I dont pick them up immediately, I will give em another 5-10mins to get bored and leave again and 9 times out of 10 if i just ignore them they will disappear again pretty quick. When I am doing this I go to the woods with zero expectations other than to enjoy myself and let them learn things at their own pace. the most natural out of each litter will quickly begin to stick out amongst their peers, the single most important thing I look for is pups with "go" the natural drive and want to.....they dont have to have a clue what the hell they are doing, they just have to have the want to too do it. The single hardest aspect of messing with these dogs is finding ones that naturally want to go hunting, once you find em that have that natural "go" the rest is easy as it gets, the trashier the better for me. I can teach a puppy what I want him to hunt IF he naturally wants to go in the first place, its hard to teach em much if they arent interested in going in the first place. a perfect example of this is something that happened to me with my top prospect a few months ago, this was a 6.5mth old pup that i had brought to the woods a 1/2 dozen times before....... 2 buddies and myself were easing down a high grassy road with low lying tallow thickets on both sides, as we got towards the end of the trail a BIG buck jumped out not 30' in front of my pup and it was game on lol. my buddies both looked at me and said "what are you gonna do now" to which I replied not a damn thing, we are gonna sit here and drink a couple and see just what he is made of, an hour later we pulled up to that pup over over 2/3's a mile away wearing a 40lb shoat out by himself............ my point is that as long as you have pups with the natural want to then the rest is easy and all of the extras that I used to do trying to work them was just that....extras.
im not saying its the right way by any means because Lord knows there are as many different ways to go about training dogs as there are dog breeds in the world and what works for me may not work for you, ya just got to figure out what works for you and follow the plan, if things change then adapt and keep on rolling.
regarding the slowing down statement, I generally dont ride around much looking for tracks or sign, 1/2 the time i turn a pair loose from the truck before I even unload my buggy then get all my stuff together and head to em once im ready. A perfect example of where slowing down payed off for me, me and a buddy decided to make a late night run because when we were hunting in the mornings we were coming across multiple sets of big tracks throughout the lease but they were always from the night before and our dogs simply dont have that cold a nose so we decided to change it up on the hogs and started hittin the woods at 11-12 at night........ anyhow we did this one night a had caught a couple sows but nothing worth talkin about, it was 4:30ish in the morning and we were all tired, dogs included so we decided to call it good, we were 3/4 a mile from the truck so I said to hell with it told my buddy hell lets just push em to the truck.... we dropped em and started easing that way, about 400yds from the truck 3 of the 4 dogs we had started getting piggy and they all pulled right off of the road so we shut down and waited, a gyp of mine was the only one that didn't go with em and she was kinda screwin around by us not doing much but I ignored her and let her do her thing, about 20 minutes goes by and I realize she is gone, grabbed the garmin and she had gone 700yds the opposite direction of the other dogs through a young pine thicket STRAIGHT to a feeder I had set up, she made 4 circles around the feeder then rolled due north and bayed up solo on a stud of a boar hog (ive hunted those woods for over 25yrs, not all 25 with dogs but still) he ended up being the biggest boar hog Ive ever laid eyes on with dogs or through a scope in those woods. had I picked her up when she was "screwin around" we would have never laid eyes on that hog, instead we ended up catching a stud of a boar and got to watch the dogs work him for over an hour in a blowdown in the middle of a flooded creek.
SORRY FOR THE RAMBLING LOL, I was bored at work. been a while since I have visited this site, hope everyone is doing well.
We’re dang near in the exact same wavelength on this, I learned some time ago that Mother Nature has a way better way to show me the naturals than I ever did evaluating and assessing them and picking what I thought was best, now a days they are allowed to be pups until it looks like they’re mentally mature and taking them riding in the box when I go somewhere and walks through the woods doing their own thing at their own pace all while learning what the world around them is, I’ve gained an entire new meaning to satisfaction....
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