MADE ANOTHER ROUND TODAY

Sounds like a hunt that got real western towards the end! Haha. As far as the cold water goes, I almost had two dogs die on me a few years ago. If I remember right it was October or November and it was 43 degrees that night. The dogs caught a little boar in some shallow water (maybe knee deep) and had him for about 30 minutes before me and my buddy Zach got to them. I was friends with another guy during that time (not anymore, that fella has burned bridges and ruined his name with local guys) and I was borrowing two RCD’s for the hunt that night. His dogs were real poor looking and were pretty bony. I was using them some because I was short on a catch dog, and they were nice hard catching dogs. He got them from a friend of mine that had trained them and when he got them he just didn’t take care of them at all, never wormed them. Well because it was in the 40’s that night I actually thought it was a little warm compared to what it had been. We had an hour walk back to the truck dragging that pig, and an hour ride to drop those two catch dogs off. I got to his house around 7am and opened the tailgate and both of them laying down and cold to the touch, unresponsive. I thought they were dead. I beat on his door until he woke up and got them some warm blankets and tried to massage them to get some blood moving. One of them woke up after an hour or two. The other one was in a coma for 12 hours before he finally came out of it. Opened his eyelids and you could touch his eye and it wouldn’t move or twitch, we thought he was brain dead. Both dogs went on to make a full recovery after a few days.

I take the cold much more seriously now. That night I didn’t put straw in the back of the truck because it didn’t seem real cold, but those two dogs were on one side of the box and I had 4 or 5 on the other side, the others were all fine and I figured that they would all be just fine huddling up for the ride. Those two just couldn’t take that cold with them being in such rough shape. Looking back I should have never taken those dogs hunting like that, but I was a young hunter and it was a learning lesson. I was feeding them a big ration every time I used them because I felt bad just seeing their condition, but I never thought the cold would hit them that hard.

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