Message #580902

[Austesus]

I agree with all of the above posts, definitely agree with what Shotgun said about different levels of hunters as well. The more time I spend in this sport the pickier I am with the people I want to hunt with. I lost my private land earlier this year after having a personal conflict with an old friend that I had the land through. That 6k acres was the only spot I had exclusive permission for other than a couple of very small tracts that I won’t take a rangy dog to. Since then I went from hunting 4-5x a week to only going on invites with other people every weekend or other weekend and it’s made it hard for me to have much interest right now, coupled with losing my best dog this year and basically being stuck waiting on my pups to get old enough to start.

I have some great friends that always invite me to hunt but a lot of times I just really don’t enjoy going with them anymore. Their style isn’t conducive to what I’m wanting. Going by myself I could go in my buggy and spend all the time I want letting one single dog try a track, or cast, or hunt out in front of the buggy. I felt I had a lot more ability to fine tune dogs. Now I’m stuck walking again at a lot of these places, which limits what dogs I’m even going to take. I have two Parker gyps that will be ready to start towards the end of winter and I’ve already told my friends that they’re not coming on those hunts. I don’t want those dogs walked at all and for some of my friends that don’t have dogs that will cast that pretty much means we won’t hunt together when I have those dogs.

I know several guys that I enjoy hunting with but they are completely content with walk hunting a pack of close range dogs until they find sign and that’s no longer how I want my dogs hunted. I want to hunt strictly from a boat or from a buggy and have dogs that cast and hunt hard like my last lead dog would. Starting over from scratch without Ranger to show the pups, I’m choosing to be very selective about what dogs my pups hunt behind. And several of those friends think that their dogs are on a level they’re not. I’ve tried to politely tell them that they could have better dogs or that they could do certain things to improve their dogs but they think they have it all figured out and honestly they’ve just be never really hunted behind a good dog and don’t know any better. Not trying to make it a knock on those guys at all, but they will look at the one thing they think their dog did right and are happy to talk about it all day while I’m looking at the 37 other things that the dog did wrong. What they think are great dogs, I wouldn’t want to own and would call mediocre. Just finding a hog isn’t nearly enough for me to be interested in a dog.

It’s frustrating for sure and it’s taken a lot of the fun out of the hunts for me. I purchased 130 acres this year that is about 10 minutes from some land I hunted years ago. Hogs are periodically coming on my property and I’m working on getting permission from surrounding property to hunt the area. One of the neighbors has 2,200 acres and I believe he will let me hunt them there too. Once I can get some more land acquired it will be easier to hunt my way. As far as levels of dog men, I don’t give any real credit towards someone that just has a good dog. Not as far as being a dog man. To me a dog man is someone that has good to great dogs and that can consistently produce them over and over again. Guys like Clue Anderson, Chance Ward, Bob Owens, Larry Parker, etc.. I haven’t met any of those guys in person except for Mr. Larry, but their words and their reputation speaks for them. There’s a lot more that are on that list as well, but those are just a few of the guys that I consider to be top notch dog men. Those guys also don’t brag and call themselves dog men, that title was given to them by others. That speaks volumes. Most of the time when someone brags about being a dog man they’re just a dog peddler IMO.


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