How did you decide on the dogs you hunt

One of my favorite books as a kid was Where The Red Fern Grows, and it really gave me a burning desire to have hunting dogs. As a kid and a teenager I was always training yard dogs and had some experience messing with some of my uncles bull dogs. When I came back from BCT and AIT I got my first dog that was MINE. A 6 month old bulldog off of my uncles stock. He was just a house dog at the time but I really enjoyed putting a good handle on him. When I met my now wife, and we started dating, I was browsing Craigslist one day and found an ad for some Ladner Black Mouth Curs. I was 19, she convinced me that if I really wanted to try to get in to hunting dogs I should just buy one and try it.

I made the call, went and got one, and then went back and got another littermate. Those dogs didn’t amount to a whole lot but it gave me a good connection with the guy that got me really going with hog dogs. We are no longer on good terms but back then he taught me a lot and took me under his wing. I would hunt with him every weekend and would handle dogs and just watch and learn. We walk hunted, and would hunt for 12+ hours almost every time we went, often walking 15-20 miles on a hunt. He didn’t like talking on a hunt, so I just stayed quiet and tried to learn by observation or asking a question here and there. He liked “silent and violent” dogs. He was a very good outdoorsman and just had a knack for knowing exactly where to go to put the dogs in good sign and catch pigs. Back then he caught 500-600 hogs a year with a lot of them being big teeth, and that was more than anyone else I knew about. He hunted 5-6 days a week as a full time job and made his living by training dogs for guys and by starting and selling dogs after they had been on a few hundred pigs. He would occasionally sell a nice finished dog as well, but rarely would keep one long enough to really finish it out. His enjoyment came from making dogs, and so his yard was a constant revolving door of dogs.

I got my first good dogs from him, they were off of a super cold nosed long range Ladner BMC bred to a game pit. That Ladner was a freak dog that was on a different level from anything else I had seen. The off spring of that litter were hell on wheels and came out like clones of each other. I watched a lot of them in the woods and always liked them. I got two of them from him, and started my own pack of dogs. Fast forward a few years and almost all of those dogs had been killed from being so rough. Quite a few of them were killed before they were 2-3 years old. Everyone that had those dogs loved them, and there were some random scatterbred breedings off of them but nobody had really bred them with a purpose. After multiple setbacks I realized that if I wanted to keep myself in good dogs consistently I was going to have to breed them myself because nobody around me had an actual plan or a breeding program. I started making an effort to turn it in to a legitimate line, and I have really taken a passion in the breeding and genetics side of things.

Up until this past year I was only able to walk hunt, and I loved very very rough dogs. What attracted me to them was a lack of races, and the warrior aspect of a dog that isn’t afraid to fight like a savage and give it everything he has to do his job to the best of his abilities. There was just something about that kind of dog that commanded respect in my eyes. I had not seen hardly any dogs have success by baying on the properties I was hunting, which were dogged very hard for years.

With that being said, my Ranger dog that I bred and raised off of unrelated stock, changed my mind. He showed me the benefit of having a dog with a LOT of bottom, that was a one dog show. He would stop them, and then back up and bay until you got there and told him to catch it or another dog got there and then he would catch out with them. He made me a believer in a bay dog that had enough bite to quit the running problem. He was killed last year, which left me with nothing as far as good going grown dogs outside of the best gyp on my yard which is very rough stock. I currently have a litter on the ground off of my rougher stock, that is bred very well in my mind, but I’m not sure if I’m going to stick with them.

I recently got a well bred female pup (Thomas you know the pup I’m referring to) that should be closer to what I was looking for with my Ranger dog. I have really got to where I would prefer the deep hunting solo bay dog over anything else. Today I brought home a dog from the same fella and the same line (with an outcross) by the name of Doc (Thomas I believe you’re in the loop on that one as well). I’m very excited to put him in the woods. I refuse to be kennel blind and although I have greatly enjoyed this rougher stock, and I have really enjoyed trying to learn and work on the breeding and genetics side of them, I am now in a position where I may be able to have dogs that better suite the bill for me. I am unsure of the future for the rough dogs. I may keep a few for catch dogs, I may keep some for smaller properties, or I may cut my ties with them completely and place them all with friends. I currently have 9 pups on the ground that are a week old so I’m not sure what exactly the plan is for them.

But, I have learned a lot from this forum over the years and I believe in staying a student, so if the new blood is outperforming the old blood, then it will likely be time to cut ties and move forward with my yard. I imagine many of us have started in the same position of just using the best dogs that we could get our hands on at the time. Either way, I’m having a slow start but 2023 will be a good year for making some new dogs!

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