Evaluating your Pups/Dogs

This is a tough subject to wrap your head around if you are totally honest....with yourself....and with your dogs. It's easy to develop kennel blindness, to grow fond of your dogs or for one reason or another or to just develop a perspective that makes it hard to get away from the line your producing...to move dogs that need to be moved or make a change that really needs to be made.

When you have good solid dogs, dogs that produce pork for you on a regular basis I believe you can get spoiled. There is an equation, if you will, to every type of hunting. I wish it was as easy as acquire dogs + develop dogs + acquire spots + hunt dogs = catch hogs, but...it doesn't take long to figure out...lol...that's not the case.

Variables get thrown into that equation that....if left unanswered, will eventually make the equation harder and harder to solve. It could be something as drastic as the loss of a few members of your pack. It could be a change in terrain or hunting styles or maybe just the hog population itself...numbers or characteristics. No matter what variables change....as hunters...we need to find the answer to those variables if we want to continue to solve the equation.

In addition to kennel blindness...in my...humble opinion, I believe there is a direct opposite. Something that can be just as dangerous. Lets call it...Reverse Kennel Blindness. This can develop along the same lines as true kennel blindness but it is influenced more....I think....by the owner/handler than anything else and if you don't recognize things while their happening or at least as an after thought then it can cause issues detrimental to your pack/line. Sometimes you can not know what you have until you lose it.

I thought i knew what i needed to know about my pups...but honestly... I don't know WHAT THE HECK I have right now...lol. They are pups and continue to develop before my eyes, almost drastically. I still have it in my head what I want down the line, a definite model dog and I'm not sure if ill get that from what's in my yard right now. One thing I do know from reading on this forum...the stories, questions, and want ads....is that what these pups of mine have shown me over the past few months some guys would love to have, so they ain't goin no where for a good long while.