Big nasty I'm totally in agreement with you on the 1yr old thing. I do a lot of mock hunts but no uncontrolled situations until a year old. Just because they can run with the big dogs doesn't mean they are mentally mature enough to handle whatever is thrown at them. I had a young dog one time that was really doing good. I wound up losing him 2 or 3 times for a day or 2. This was before I had a tracking system. It pretty much ruined him. After the third loss he wouldn't hunt. I gave him.lots of time but he never recovered. If I had allowed him to mature mentally, I would probably have had a heck of a dog.
T-Dog folks would have a lot better turn out on their pups if they would read your post and actually apply it to their own dogs, by no means am I saying is this the case with the original poster or his questions, just because a young dogs is leggy or fast running across the yard doesn’t mean he’s mentally with it, I’ve seen a few exceptions about those young super stars, once I slowed down my lifestyle and ways and hunting became about the dog work instead of catching hogs and taking pictures and I followed the advice John Wick wrote in his book even though my dad had been telling me the exact same thing for years but me being young and knowing it all didn’t think my life long dog hunting father knew what he was talking about, after all rabbit dogs, deer dogs and fox hounds were way different than my hog dogs lol (or so I thought) and I quit comparing my dogs to ole so and so’s and believing every story I heard all the time about ole boy down the roads dogs doing it at 4 months old and such nonsense, I started having a much higher turn out when I started letting the dogs let me know when they were ready, all dogs are different and I know my dogs and raise nearly all of them from pups and the things and characteristics that I look for in my dogs maybe or more than likely are different from the things you look at and for in your dogs to let you know they are mentally tough enough to handle hog hunting, where I was getting at with all that is I sent a good buddy of mine a pup off my Little Girl female and the running walker male and told him to be patient to not even mess with him to just let him run around and be a pup and mentally mature, well he put him in his wooded baypen and the little pup was doing good so he started hauling him with his grown dogs and got him wrecked by a mean sow and just completely ruined the pup hopefully for the time being, all the rest that I placed out were raised and messed with just as I suggested and now they are a few weeks shy of a year old and all looking really nice, had he been a little more patient he probably would’ve had a nice dog on his hands but made the mistake so many others do and want to rush things...
How much truth and fact there is to it I’m not sure, but if we used the age old adage of a dog aging at 7 years to one human year, then a 6 month old dog has the mental capacity of a 3.5 year old toddler, ask yourselves how many 3.5 year old kids do you see dominating the ball fields, at 7 years old a child is just now starting to really learn a sport, at the dogs 2 year age mark they are mentally equivalent to a teenager, during a child’s teenage years is when most of them discover their athletic talents if they have them to begin with, and from there on out like dogs they should only get better, I know there are a lot of differences in humans and dogs and kids and puppies , but then again there are a lot of similarities that we can use to compare to to get a better understanding of how things work, I know this is a little off topic than what was originally asked and I give my apologies...
