In Honor of Sherry Bando Conversation

About 10 yrs ago, in a conversation with Sherry, she got all excited when she heard me say that I did not put my dogs in harms way or start my dogs on hogs until they were 2 yrs old.

She was excited because most people operate under the presumption that a good dog will be hunting by the time they are 6-8 months old or they will never be a hog dog. Rarely do most people And the result is all too often the hunter gets rid of the dog before it is ready to fire off. I have seen an impatient hunter give a dog that would not hunt for him to his son to be the family pet. He lived to regret it because when the family pet 'was ready', it fired off and like someone had flipped a switch in that dogs mind and it turned on hogs like there was no off position and no stoppping the dogs obsession for putting meat on the table.

OK, it might be the case for most Catahoulas, and every other breed used for hog hunting, that you need to run in a pack. But there is a small circle of elite high performance Catahoula breeders who have dogs that are natural hog dogs and do not need to be trained to hunt, just give em time and they all hunt just fine.

The problem with these dogs is most people who have never had one, do not understand the proper way to start and eventually handle em in the course of hunting big deadly hogs.

Too many people are culling dogs before they are a year old because they don't want to risk feeding a dog for years that doesn't eventually hunt. And I understand your concern!

But until you see what these dogs do coming from litters where every pup goes on to be magnificent and there are no culls, you will wonder why you ever fed anything else.

This picture below says so much about 2 experienced, well equipped dogs and good breeding.

And... for me this picture is special because my first ever wild hog hunt was in a boat in the marsh along the gulf coast of Louisiana.

The dog below is from a Camp-a-While bloodline. I will contact Donna Whipple and see if I can edit in some more info about this blue leopard with the tan trim.

First let's look at the blue grey bull dog...
notice he is intently watching the shorline,
well protected by a cut collar and a cut vest, not to mention he's got an orange tracking collar tied  onto the top of the cut vest and he is tethered down short. This dog been here before...


OK, let's look at the bay dog and notice she got her tracking collar and a regular dog collar, but no cut collar or vest. Why no vest?

Well this kind of dog is a little bit different than most Catahoulas because she is bred to be a one dog wonder. And why do we call em that?

Because it appears that most people assume if you are hunting big hogs that you need at least 3 or 4 good dogs on the ground or you can't catch.

OK, I been there and done that when I first started hunting hogs and I believed that everyone hunted with large packs of dogs because that was all I ever saw happening.

But after talking to a lot of people such as Sherry Bando who bred the right stuff, oh yah..., about various ways of hunting I learned that with the right dog, all you need is one dog, and the irony is you catch more hogs and get less injuries that way.

We are talking genetics here now, and not really training em to hunt, because if they were not bred to hunt, I want to see you put it in 'em!

And if they are bred right there is no need to worry about whether they hunt or not, because given time, they all fire off, but too many people run em too early and they do not survive to be 2 yrs old!

The reason being that instead of hunting em as an old and young or as a 1 dog most people run a pack of dogs and with these Blair bred dogs if there is a pack, guess who is the first one to get killed? 

The best dog because he don't need help backing him up and getting in his way if he needs to spin out and run, he can!

 One dog by his self will set back and bay from a safe distance and wait for the man and the bull dog to arrive. Put too many dogs on the ground behind him and he gets too tight and confident and he thinks he got enough help and can catch before the man and the bull dog get there

In fact they are so game bred that if you have to train them to do anything you need to train them to survive, because hunting hogs is warfare with a deadly enemy!

I will  edit more in here later..

check back.