First tree dogs. Advice?

[Sureshotshane]

I finally have my first treeing type dogs. Two leopard curs more specifically. A male and a female 8 weeks old.

I don't personally know anyone in my area that runs hounds or curs so no adult dogs to help train. I do hope to meet some folks though.

What's your best advice you wish you had when first starting out?

[SASS]

What part of CA are you in?

[Sureshotshane]

I’m about an hour southeast of Sacramento.

[al baldwin]

If your goal is to have strait tree dogs that are a pleasure to hunt with, be sure the mentors you chose for the pups are strait on the game you want those pups to hunt. You might find it easier to train if you only had one pup. If you cannot find anyone with a broke dog to hunt with get yourself a few box traps & show them the game you want them to hunt. Training without a strait mentor can be a real challenge, patience will be required. There are some naturals out there, but, most folks will tell you one generally has to go thru few pups to find one. Good Luck!

[Redwood Coonhounds]

There's a lot of us not far from the Sacramento area, North and South. I would start going now with someone to help you out before those pups are old enough to hunt. That way they would be likely to invite you out more and get a friendship struck up. As most people don't want the headache of helping train a new person and a bunch of pups that aren't theirs at the same time - just being honest about that. But you've got about a year before you need to get serious with actually hunting them. Leopards mature and start drastically older than a lot of the other hound breeds.

[Sureshotshane]

I wouldn't blame someone at all for not wanting the headache of helping a person with virtually no experience with tree dogs. I really enjoy taking new turkey or big game hunters out but the person has to really want to go for me to take them. All the time people ask me to take them hunting, or even better is when my wife volunteers me to take someone on a hunt. Most people it's only a once or twice deal because they find out they aren't as dedicated. Meet me at 4 am to get out for spring turkey to some people means they will be getting up at 5 am. My backs already against the tree by that time.

I try not to put all my eggs in one basket with any type of dog and these are no different. I'd be happy if 1 or both turned out but not surprised if they didn't.

[macedonia mule man]

A dog that will make a good tree dog trees pretty quick. Train only one dog at a time and bu himself with just you and him. Put out about 4-6 feeders, take it 2-3 nights a week for 6 weeks. If it is not treeing after 6 weeks,get another dog.

[Deff]

My advice is:
DON’T let others opinions about how good your dogs are matter! There’s a quote I’ve heard attributed to just about every good hound man known: There’s nothing in this world that can swell you up with pride one minute then totally p_ss you off the next like a hound! Just roll with it and have fun!
Try to make any exposure to guns a positive experience! A gun shy dog is the only thing that I haven’t been able to fix with enough time and patience.
Allow them to be trashy. Anything up a tree is an accomplishment at first. Once they are hunting enthusiastically, you can wean them off of the trash.
Buy a good tracking/training collar system. I like the Dogtra one. The Garmins are good too. Get them pups tone trained to come to you. There’s nothing that feels worse than returning home without one of your dogs!
When they do manage to tree what you are after, shoot it down for them and let them have it to maul. Pet them! Give them treats! That is the elusive breakthrough we are all searching for!
Most dogs have a natural hunting preference bred deep inside them. Most of the ones I’ve had would tree a coon, but some never really turn on unless it was a bear or a cat. I've seen a couple that only wanted to hunt coyotes.
Don’t try to train to a timeline. I have a six month old puppy that already has a split ear from tangling with a bobcat by herself. My other dog is over a year old and is just beginning to think about hunting. I’m enthused about both of them!

[Redwood Coonhounds]

I'm not saying there's no one willing to help. I've mentored tons of people over the years. But my word of advise I wish more would have listened to, is put the work in and hunt with someone and get a good idea of what you are doing before you get/bring pups. I've trained a lot of peoples pups, and there's times I flat out told them to leave them home because I have enough on my plate to deal with something I didn't really sign up for. Makes for some long frustrating days, and a lot of times I just want to have fun and not babysit. Some I've told to stop collecting dogs, they had too many and didn't know what they were doing and it was a train wreck. Some got their feelings hurt, and we parted ways. Some learned from it and we are still good friends.

[joecool7296]

I just trained a pup they way you described, although just one, not two at a time! I had few folks with older dogs say they’d help but they never really came through and at a certain point I knew I’d just have to figure it out myself.

So, here’s what I think is important. First read walk with wick, then read all the training things you can on here. I also took a little inspiration from the versatile dog training stuff I saw online. That will help you form a plan and respond better to what you see in your dogs. Then make sure you have well bred pups, both parents need to be successful hunters! If you wanted to have a kid with a 160iq you wouldn’t pick a spouse with a 60iq haha. Same goes for dogs!

Then, take those pups to the woods every day! Thats not an overstatement either - the first year I had my pup I missed maybe 15 days due to work travel and downpours. I feel that’s a necessity for several reasons.
1st if there’s no older do to “show the ropes”, then they need to get experience the harder way which is via extensive exposure.
2nd a well bred pup will mostly train itself. You’re there to promote what you want, and again, with no role model for the pup, they will need more opportunities to get it right. A walk every day gives them those opportunities.
3rd if you don’t have a straight dog to train with you’re likely in for more trash breaking. My pup developed the ability to trail before tree, so he got on lots of trash initially. I wasn’t too hard about it until he actually started treeing desirable game. I did not want to confuse him to think running game was bad, just that running off game was bad. My take is there’s two ways to break: lots of less severe but still negative feedback, or a few very severe outcomes! A walk every day lends itself to lots of not so severe reminders of what’s off game. I think that’s the right approach for a pup that doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be running. I initially broke more gently than most via “no” when we saw a deer or squirrel on a walk. When he started treeing good game,then I kicked the trash breaking up a notch. the whole process went very smoothly because I was not teaching something new, just reinforcing what he was already taught. I’m emphasizing this point because I think you can break a dog here if you’re not careful, especially since it can be a big task. I literally had to break off of everything in the woods from chipmunks to turkeys to mink.

A few more thoughts: No older dog means that you’re their hunting partner, so make sure you both know how to communicate and read each other. recall and obedience should be really solid!! I also found it helped being in very good shape - I would essentially run track for track in the beginning. This helped me observe the pup and identify what we needed to work on.

For us it was as simple as walking creeks at night once I had determined he had the skill set to be successful. If you spend a lot of time with your pups you will know when this is. I would be cautious not starting too young. Not being able to run track to tree means no success when it’s just a pup, so you don’t want that stage to be prolonged and have them loose interest. With an older dog they can be a “cheerleader” and still have a reward at the end to keep things interesting. You’ve chosen the hard way to do things but if you put the time in I think you’ll be very happy with the outcome. Your pups will learn to do everything themselves which will make a well rounded dog. I now have a dog that will be the foundation of my pack. It’s a daunting amount of work to get the first dog going by itself but I’d do it again without hesitation if I had to!

[Renagade Curs]

I start all my puppies running rabbits with beagles or a beagle be it curs or hounds or crosses thats the way my dad and grandpa started pups to like he said above pups gotta be able to hunt and run a track first. Tree bred cur or hound pups I start squirrel hunting them pretty young to usually after 5 or 6 months old to get them looking up. That's been hard for me lately we have very few squirrels. When I was a kid all the old timers started tree dog pups the same way rabbits then squirrels then on to bigger critters. I've heard many old timers say if a pup can run a rabbit and tree a squirrel most of the battle is over before you ever take them hunting for the game you actually want to pursue.
As far as starting a puppy if you don't have beagles take them with someone that does if you can't find anyone that has beagles or anyone that will let you go with them walk areas you know there's rabbits try to kick them up for the pup to sight race eventually the pup will do more than just sight race the rabbits, I've had puppies as young as 11-12 weeks old start running rabbits. Be careful when they're real young if they have lots of gameness to them they can over do it and cripple themselves, always leave them wanting more. I'm lucky here where I live I leave them loose with my beagle when I first notice they're sore footed I tie them hunt and start regulating how much time they're running with the beagle.
Starting them on squirrels is easy you don't need another dog if you've got lots of squirrels walk them where there's squirrels talk to them encourage them when you see a squirrel if they got it in them it won't take long.
I've heard newer age people say that's ridiculous starting them on something other than what you intend hunt them on for the majority of their lives, I'm just going to say I usually always had better dogs than them and puppies under a year old that acted like old dogs would hark to a race even if they could barely hear a dog. Puppies that would leave like old dogs hunting even by themselves trail and jump their own game and run it.
If you ever read or have read Meet Mr Grizzly how he trained his dogs backs up what I'm talking about he trained them to hunt and take a track then he trained them to hunt what he wanted to hunt...

[lawdawgharris]

This is one of those things that the old saying “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” applies to. A “well bred”, “ purpose bred” pup(s) is a short cut to quality. As said already, all you really have to do is afford good dogs the opportunity and they will nearly make themselves. When you have the pups with the tools, single most important thing is confidence. Right away I like to sit in the yard and scatter pieces of wiennies for them to find while they explore. A couple times of that and that hit the yard searching. This kinda teaches them the winding technique. Then I start dragging them and teaching them to trail it. The reward is obvious and it’s fun to watch. I cast hunt my hog dogs. Obviously their confidence can be broke by too much too soon. I like to take my pups to the woods early ( 10-12 weeks old). I take a chair and a cooler and sit. I try to do it around water too. I let the pups just run and explore. They learn how to navigate through the brush and how to get back to where they started. Most of the time my pups are already wanting to bark at hogs through the fence. When they get to the 4 month old age I will start letting them bay some but only on a shoat that they can’t get roughed up by. When it gets to the point where they leave the kennel and want to head straight for the hog pen, then I start doing mock hunts. I will go to the woods and let them watch me take a shoat into the woods from the dog box. If possible I always have someone else with me to stay at the buggy or truck to turn them out after the hog is ready. I let them go immediately and let them circle and bay the hog but not so long that they get tired or bored. It’s usually only a couple minutes and then I leash them up and praise the heck out of them. Once they hit the ground and burn it up then I start laying harder tracks. Each time I judge how easy it was and then add variables to make it more difficult such as staging the hog and then going back to get the pups so that they don’t see me laying the track, waiting longer intervals before casting, crossing water, etc. etc. it finally gets to the point where I’ll have the shoat in the woods with food and water for a couple days and just pull up and cast them. If they don’t find it then I just ease my way towards it. They will keep pushing out in the direction you are moving (I always push them into the wind). I stop about every fifty or 75 yards and wait. If they come check back in then I move a little closer. By the time they are a year old, they have been on enough mock hunts that they think they are hog dogs already. They don’t realize that their first hunt isn’t a controlled situation. They’ve already seen multiple scenarios and are contributors almost immediately. I even put multiple hogs in one spot and stage more than one hog in the woods so that they learn to relay. It’s a lot of work but dang it’s fun to watch them learn and grow. You also don’t have to wait very long to see which pups are going to be what you are wanting and which ones aren’t.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Beebout-it]

Damn think you could catch me a few live lions to try that with lawdog!! Lol I really need to go see some hog dogs in action! Sounds like a blast.

[lawdawgharris]

Lol I’ll work on catching you a lion! You can come hunt hogs whenever you’d like. Our hunting is fixing to come to nearly a halt. It use to be that we could hunt year around but now days all these people have been told that deer are more scared of dogs than they are hogs. They think if a dog comes through the place that the deer move out. Even on the places that get dogged all year long, all of a sudden it’s deer season and that means the deer are going to change their thought process when it comes to dogs. One guy has a high fence (about 2-300 acres) that he put a bunch of high dollar deer in it. He had it fixed so that hogs could come in and not get out so now he has 2-300 head of hogs in there. He couldn’t figure out why he didn’t have any fawns this year! As soon as deer season is over we will be hitting them hot and heavy every chance we get. It’s cooler and we can normally catch numbers. This time of year we try and catch 2 or 3 and get out of the woods because of the heat.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Renagade Curs]

Lawdawg when I started hog hunting wasn't anyone hunting that I knew really hunted I knew of no one I started from scratch didn't know squat about it started hunting trashy pups or anything that would bark at a tame hog in a pen it was an experience I'm telling you school of hard knocks at its best.