dwalton wrote:Andy: I did not mean to pass over your Question so quick just had my mind somewhere else. Treeing dogs can have the same track qualities as running dogs. When the treeing walkers were a new breed just out of the running dogs you saw a different dog than I see today in treeing walkers. When Nance first started using walkers in coon hunts he came up against a lot of controversy. When he started winning most of the hunts people took notice. Nothing has changed but what people have bred for. What I look for in a bobcat dog that I find most in a running dog is its ability to move a cold track fast with head up taking scent out of the wind or from brush never coming back to the same spot to bark again, not barking off track only when they smell a cat and opening when they have a clean track a head of the others. You take a pack of dogs that run in this style and they can move a cold track quickly. If dogs only open on a clean track they will leap frog a track through the country. Catching bobcats in numbers can be done with any breed of hounds but running dogs have this trait more than any that I have seen lately. Big numbers of bobcats is done by dogs moving a cold track fast. Time and distance you only have so many hours in a day. I have said time and time again each to their own if you like it and it catches bobcats hunt it I would. There are several hunters hunting part time catching 40 to 50 bobs a year and some hunting full time catching 50 to 75 all in the 90 season. In areas of Oregon coast that is steep and brushy where a lot of people hunt. Most of them have enough sense to keep their mouth shut. Robin your numbers are just that. I hunt in several counties as well as anyone that catches several cats. If you check there are very few hunters or trappers that tag over 10 bobcats a year many less than 5. The majority of the bobcats are caught by just a few houndmen or trappers. Just maybe some people work at it harder than others or know something that others don't. It does not mean anything that one catches more that others other than they are doing something right. Dewey
You say that very few hunters or trappers tag over ten bobcats per year and you seem to think this means they don't catch. Do not forget that a good number of ethical cat hunters do not set out to kill as many as possible. In fact, many have personal restrictions so, just maybe, high kill numbers has less to do with the quality of dogs and more to do with the lack of ethics.
but I will give my two cents. Personally, I don't care much for running bred dogs. I realize that a lot of dogs local to my area have running blood in them and there are traits that I really like but, when inexperienced breeders put so much running blood into them that they refuse to look up, I don't want one. I like a natural locate/tree dog and I prefer to build off of that. I've had much better luck working a dog to rig or better their starting/trailing than I have trying to get a dog to tree that doesn't care a thing about treeing. I recently spent three years with a young dog that would flat move a cat track but couldn't locate a bigfoot in a sapling. After three years of that, I finally decided to get some pups that I felt had much less, if any, running blood in them and it was the best move I've made. Now, I get a grin on my face each time I hunt because I am seeing pups work that remind me of dogs I used to hunt.