The Ultimate Bobcat Dog, PART ONE...

[pegleg]

the best tree dogs bark to communicate the games location to the hunter. second best are the dogs that bark at their frustration at not being able to reach it. third those dogs trained to bark treed. {this varies depending on dog and training} and fourth is a dog that trees the loss of scent or trees. and last the dog that won't tree or stay for any reason. i like a combination of factors driving the tree in a dog but the list is my preference. when treeing is a end and pleasure in itself you start seeing those terrible slick treeing dogs that seem to experience ecstasy by the very act of rapid barking at a tree. yes its a simplified listing but sometimes simple is best.

[pegleg]

dan try to get her to realize you can't find her with out help. it might not work but if it does and she has the working dog intelligence it's game over you wont have to worry ever again she might be tight mouthed but she will probably continue to call you. it might be best to try a few games first so she learns if she barks you'll come. have some one tie her out in the woods and call her until she barks. there's other ways to do this but if this one works its quick. disclaimer i do not recommend this for other hounds dan's case is different some dogs aren't thinking enough for this to work.

[Dan McDonough]

Pegleg- I with you, very good suggestion. Things are happening really fast right now and I'm just having to keep up so these dogs don't bite me for falling behind (I'm not kidding). Today something changed in Vicki's head and she's blowing though various levels of thinking at quite an astonishing pace. As soon as I'm caught up with what I'm seeing, I'm going to be all over the treeing end of things. On a side note, the physical ability of these two is way beyond anything I've ever even come close to seeing in a hound. More people have got to try this stuff, it's going to blow their mind. Most folks have seen a border collie in action and have an idea of how smart they are but putting the snapped tight awareness and physical ability of a good stag on top of that is just knocking it out of the park!

[yoopergat]

dan, hows the pups doing? are you running them on bear at all.

[twist]

What is age of these dogs now and are they catching game truck to tree. Pictures in action would be great for everyone to see. Andy

[Dan McDonough]

Yoopergat- Nope, no bears. I'm just trying to keep them off of them, they're all over the place around here...not my cup of tea. I would very much like it if all of the bears, porcupines and skunks would go away. The deer can stay because they are good eating.

Andy- They were 1 on 8/2/14. Sorry Andy, pictures of what me and the lurchers are doing will nearly always be limited to dogs on the chain or in the yard not doing much of anything. There are to many gooheads out there looking to get another dogman in trouble.

[Dan McDonough]

I'd like to mention that the lurchers are 13 months old at this time. It won't be long and they will be starting their first real bobcat season.

[amos_slade]

Keep us posted Dan. If this works out sign me up for 2!

[Dan McDonough]

The beauty of the lurcher is that any one with a very sharp B.C. and access to a well built Stag or Greyhound can make their own. The first cross collie lurcher is the go to dog of the gypsy and the poacher in the UK and has been for long enough to eliminate the question of weather or not a lurcher can do the job. No one will need me to make them a dog. It's not that I mind selling a dog or two to help pay for the cost of maintaining a pack of dogs but I honestly don't think I've landed on some magic cross...I think I've crossed a couple of above average dogs for their breeds and got what I expected which can easily be done by anyone. The idea and success of the lurchers has a track record of over 200 years.

I want to add one thing to this. The common idea in the US of what a lurcher is and can do falls dramatically short of what they are truly capable of in the field, woods and swamps. It has to be seen to be believed.

[Dan McDonough]

Went out for a quick run yesterday and had a bobcat cross the road. Tommy and Vicki were out and on that sucker. It had no room for error and jumped into a big cedar. It all happened in a few seconds and the cat made it up just barely. Those lurchers can sure jump high!!!!! I don't want them killing any cats at this point and this one was somewhere around 35 lbs. I would like it if they had a few more months of close calls before they have a battle but to be honest, they are both grown enough and powerful enough that I don't think they will have much problem. The bonus was that it was all so close to the road that I got a ton of work with them on the tree in. Normally that's not a problem but I had my 2 year old in the truck with me and this worked out very nicely. She got to get out and look at the bobcat and she hissed at it. I thought I was going to fall over it was so funny.

I have to add one more thing. I keep thinking that Tommy and Vicki are awefully lucky dogs for all of the stuff they get into but it's getting to the point where I'm just realizing that they are just talented at getting to the right place at the right time. These dogs are really very cool.

[Dan McDonough]

Working on herding type commands at the local ball field. It's fenced in and it will never be a place where we hunt bobcats. That way if anything goes wrong in there it won't translate to the field. I have this idea that I can use their big brains to catch when I see the cat and they do not. I'm sure it won't come in handy very often but you never know. The extra time with them in another environment won't hurt at all. I have to do something when I can't go to the woods. I sure wish I had more experience with this type of training. I may take a class in the spring.

Did it occure to you that your hound was ever smart enough to take herd dog training? I get that hounds are wired differently but I also don't think that they have the intellectual capcity to pull it off in nearly every case. I never really occurred to me enough to do anything about it. I've had a couple that were very smart in there range of capability but it was always their range of capability that stopped them from being more. The lurchers have a much higher range. This thing is still as fun as when I was just thinking about doing it and I still can't figure out why no one has done this before.

[ands]

Good to hear your putting that sort of training into them Dan. Its a massive help hunting wise when you can wave your dog on or send them left or right to that spot where you spotted something sneaking off. It'll take some training though with two apprentices on your hands.
Good Hunting !

[Dan McDonough]

I can do some of that directing now but not at distance and not with sound, that's where I'm headed with this. I feel like I can do a lot more with these two if I can "talk" to them. It's been about 12 years since I last worked with this kind of training.

[john porter]

Please keep posting Dan. I am like a sponge and will be taking some of these ideas and applying them to my cross as we spoke per pm...

[Dan McDonough]

That the kind of spirit I'm hoping to generate with this post first and foremast. Some people will copy what I'm doing I would imagine and that's cool with me, not everyone has the time to do this from scratch. The bigger story here is how it began and I'll write it out again because I think it's worth keeping in mind.

I began this project for a lot of reasons but the one that caused this idea to actually launch came out of David Peightal's book, Bobcat Dog. In that book he proposed the idea that no one had made a dog specifically designed for bobcats and instead, we have all been using dogs that were originally designed for other pursuits. That idea hit home with me. I'm not so infatuated with the bobcat specifically as I am with the dog's themselves. Bobcats just proved to be the game that I thought was the most challenging and quite honestly, if I lived in one of the great grey fox areas I would have been just as attracted to running them as anything else.

I'm pretty sure that I won't have developed the "bobcat dog" by the time my life is over but I do hope to influence the idea of what a bobcat dog should possess by the time I'm done.

I listened to both my own experience and the vast experience of others when I generated my list of requirements. Brains were #1 so I started with the non-creative and quite obvious choice of a border collie. Ability to locate, agility, toughness and endurance comes with that package so it seemed like an easy choice for a base. I've always enjoyed and appreciated what a super agile dog could do in the woods and saw some pretty neat dogs during the few years that I hunted in the squirrel dog comps. That lead me to want a high level of physical ability and that is at it's highest in the sighthounds. They can do things that other dogs would only dream of if they were smart enough to do so. They jump higher and run faster and have to make key decisions about what their body is going to do next while operating at those speeds. Those things lead me to the old English poaching dogs of the Gypsy and Professional Poachers. Being a good criminal takes smarts and the dog isn't aware of the crime so I don't hold it against them but the intelligence and abilities that it takes for that type of dog to do it's work was never lost on me.

I don't think that it will take full ten years to complete this first phase. I didn't know that when I started but, I am relatively sure of that when I look at what my first cross stag/b. collies have done in their first year of life. I'm now wanting to make another first cross lurcher to compare to this batch. I can't go forward without at least seeing if I can hit the nail on the head twice in a row. Ideally, there would be three other kennels working on the same thing but alas, I am still alone in this for now.

As for the nose and trailing, that angle has been covered by countless individuals including myself and doesn't really need all that much in the way of my help. How that's going to get worked back into the Ultimate Bobcat Dog is still undecided as far as this project is concerned. I intend to tackle that in turn and not before I have the first things in place. I have watched many people say brains are first and then (in action) show that track and nose (among other things) were really first in their selection. Weather they knew they were doing this was not always clear. At any rate, I'm sticking to the order of things to see how it works as my true and actual guide.

Anyhow, that's it for now, got to get.