BigGameHoundsmen.com

Spanky wrote:As for the thread and a so called decline it depends on which side of the fence your on. If your a coonhunter the breeders developed a hound that is almost unbeatable in competition, thats seems to be a success story to me. Those men accomplished exactly what they wanted to do with the breed and they hold a candle to no other breed when it comes to winning.

As for the Big Gamers shame on us for not keeping the old blood around enough to keep the nose on the hounds for our us. There are pockets of excellent big game walker hounds out there such as Nelson Cole, Warner Glenn and a few others but they are not overwhelming to say the least.

Mike Leonard wrote:Ike,

I think this is an excellent question and I guess we as pretty much all big game hunters primarily want to know where these breeds as a whole stand. Ofcourse we all realize that their are still some excellent specimans in all of the breeds and also some honest breeders still striving to enhance over all ability traits but the breeds as a group we need to look at.

As some know when I started in hounds man many moons ago following my Uncles redbones and also those of a few other neighbors on the river. I never saw a hound other than a red dog until one day he bought a black and tan and later his buddy got a plott. I was way up in my teens before I ever saw a walker or a bluetick in the flesh. I saw them in pictures and I use to dream of owning some bluetick and redticks like the ones I saw in the pictures with the famous Lee Brothers taking hunters after lion, bear and jaguar. I finally got my chance to own some of my own dogs and i had a friend who came up from Oklahoma and he was a dyed in the wool walker man. He had some old House bred dogs and I got a couple of pups off him and tried to train them on my own. What a disaster! I tried hard but about all I could ever get them to run was deer and they did a good job on them I will tell you for sure. I finally fell in with an old govement hunter and he had some really top cat dogs and they were blueticks and high tans. after watching his dogs in action I knew my two deer running walkers were not going to make the grade. He helped my cross over a bridge from which I have never been able to go back across. He told me if I would get rid of those two deer burners and he meant dispose of them not peddle them he would give me started blue dog that would make me proud. I did, he did and the blue dog still ranks right at the top of the heap of hundreds of hound I have ever owned. So blueticks are better than walkers?

No i just got some direction and a line that was right for the hunting I was doing.This dog showed me what a real hound could do and I started to become a success at hunting. I tried to duplicate him but was not very successful with that. I had a burr under my saddle for walker dogs and I just felt they all were hot nosed deer burners and I wanted nothing to do with the,.Well about this time I met John Monroe of Finley River walker fame. I told him about my expereince with walkers and how i liked my cold nosed bluetick a whole lot better. He said well you should try one of my walkers I think you would change your mind.They are cold nosed bawl mouthed track dogs and they will also run circles around your old blue dog. Well that sort of ticked me off, but my buddy got fired up and asked John to send him a male and a female. The famle was out of Finely River Joe and the Male was out of one of John's Cheif bred bitches and Beaver Lake Lightning. Well in just a short time these dogs were doing just what he had said trailing good, and cold tracks , treeing ahead of old Blue Earl many times and I was green with envy. Well I called John again and told him he was right and I guess i should give walkers another chance. He said well not all walkers are this way and he told me he was already seeing a shift to hotter nosed pop up dogs that could really rack up points on the scorecard in thick coon country and win the money hunts. He said he really didn't want his dogs to become that kind. He had a lot of praise for other foundation walker breeders like Joe House and James Merchant and ofcourse Lester Nance and Raymond Motely. He said these dogs all come back to pretty much the same tree it's just the direction they have been taken from there. My buddy with the two good dogs crossed them several times and he was lucky I guess because nearly every pup turned out to make a better than average dog if hunted and some were really top lion dogs. I ended up with several of them and a female from Lester Nance and another from John Wicke and I had some pretty decent walker dogs for a number of years. Like all good things it seems tradgedy struck and I lost several of the key elements and about that time my friend who had the original dogs choked to death and his dogs were sold off before I could get back there to get involved. Well for several years I spent thousand on top titles walker dogs prodgeny from all over the country, and about all I had to show for it was dog bones scattered across half of the west. John had some problems and he really didn't produce the dogs he did before and others that I tried just didn't have what I was looking for. I switched around ran black dogs, blue dogs, brindle dogs and every cross imaginable. I had some success with some of Morris Hurt and Bobby Shives dogs but I never carried it on long enough. I fell into an old strain of lion dogs from Wiley Carroll, and the Giles Goswick strain as well as those of Jeff Allen and pretty much stayed with them and I still have a lot of that. I decided that registered walkers were probably not a choice for me as most had become hot nosed competition coon dogs. And then lo and behold I end up around some guys who had been breeding and hunting an old line of Nance dogs that were very heavy in the lines of Nance's Little Topper. I liked what I saw in many of these dogs and also the consistancy they were getting. Not to say they are better than any other walker strain because their duds and wonders in all lines, but they did cold trail like the old time walkers did, and they did seem to have qualities that would help them make good cat and lion dogs.

so here I am full circle and still scratching my head, I guess it is not a thing you ever figure out completly and maybe that is what keeps it interesting. If you like the dogs you have and they do good for you then indeed you are a member of this lucky group of hound dog folks.

Ike wrote:Well guys and gals, that's lots of good comments on where the walker dog is or ain't these days. I read back up the post somewhere about walker dogs being way smart or way stupid? Can't remember which, anyway I found this little photos which clearly shows them walker dogs are the shit....

Nolte wrote:It's funny how stuff changes. When I was a kid there was a big hodge podge of dogs in the yard. Then we had ONE Black one that stood WAY out above the rest. So Black dogs it was.

Had some that did good others that didn't and then a guy we know gave me a walker since I was just a kid. He KNEW it would rattle Dad. Dad hated that yappy white bastard till it started kickin ass and taking names. Then it was OK. Had a few more white ones after that, which didn't pan out. They were OK, but not a bit like that first one. I've seen a pile since that weren't worth damn, and a few that I'd give up anything in my yard to have.

I'm a firm believer that good dogs are where you find them. You try stuff here/there till you find something that suits you. You run with that until it doesn't work out or you find something better. There isn't any silver bullet or magic color. One common them though is that good dogs generally are found in the trucks that can/do spend the most time in the brush. If somebody in your area is whackin/stacking game it's probably a good idea to see what's working for them.