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I think that would be quite an experience to do what you said. You want food on the table? Go get it, thats your only option. Course in a place where a moose could feed for quite a while ... you can't be using dogs on them, nor do you need to. That changes things bit but I still think it would be interesting to do.

That's where my last dog worked well for me, she was up for anything. I know you guys need/want to work specific game, but I kinda liked the fact that from birds, fish, all the way up to bear the dog was good for working with you if you needed her to.

Nicole Stark wrote:Hello:

I've been perusing the forum for odds and ends and have noticed quite a number of comments about bad feet.

How do you guys define bad feet? A frame of reference I have of my own is a number of my dogs - I'll put it out of a hunting context just for the purposes of commenting on my experience with bad feet - some have run so fast and hard they've ripped quarter size or bigger sections off their pads and, obviously turned up lame for maybe 2-3 days..

Would someone fill me in on this topic? I'm just trying to understand what exactly it means, how it shows up, and what's the issue with the dog when bad feet are involved. Is this something known to be a problem in certain lines?

I'm no expert by any means but will add what I've noticed and learned, I live in the Southeastern part of the country, east Louisiana/west Mississippi region, I have one female in particular who used to always blow her pads, I would sit her up and she would get healed and we would repeat the process, I went to my grandfather who used to be a highly touted and respected running walker man in our area and asked what I could do, with the quickness of lightning he replied to breed a better dog, not what I was wanting to here, he then told me that if I wanted to see how much drive she had to hunt her hard and let her blow it off again, and to not put anything on it other than running it back on her and left me at that statement and left me puzzled, so I took his advice even though it didn't make sense to me but I did it anyhow knowing he wouldn't instruct me to do anything that would harm my dog, she blew her pads off and I proceeded to hunt her fairly hard for 7 hunts in 6 days and by the end of the last hunt her pads were calloused over like concrete and I've never had a problem with her since, if by chance she sits up a while, I'll leg her up a couple days and she's fine, another thing that was pointed out to me by a man I have a world of respect for was an issue with all these new types of recovery and training collars, I was having trouble with another dogs feet that I had never had an issue with and couldn't figure out why all of a sudden it was an issue, and it was just her front feet, nothing had changed out of the normal, until it was pointed out to me that I had been only running one recovery radio collar and had started running that collar along with a garmin collar and a shock collar, so now she was wearing 3 collars, I can't prove it but that was the only thing different done prior to pad problems, I would make her wear collars in the kennel at home to condition her neck and shoulder muscles to carry the added weight, after that I never had an issue with her again and did the weighted collar on the rest of my dogs and haven't had an issue with that part of it anymore, those collars may only weigh ounces to us, but when compared pound for pound on a dog they probably feel like a few extra pounds on them....

This is just my .2cents anyways...


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I would love to see pictures of "coon foot" and a "cat foot" side by side so we could compare. I don't know that I have ever seen a "coon foot"...

I believe the way a dog runs can affect how their bodies hold up too. I had a dog that ran heavy, by that I mean you could hear him coming down the trail, sounded almost like a pony running at you. He was a black mouthed curr and did get his feet all cut up running over sharp rocks for the first two years of his life. None of my other dogs had any trouble on the same rock. He passed just as he was getting into his prime at 4 years old... he had changed his gait and ran quietly the last two years of his life, and had no more foot issues.