BigGameHoundsmen.com

dwalton wrote:Most of you boys out there that think your cat hunters could probably learn something, about cat including myself. A good pack of cat dogs that are hunted hard miss very few cats. When you have hunted with a good pack of straight cat dogs they make it look easy. I have seen very few combination dogs that make great cat dogs. A few, one or two in 44 years of hunting. I have seen no cat dogs raised on snow, lion, and bear that are top cat dogs to me. Bare ground cat hunting [ bobcat] is a totally different thing. Its like comparing apples and oranges. In the northwest top cat dogs will catch cats all summer long, not all you will lose a few in the summer but if you hunt all summer and are catching cats when winter gets here you will cat almost all of them. Cat packs with a combination of types of dogs that are hunted on straight cat on bare ground move a track different than lion dogs or bear dogs do, they can not compete. Dewey

I would love to see your valley dogs come over central oregon and run in the snow and cold trail a day old cat track not a 2 hour old track. Dogs trained on the snow can pick thiers heads up and run,but dogs that are trained to run with thier heads up have a hard time slowing down to do some real cold trailing.In the last 10 years I have seen alot of guys here buy dogs from the west side and none of them can cold trail here and if they do they are to slow.Once dogs from here get past going though the waist high brush in the valley they can fly.I have hunted with a few people down there and they say that the dogs from here stike too old of tracks. So Dewey look me up this winter(PM me and I will give you my #) and we will see who can compete.

Many of the guys I chat with that hunt w/o snow claim snow dogs just don't have the nose to catch cats without. I think many of these dogs are as interchangable as babies at birth. Raise a Korean in Texas and he will talk like a Texan. They are basically the same dogs. I feel my best bobcat dogs would have made great bocat dogs had the been trained on the coast or Texas or here in Montana. I could be wrong, but I think I'm right. When I read B.S. Jones's book Old Traveler years ago I began to picture how a pack of bobcat dogs works as a team and the more productive members of that team the more efficient the pack was at catching. I have had to go back to hunting them in pairs or trios at most due to the fact that one brush with the land sharks and I'm out of dogs. I always split the best two and run two or three separate teams. We used to have an A team a B team and a C team. Now it is hard to tell which is which. The downside they have to share tracks, this is bad. We have all these wolves to thank for that.

John,I'm looking forward to the invatation[if I can come too].Here's the deal,I'm never to proud or stupid to overlook a better dog!!!So if you have a dog or dogs that'll out strike,and trail these dogs in any conditions,I hope you'll share some of this bloodline and allow me to buy some of it.As long as we're only talking bobcat as the game.
Tim
P.s. are related to Mike Weston?

Hey Tim come on over when the snow flies and we will go.We hunt off sleds most of the time so if you have one bring it or you can ride my spare.I was not trying to piss anyone off,only stating what I have seen as I'm sure your doing the same.Some of you guys catch 3 cats a day when it may take us 3 days to find 3 tracks. It is a lot drier here year around and no brush to leave scent on so cold trailing here is alot harder.Give me a call. Mike is my brother and I'm sure he would like to see some new blood too.

dwalton wrote: A good pack of cat dogs that are hunted hard miss very few cats. When you have hunted with a good pack of straight cat dogs they make it look easy. I have seen very few combination dogs that make great cat dogs. A few, one or two in 44 years of hunting. Dewey

Dewey, wow, it is cool to see you on here. For those that dont know Dewey, I am proud to say I do know him. If you did a search on his name here it would probably come up on one or two of my posts. I am afraid to say too much about him because I dont want to scare him away. But I will say a little. This is a bobcat hunters bobcat hunter, folks. I hunted with him twice back in the early eighties and of all the people I ever hunted with he was the only one that made complete sense to me. I did everything I could to model my hunting style and aproach after what I learned from Dewey in that short time. Those lessons helped me more through the years than any thing else I can think of. He was one of the few willing to really tell the whole story to a young hunter. He even allowed me to throw one of my sorry dogs into his pack. I understand now what a sacrifice that can be.

I will tell you this also, all the years I had hunted the flat lands, I never hunted with anyone that could come close to walking away from me no matter how long the days got. In the woods, Dewey Walton makes me look like a helpless todler.

You and I dont have to agree with Dewey on everything, but there has never been a greater woodsmen and hunter mentioned on this board or anywhere else for that matter. Obviously, this is just my opinion...but it would take an awful lot to change it.