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What a Great read this thread is David.
I've always tryed to read all your posts on here because you get a guy to thinking outside the box. Thats a very good thing if we are to progress.

Looking forward to a finished book.
Thanks, Robin

I agree though, there is nothing more disgusting than a dog that does not show desire when you think they should. On a couple extremely gifted dogs, I have had to look the other way. In my younger days, the dogs would never have stayed. The more human- like intelligence qualities a dog takes on, the more they are like humans, who do not play so hard when they feel sick or frozen half to death.

I couldn't agree more. It seems like the true dandies really get tempermental at times. An old female of mine used to have days where she wouldn't hunt. She'd hunt harder than anything most of the time so, when she said no, I went home. lol
Don't get me wrong about drive being an end all be all. I just think it can act as a hub of which other traits can be built off of. If the brains(or something else) are severely lacking, a dog can continually iimprove, but, as you said, you eventually run out of time trying to get the dog on enough cats. Drive can merely escalate a deficit to acceptable levels, in my opinion. Going back to the statement I quoted, I think a dog HAS to be smart enough to know when to quit if for no other reason than to avoid wasting time on tracks that aren't good enough. Dangit David, I swear this is a two week conversation over 80 pots of coffee.(just to get started) Way too much to discuss but carpel tunnel syndrome would surely set in from all the typeing. hahahahhaha Definately the best reading and most interesting thread I've read.

this is a good read guys, thanks for posting.

jcathunter wrote: Dangit David, I swear this is a two week conversation over 80 pots of coffee.(just to get started) Way too much to discuss but carpel tunnel syndrome would surely set in from all the typeing. hahahahhaha Definately the best reading and most interesting thread I've read.

jcathunter, Two weeks riding around those mountains sounds about right to me. Man I miss the old days when you wrote your book on here. It just kills me that all that wisdom from our Elmer Blankenship protege' was lost when the shade tree went down.

Sure is good to see you writing a little bit again.

Thanks to all for the encouragement. I realize I quit working on the book exactly two years and two months ago. You guys are giving me the inspiration to work on it again.

David, I would surely like to hear your opinion on the "is one dog actually any smarter than another" and "does one dog have a colder nose than another". To some these are dumb or easily answered questions, but the more I try to understand or learn how to communicate with a dog the farther I feel from the answers. At this point, I have developed the opinion that a dog would rob a bank for you if it only understood what you wanted it to do. To me this is the only distinction between a bad and a good dog. If only they understood. thanks.

Dang Tom Tom, you come up with the darndest questions. Some of them I read and I just say to my self "this is dale lee posing as a new guy just to see what we will say."

I am afraid to answer you because I know who you really are. I will have to chew on this one a while. Hopefully someone who is not intimidated by the Lee brothers will come on here and answer your questions.

What do we get if we answer correctly?

You will either get a very happy or a very confused tomtom. No matter what I hear or read about from those I know have done it for years, I feel at this point the relationship between dog and man is basically an exploitation of given traits, either somewhat successful or very successful. Nope, not trying to be a dog whisperer, just frustrated with progress.

I'd like S.Texan to chime in here. He's told me of good dogs of his not hunting (behind truck while roading) while the movement (bobcat) was off. Then when they went to moving those dogs would get out front and start looking for the cats. Like I say, hopefully he'll chime in here and tell more about that.

Maybe it wasn't the day those dogs didn't want to hunt. Maybe they just knew the cats weren't moving at that time. Just a thought.???

tomtom, Well, OK you are not Dale Lee.

I definately feel some dogs are smarter than others, and sometimes the gap is very glaring. There was a border collie featured in a readers digest article. He knew something like 200 words, the names of objects etc. So they put like 201 objects in this building and asked him for stuff and he would point it out or get it. They asked him for the one thing he did not know, and he went and got it by deductive reasoning.

Yes some dogs are definitely smarter than others. But as jcathunter has pointed out they must have either the strong desire to please you, or the strong desire to confront a bobcat or both. Otherwise their brains are of no use to you.

In my two dog pack, I dont really want my cold tracker to be moody and unpredictable. I want her to go out there and pound it out no matter the weather and no matter how many days in a row I need her to do it, and no matter if she has been wearing bobcat hats complete with the crown of thorns every day for a week. That means she cant be one of these humans in dog clothes. She has got to be a lot tougher than she is smart.

That is how those fox hounds could run 15 miles an hour for 8 hours a day for a week at a time barking their head off the whole time. No wolf would ever do that. It will not preserve their life, it will eventually kill them because they will not be able to replace that many calories because they wont catch very much doing that. That part of the canine intelligence had to be bred out of our hounds, or they would never do what they do that we love so much.

Imagine a human hunter walking to his deer stand and yelling out loud every deer track he sees. Then he screams bloody murder if he actually sees a deer sneaking through. It is not smart hunting. But we enjoy the sound of the hounds so we make them dumb enough to do that.

My theory is that the further you get away from the hounds and toward the wolf, the more intelligence you are going to find. I know I am offending again, but think about it. That is why I compared the border collie to the wolf in the "foxhound roots" piece, because their mode of operation is so startlingly similar.

That is a very long answer just to say; yes there are vast differences in the intellegence level found in various individual dogs. Some really want to please you and would rob the bank for you. Some others more toward the hound realm dont give a rip if you are even in the woods. Any obedience is completely forced with aversion training. I like a hound that is hunting for me, but I dont always get what I want.

As far as the cold nosed thing goes, this is a discussion that has gone on for decades, and maybe even centuries, with people a whole lot smarter than me. I have learned, however, that when I give a dog a ton of practice at it, they get better, and better, and better at it. I have seen them go from clumsy and unreliable to near perfection taking very old tracks they would have barely noticed as a pup, and almost never making a lose. Boy that makes for a ton of fun because with a dog like that, you WILL have action on most any hunt.

I am with you tomtom though. I feel your pain, because I have felt your pain. this is a tough sport to get started in. But I like it that way. I dont really like it if it just gets handed to you. It never gets it's work of character building done on you if it is that easy. If you master this sport on your own, I am confident that you can master anything in life. You will be too. Hang in there, because we are all huge fans.

Shorty wrote:I'd like S.Texan to chime in here. He's told me of good dogs of his not hunting (behind truck while roading) while the movement (bobcat) was off. Then when they went to moving those dogs would get out front and start looking for the cats. Like I say, hopefully he'll chime in here and tell more about that.

Maybe it wasn't the day those dogs didn't want to hunt. Maybe they just knew the cats weren't moving at that time. Just a thought.???

Now you got me looking back on those days when those dogs did not feel like hunting. I know one thing, I have had to assign Extra Sensory Perception to them on a few occasions when they did things I could not understand any other way.

You know, there are animals that seizure patients keep with them. The dog, cat or even snake, tells them when they are going to have a seizure so that they can get in a safe place and position.

There have been Jewish Rabbis that taught that animals could talk, but God would not allow it because it would make humans look so stupid. ha ha ha.

Boy, yea, maybe I got a new excuse for my sorry mutts. Thanks

"As far as the cold nosed thing goes, this is a discussion that has gone on for decades, and maybe even centuries, with people a whole lot smarter than me. I have learned, however, that when I give a dog a ton of practice at it, they get better, and better, and better at it. I have seen them go from clumsy and unreliable to near perfection taking very old tracks they would have barely noticed as a pup, and almost never making a lose. Boy that makes for a ton of fun because with a dog like that, you WILL have action on most any hunt."

Reading that sure makes sense and reminds me of a day when a friend and I were out hunting. I was green as the day is long (only 3/4 as long now ) and saw a track in the snow and pulled my dogs out. My friend said "you really gonna try that ugly old track??" I hadn't thought about it but, I figured since I couldn't age a track to save my life, I'd throw em in every track I found. Looking back, I think they eventually got much better moving old tracks. Hmmmm, I think I'm going to throw "the boys" in a bunch more this winter.

Well Shorty here we go.... TomTom asked if some dogs were smarter than others and if some dogs could smell colder than others. I'm like Mr David, I sure believe some dogs are smarter than others. Let me ask you a question, "Do you believe some people are smarter than others, or do they all have the same mentality?" I know the answer to that one, because I KNOW there are lots of people smarter than I am. I believe the same thing applies to dogs, some are just smarter than others. About cold noses...About 3 weeks ago my wife told me "I smell a dead rat in the wall (of the house). My son and I both told her that we didn't smell a thing. Next day she said the same thing again "I smell a dead rat". Still my son or I couldn't smell it. But the third day, we agreed that she was right, there "was a dead rat in the wall". This isn't the first time something like this has happened, she does have an excellent nose. I have often told her I was going to throw her in with my cat dog pack to help straighten out those looses. Now... why was she able to smell that rat 2 days before my son or I could? Keener or more sensitive nose? Could this also apply to our hound dogs, some just have a keener nose than others? Now I also know the more a dog is hunted and gets to trail, the keener his nose will get. I've seen it when I have been hunting hard, 8 to 10 times a week regularly, and I have the dogs "fine" tuned, working good for me. Then have one of my cold nose gyps come in heat and have to lay her up for 3 weeks or so. When I throw her back in the pack after 3 weeks rest, I can see a noticeable difference in the keenness of her nose, she has lost that "fine" tuneness. With a week or so of regular hunting she"ll get "fine tuned" again to the point before I layed her up.

Shorty, I got off track. You mentioned, dogs not hunting when game wasn't moving....The first dog that comes to mind is a dog I called Matt. I bought Matt when he was 11 months old, he hadn't been messed with up to that point. It was in December and the conditions were good when I got him and my older dogs were working good and I was showing them some cats. Within 3 months time Matt was starting his own cats, that's with all the dogs on the ground. He was beating the old dogs. This dog probably had more brains than any other dog I have ever owned. Not only was he smart he loved cat hunting, he had a passion for it. I remember when the dogs would smell a cold track, if Matt couldn't smell it good enough to move the track, he would take off in a direction looking for the trail, if he couldn't find, I've seen him run back into the road, stop, look one way then another way, look back the first way, then take off in one of those directions. But I mean you could see the wheels a turning in his head when he was trying to figure out which way he thought that cat might be. If that didn't work he'd come back and try something different, till he finally found the track away from there.

Sometimes if you got to a hunting spot to early, you knew the game wasn't moving but you dropped the dogs out anyway and went on hunting. Matt might get up front for 5 or 10 minutes then he'd come get behind the truck and just follow along. But during this time you wouldn't see any deer, rabbits, or any other game moving in the woods. Then, when things got right, Matt would come around the truck, get up front and might be the lead dog. You would also notice the game would start moving. Then they would get a cat started. Did Matt know the game wasn't moving and he didn't have a chance when he was behind the truck? How did he know "when" to start hunting? Sixth sense? When you're hunting, been hunting for 2 or 3 hours and haven't seen any game moving, nothing, then all of a sudden the rabbits are out, deer start crossing the road, a coyote or coon steps out in the road. What makes this game all start moving at the same time "feeding frenzie"? Can a dog sense this "feeding frenzie" and know when the cats are on the prowl? All I know I saw Matt do this numerous times and it wasn't because he was just having an off day because when he come around the truck, to get up front, he was all business. I believe he "knew" when it was time to go hunting. I'll get off of here. Happy hunting. Robbie

Wow, I can not get over how blessed we are on here, and the level of information that is getting passed around. I feel like I just watched a feature show on bobcat hunting in Texas. Thank you South Texan.

I was writing the following before I saw your post. I am not sure if it even is relevant after it, but since I already wrote it, will go ahead and throw it on the wall to see if it sticks. I was in response to jcathunters last post:

For some people cold trailing is really their biggest pleasure and point of pride in their dogs ability. That was true of Everett Manor. He went to great lengths to give his dogs practice cold trailing. He did not worry about the tree or even the jump in the off season. He made sure that a couple times a week he could get them on some rough old track that they could probably not finish. He just let them pound it out for as long as he had time for, or they just could not move it any more. I learned that lesson from him.

But many hunters in areas of high bobcat population will never let their dogs fool with cold tracks. Everett was a bit of an exception in this way. Why waste a couple hours on a cold track when there is probably a better track around the bend? Well, if you take pride and joy in a good job cold trailing I guess that is enough reason.

For us in the land of few bobcats, it sure can be the difference between having a hunt and not having a hunt. Many a dog has stayed in the dog box two or three days because no track hot enough could be found. Here is a good place to have that dog who has learned to pound it out. If you are a bit of a risk taker like me, you might put that dog on that rough old track, and come back and check on her from time to time while you are looking for something better.

I have a friend who is like a cold tracker of Jesus. He sees traces of Jesus all over the place. He hears him speak in everything. Man to me, these are old old tracks that I can not even smell. To him, they are evidence that God is moving today, and he is going to pick up the track to see where He is going.

It is a matter of awareness. I love watching a dogs awareness of the presence of scent progress so amazingly. I do not think the olfactory potential has changed in the dog. I think her awareness has changed. It is a beautiful thing.

At a minimum, this thread has saved me hundreds if not thousands of dollars in fuel. Time is something I'm usually short on. Right now I don't feel like that is a handicap. Thank you.

hi i see where you have written a book about bob-cat hunting iam wanting to buy a book about bob-cat hunting for my husband for x-mas but iam having trouble finding them i would appreciate any help many thanks turtle dove my e-mail is dreber46@gotrain.org