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How many people do you hunt with and mix dogs? Do you let other people run dogs with yours and how does that work out? Dewey

Mr. Dewey,

A very good multi part question which should provoke some good responses; I feel that there are NO Right Answer to this, just what works and has worked for the Hunter posting.

Question one "How many do you hunt with". We hunt with 4 others regularly and as many as a dozen other Bobcat and Bobcat/ Fox hunters during the year. This will range from Deep South Texas to Northern MO, then East to Florida and North to VA.

How many Packs do we mix Hunt Dad's Hounds with.....0.....none, not even the Packs made up of Littermates to Dad’s? The reason for this is each Hunter/Houndsman who hunt these Hounds all do something a little different in Style than we do...not wrong just different. Also Our Hounds do not know these Hounds and will not Honor these and Vice Versa.

I know that others do this in other Parts of the Country...it is the Culture there to do this. It just is not what we feel makes a cohesive Pack of Hounds.

As I have stated before the COMPETION with us is not with another’s Hounds but with the quarry being pursued. Dad and I both enjoy hearing a Good set of Hounds perform no matter who owns them and the color or breed….if they are getting it done, we are soaking it up!

Just our thoughts!

I have over the years hunted with quite a few different houndsmen and their hounds and it was very enjoyable but for the past 10 years I have gotten to where I just hunt with one other hunter that I alow to bring dogs I have hunted with him for close to 30 yrs and He was taught to hunt my style and we run and catch consistantly. I have always invited guys to ride along and watch and shot the breeze I have been real hesitant to any other hounds as it seem to work alot better if just certain dogs that have hunted together over a certain period of time catch more game. Also I am usaully hunting a young dog or two and find you start mixing other peoples dogs and things start to fall apart and your catch ratio drops. So anyone is welcome to ride along at any time and watch the hounds do their work and shot the breeze.

Not a good Idea for many, many reasons. There is way more bad than good scenerios from mixing packs. I do like to have a buddy hunt every so often though. If they come with me in my truck, they bring a pup. If I go with them in their truck, I bring a pup. Not correcting on 1 bad race, can give a hunter fits for weeks. The best hunting partner has no dogs, brings lunch and has learned to keep his mouth shut. JMO. John.

I pretty much hunt alone for cats other than just a passenger every once in a while. My hounds seem to do better without strange dogs being around. This year I only hunted 2 or 3 days with friends that brought dogs. When I hunted bear or lion permits I would hunt with others and it worked out fine and had alot of fun.

dwalton wrote:How many people do you hunt with and mix dogs? Do you let other people run dogs with yours and how does that work out? Dewey

I might hunt with 6 to 8 different people in a year. Now most of these people just go once or twice with me a year. But...I am pretty selective about who goes with me. Then also I would guess about 95 to 98% of the time, I'm hunting by myself. Now....when I say they go hunting with me, we are mixing the dogs.

Very interesting to me to go with a few others that really produces (mixing our dogs). Sometimes I just like to see how my dogs perform when I know they are up against some stiff competition in dog work. Only way to observe this dog work between the dogs is they have to be on the ground at the same time, same conditions, same cat because they're too many variables in cat hunting, things can change from one minute to the next. One cat can be a lot tougher to trail or run than the next. So everything has to be equal between the dogs otherwise it's not a comparable test.

I do this because if my dogs are getting out performed in one area or another (trailing, running, etc.) then I'm going to try and get a dog that will compensate where my pack is lacking in ability, hopefully from a cross from the dog that is out performing them. I'm always trying to better my pack, they need all the help they can get.

If I do hunt with someone I don't know anything about, which is once in a blue moon. Any dog I have that I think might be tempted into something wrong will have a shock collar on. But most of the time my dogs want honor a dog they don't know anyway. Robbie

Warner5 wrote:Not a good Idea for many, many reasons. There is way more bad than good scenerios from mixing packs.

I agree on this

Warner5 wrote:The best hunting partner has no dogs, brings lunch and has learned to keep his mouth shut. JMO. John.

This is absolutely priceless!!!!

Most of the time I mix my dogs up with others, both of us spend the whole day explaining that they don't usually act like that. Fortunately, most of the guys I have hunted with realize mixing packs is a bad idea, and should only be done to enjoy a day of story telling and laughter. If you seriously want to see a cat get caught, it should be done without mixing packs.

There are a couple guys that I have mixed dogs with a few times a year. It isn't quite as bad as a completely new pack of dogs but I am sure neither pack is operating at 100%.

I like South Texan's answer. I'm not afraid to Put my dogs down with any other dogs. It really tells me how well or how much work I need to do.

Sometimes it makes me feel good how well my dogs do, But allot of times I realize that there are better out there.

One of the things I find out, it tells me how Broke my dogs are... Allot of time This is where I fail... and I only see it with New dogs.. I guess I could say they were broke if I only hunting alone or with other Broke dogs.. But I know better, and I still have some work.

Buddy

i'm guilty of asking people that don't own hounds to tag along. mostly lack of patience, on my part. like dads dog boy has tried to explain in the past, the dogs if ya listen and watch, most of the time they will tell ya what they are doing. and i guess don't tolerate kennel blindness (aka my dog would never do that). none of them including mine are perfect, the only time they make no mistakes is when you shovel the last shovel of dirt on them. that being said i have had a few people i consider friends that i have hunted with that knew if an adjustment needed to be took care of it got done and we had a good hunt. not a long day of one train wreck after another. also how many of your own hounds a person can handle is completely a much different number than a mixed bunch. sort of like kids the more ya mix in the more creative they get. good luck and take care!

Glad to read I/m not the only one, who has hunted alone a lot after I began to hunt bobcat only. It has always been more enjoyable to hunt with another hunter. Problem is trying to mix the dogs. When my partner & I hunt we always each take our own rigs. As I aged wife could not understand why I never took more houndsmen with. Like slowaneasy stated, I told her hounds were a lot like teenagers. A pack of 4 or5 used to hunting togeather, bobcat oriented was fine. Throw one bad apple in, a train wreck can happen. To me dogs are creatures of habit most young dogs hunted with clean dogs give very little trash problems. Coyote problems seem to happen at about two. And did this winter with my two year old. Got lucky old dogs told on him enough so I could burn him up with the tri. couple times. At present he has refused to road when coyote scent around, but I/m sure not going to let my guard down & plan to work him on trapped coyote. I doubt he will ever be a complete cat hound. But as a box dog think he will excell. Twenty some years ago moved & have a small apple orchard, a few feet from the kennels, deer are residents to the orchard & deer problems have been few & far between with the young dogs. But if I see the deer near kennels I will collar dogs & turn them lose. Thanks Baldwin

Thanks for the post guys: I hunt mostly alone. I like company and have a young guy a long but don't run dogs together for all the reasons above plus because of dog fights. If someone wants to run with me they can come and run 1 dog if I want to see that dog hunt but would rather ride along with them and leave my dogs at home. In the past I have had hunting partners that raised there dogs with mine and that worked out OK, now I hunt to many dogs for that. Dewey

back when jon warner and i first started hunting together we would each take 2 maybe 3 apiece and it worked out great . we hunted alot together and the dogs new eachother. i sure wish his bud dog would have bred my cindy dog . like has already been said there can be alot of headaches when putting strange dogs together but if done correctly is very fun . thinking back on those days with jon the first 2 days we ever hunted with eachother we treed 5 times found 3 bobcats and a lion . the only tree we never found the cat was the one we seen cross the road . i might be wrong but i can only think of 3 cats we ran that winter we never seen in a tree . not saying they were not there but we never seen them. we looked in one tree for about an hour once , great big old grouth . finally one of us told the other we are some blind cussword s . there is the cat right there . it was in a tree about 12 ft off the ground behind the big tree . good times . if u hunt with a guy all the time it is fun once the 2 guys get on the same page and the dogs know eachother.

jc

J.C. is right many good memories go back to those days. Still looking for dogs that can do what those one's could. It worked back then because we hunted and trained together so much that the dogs became 1 pack. J.C. you find another Cindy, and I'll find another Bud dog. WE will pick -up where we left off. Except this time we will be smart enough to get some pups. Thanks. John.

Well glad to hear I'm not the only one who has issues with mixing packs, I hunt by myself alot and then with just a couple of other friends. I can let myself get frustrated by my dogs not honoring or even remotely wanting to hunt with other peoples dogs, I have found over the years that the dogs I like the best (the smarter and more biddable ones!) seem to have more problem with this than the 'hammer heads' do.
I have to remind myself that they do just fine on their own and being as thats usually how I hunt...well I just better cork it and let them redeem themselves later, getting mad at that point only reinforces the idea in the dogs brains that those other dogs are bad news.
I have never had any extra trash problems with strange dogs as usually mine are already suspicious of what the stranger dogs might be running anyhow

I do have a question though, have any of you noticed that your stranger dog 'shy' dogs seem to not be as bad about dogs that are close blood relatives - even if they don't hunt together a whole lot? They must be able to smell it genetically somehow, I mean if dogs can detect cancer cells in a urine sample why not genetic relationships?