Merchants Tree Blaster

[longwalker]

Anybody out there ever own a pup out of him? How did you like 'em. Good and bad, I'd like to hear it all.

[Spanky]

hunted with several hounds out of blaster that were ok. I would say they were above average in ability but nothing like the hype, they can get you in trouble no different then any other hound or color

[Buckskinner]

I bought a treeblaster pup from Bob Marosok in Wy after he bought treeblaster and started campaigning him real heavy. She made an average dog, she had a sorry mouth. She did cold trail descent. Nothing to stand around bragging on thats for sure! I did buy other dogs from Bob out of his Little Topper breeding that was realy nice dogs on cats.

[WALKERDOG#1]

i have a 9 yr old direct son out of tree blaster. he is an above average hound with a great mouth. he throws excellent pups. breedings to him are 150 or pick of litter

[Spanky]

get ahold of Bill Ziegler on this site. He lives in wyoming. He has blaster hounds. I have hunted with his Sawyer hound and he was a good one for sure....

[roberthofmann]

nance breed walkers will catch any thing you put them on they have really cold noeses on them the treeblaster dog really helped the nance breed really out blaster anded a lot a tree power to them the old time nance breed hounds were fox hounds . if you want good hound you should call bob they will take a track that 3or 4 days old and tree it if you dont bleave me just call bob about it bob make a living at this and so does his son . iam buy some nance breed walkers from him you want to remeber this bob guides couger hunts all thease other hound that people are breeding are hot nose hounds . i am not say they are bad . there is nothing wrong with a hot nose hound . but you are going to catch more game with a cold nose dog . how many hot nose dog can catch a cat not very many . so please dont talk bad about tree blaster if you dont know any thing about him . how many rockriver sacket dogs out there cat a cat not very many . tree blaster could catch a cat .ive hunted a lot of sacket dogs and seen some good stuff out of them. not all sacket dogs make cat or good bear dogs . they are ok coon dogs in ukc stuff .

[mike martell]

can anyone answer one simple question? why did bob marosoks buy merchants tree blaster if the nance dogs are the real deal. bobby lyles of the white cloud fame was impressed with the nance line for dirty cold nosed hounds.topper, bobby, wolf mountain boomer. this was accomplished. but what was lost along the way was tree! did bob marosoks look to gain tree power or just buy the dog to breed and promote. i never followed what he did with blaster. i just assumed if he had the same issus as i experienced, he was needing to hold a lion for a client and couldn't get the job done. as simple as this sounds this is exactly what i had seen with dozens of w.c. marosoks crossed dogs.this is not intended to piss anyone off. the facts were evident over ten years of different crosses i have hunted and seen. knowledge is good for those serious enough to make crosses to never be repeated. this qualifies to the letter of the law.out crossing may have been the reason. maybe if you get the all nance you have solid tree dogs. the thing i have seen out west is no tree.i'm not talking about treeing 15 feet up in a juniper but 80 feet up a fir or pine tree.this pattern has run for decades. i'm just looking for solid input, not you own a nance and it trees and reproduces hard tree dogs, and evidently you don't know hounds. but dialog on where these crosses failed. thanks.

[Mr.pacojack]

I don't think you are going to get a simple answer for this simple question because I don't think it is that simple.
This is not just a problem with the W.C. dogs Nance or Marosok dogs as you stated this is a problem with dogs out west and this problem is not color blind.
In my oppinion too many tears are shed over these dogs of yesteryear, and there is no use crying over spilt milk but I do agree with you, it would be nice to know so this mistake wont happen agian. More importantly how was the great dogs made?
I feel many people get caught up in the line of the dogs....Line breeding does not gaurentee you will produce superstars and too many people think that. Even in line breeding certain dogs cross over better on each other and the same goes with outcrosses.
20 years or so ago I had one of the most well rounded hounds I have ever seen and one of the best I have ever owned. I had line bred females and bought some of the tightest linebred females I could find. The pups never could hold a candle to the sire. He crossed over great on one female and she was a total outcross. A young man that hunted with me and this dog wanted some dogs from me but wanted the line bred version and is still running these dogs today and to this day they can't hold a candle to the Good dog. But is still running off the name of this dog.
My goal was, I wanted to breed dogs better than the sire I had .
What I have seen is too many people want to make a name for their dog and their selves and as a result the offspring do not benifit.
Great Question Mike, dont' get me wrong in anyway, I agree with you 100%.
Hopefully you will get some responces without the bashing and B.S. that goes on like you said.

[twist]

Hear is my thought and just my thoughts.I have had the Nance strain for close to 25 yrs they are nice biggame minded hounds never had one that would catch a 3 or 4 day old lion track in Montana lion season as it is very similar to Wyoming conditions or would catch everything I turned them out on isnt doing to happen here or in Wyoming or any place else if any one believes that they are DREAMERS. 15 or so years ago Bob was into field trialing and nite hunting pretty hard the Nance strain of dogs he had then were fast hard track runnin and nice tree minded dogs just what a BIGGAME hunter is looking for. But he got cought up in that wanting to WIN CIRCLE and was looking for that great power house, pressure tree dog and that was what Blaster was weather there was (game in the tree or not)! This kind of dog wins nite hunts, if you cant find the coon in the tree you just get circle points (easy way of saying they are false treed) Blaster must have been a great compition type hound but was not a great producer of biggame hounds. Hope I dont ruffle any feathers just my thoughts. Andy

[roberthofmann]

we have that promblem in all the hound breeding here .so why did bob put treeblaster in his dog s if treeblaster is not that good . some of the tree blaster dogs where nice hounds .so why did he put treeblaster in the nance breed dog his daddy hunted thease dogs for years befor he died and bob took over them and his son has them to . only reason treeblaster was put in them becuse they where fox hound in them and they final breed the fox hound out of them lester nance started with them . he the first whone who reg this breed of hound . if thease hounds where bad i dont think bob would be hunting them . i dont like to burst people buble here . i own a nance dog and it is pup

[mike martell]

paco, andy. ruffle feathers?this is cool about the caliber of guys weighing in on this topic. here it is straight up, i like the walker breed as a whole and my goal is simple, improve it as much as possible for the better of the breed nothing more or less. i'm not a dog jockey or breeder but a hunter first. each of the mentioned lines are tops in there own family of dogs. i reflect back on a strain of hounds that made me give up hunting plotts years back. this being the old woodscreek loose bruce line of dogs. these dogs did real well within the same family or outcrossed. they seem to fade with inbreeding. at least with dogs i hunted.paco. i think you are right about how some like riding off the name and not performance testing the dogs ability. i wish ukc would go away and be replaced with a system of at least making sure the dog could trail and tree before being registered. but hey what is less than for you and me may just be tops for the next hunter by there standards.

[twist]

Roberthofman, I believe that Bob has been trying to get back to the old Nance style dogs he once had as he has just about weeded out the Blaster breeding in his program as they were not the big improvement he was hoping for in the biggame world. Paco and Mike you guys are 100% right about the hipe of old time dogs just because you own a great grandson of old so and so doesnt mean squat if they cant trail and tree this is were a strict cull plan needs to be put in place. later Andy

[Mr.pacojack]

[twist]

Devin, you are for sure right on the culling of hounds. The weekend hunter for sure out weights the full time hunter and for that reason hounds are not culled like they should be. That is why I said a strict cull plan NEEDS to be in place as very seldom there is not one. In my opinion I dont care if a person is a weekend hunter or making a living at it if they are not catching game consistantly with a certain dog they better be looking for something else but that usually doesnt happen that dog is pasted on to someone else as the owner will say with just a little more time they should make a dog and this dog is already 4 or maybe even older and some other ding dong will take it and the cycle starts all over again. later Andy

[Bill Ziegler]

Of course Bob was interested in Blaster to enhance the tree in his dog. He saw a need and went after the dog that, at the time, was one of the best producers of tree dogs alive. Isn’t that a sign of a good breeder? Bob’s claim to fame at the time was that he was one of the last breeders of the true Nance bred dogs. He knew people would think he was abandoning the Nance bloodlines but he still did what he thought was needed.

Bob and I had gotten several pups out of Blaster and recognized what he could put into his pups. Rick Rodermal owned Blaster at the time and was hunting him in Indiana in small shelter belts and corn fields surrounded on all sides by paved roads. Anybody that had ever hunted with Blaster talked about the amount of hunt and hustle he had in him. We could have gone on and just kept breeding to him and buying pups out of him, but common sense said that he wasn’t going to be around long in that situation. So we bought him.

Blaster was an old time Yadkin River bred dog. Those old Yadkin River bred dogs weren’t without their issues. A lot of them were one man dogs. Most had huge mouths, but the one’s that didn’t have huge mouths tended to have very sorry mouths. They weren’t the best made dogs by a far shot. But the good ones were hard going hunters with lots of track and tree. When you bred to Blaster you had to know that there was always the potential for some of those issues to show up.

Blaster himself was a big, loose mad dog with flat feet and he was pretty cow hocked. He did have a nice houndy look to him though. His mouth was legendary….one of the loudest ever. He was an absolute joy to have around the kennel. He never barked out of place.

We never hunted Blaster but talked to dozens of hunters who had. Nobody argued that he wasn’t a top coonhound. Although he was best known for the amazing show he put on at the tree, most also talked about how hard he hustled. He hunted wide and deep for a track. He took his tracks as he came to them and he pushed a track in a way that would have made his daddy, (Yadkin River Champ) proud. He was also known to be a very good, accurate locator. And of course, that mouth. His biggest fault was that he was a trashy son of a gun.

There were several outstanding crosses made off Blaster. There were also some crosses that had mixed results and some that didn’t work out well at all. There was also a lot of females bred to him that were absolute culls….females that had nothing going for them except that they were out of “somebody’s line”. As a result, there were a lot of really good dogs out of Blaster, some that were just o.k. and some that were absolute junk. Blaster put a lot of his strengths in those pups that went on to become “good ones”, and his strengths were something that would have benefited most hunter’s bloodlines (both coonhunters and big game hunters). As with any dog, you also had to decide if his faults were something you were willing to take a chance on.

It’s human nature I guess that if you don’t like somebody, you don’t want to like their dog. And if you don’t want to like their dog, you can always find a dud or two out of them to convince yourself that they are lousy reproducers. Just like, (though exactly the opposite) if you want to like a dog, you can usually find an example or two to make a case that they are outstanding reproducers. Bob has a pretty strong personality and can rub some people the wrong way, (I suppose I can too, but not nearly as many folks know me) but that has nothing to do with what Tree Blaster had to offer. All in all, I believe he made a very positive impact on the Walker breed, especially out west, where as some have mentioned, there was a serious need for more tree power.



p.s., I haven’t talked a lot with Bob for several years now, but I did run into him a week or so ago. He told me of all the crosses he’s made recently with Blaster’s semen. It sure didn’t sound like he’s trying to get away from Blaster blood in his dogs.