That is really interesting. Just shows how things differ between areas. Like Mondo said, we can only use six. Looking back, most times I wish there were only 3 in there during a ground battle. And if I had a wish, it'd be that I could pluck out the best start dog at that point and replace it with just a tough dog. Doesn't seem to work that way though. Whenever guys get antsy and want to pile in a bunch of dogs I usually say "We don't need more dogs in there, just better ones.".
Now that just applies to our area, I have no clue what it takes anywhere else. I don't know how it is by you, but we have areas that are off limits. So we have to do our best to keep the dogs out of there or get a visit from the local law.
Sometimes you roll the dice and other times you pass. It is common for some of our bigger bear to be wandering suckers. We trailed a pretty good bear for 8 miles this year and still didn't have it jumped before the dew burned off and the wind took the track away. The next good one was only 500 yards away, even though we had cut his track down a mile or so. Do you guys ever have that problem and if so, is it a snag the dogs wait til tomorrow kind of deal. We had a tornado about a dozen years ago and a big wind storm two yeas ago. We had areas that were a tipped over jungle. Dogs would catch and it was a mess. It'd take you 2 hours to go 150 yards, crawling, climbing, doubling back, repeat. Sometimes you felt like a monkey and others a badger trying to dig through. We killed one bear that didn't leave 80 acres and it took us all day to do it. I had my fill of that and I'll let you boys do the crawling to get to a bear. And the getting was the easy part, the extraction was a nightmare. I get queasy just thinking about it.
