Dog changes mouth on certain tracks

[Mike Leonard]

A different subject that got into the mouth a hound uses or how much got me to thinking about this subject.

Now this has to do with lion hunting but I am sure it could happen with other game as well.

I have seen this happen more when running one dog or when one dog was the real leader on the trail. I know some say a certain dog will trail every track about the same and use the same amount of mouth on the track, but I have seen certain dogs that have strayed from that pattern.
I will explain:
I had a flag tailed spotted walker dog years back that was a real game catcher. This dog had a high tenor bawl on track, and his voice really carried. He was a dog that could cold trail fast but he also was a do that would really drift out on a loss and usually picked it up again well away from many dogs that stayed rooted in the ground.
In some of the areas I was hunting the lions had quite a bit of pressure on them so many of them had been run and lost a bunch and some lions really get smart after having this happen a few times. Even if bedded up they will hear a hound and they will get right up and go to moving out into bad country as soon as they hear a hound bark. I have probably seen this more with female lions but some toms get wise too. They will get up and leave at a trot and head into areas where hounds really have trouble catching up wit them places like bluffy craigs and they may even do a lot of doubling back on their track which really make things confusing and slow down the hounds and some of them get almost impossible to catch on anything but ideal conditions. I had one old female lion pretty close by and I knew here range pretty well and it was close so I could usually get some training on with her if I had some time. After being caught and let go a few times she really got smart, and I had even seen her with my eyes a few times up ahead of the hounds pulling some of her stuff and she would pull off some of her stunts and many times just leave the dogs in the dust.

Well old Booger was a smart hound and must have known her by her smell and although he was usually a wide open trailer, he started changing up his tactics. I would see him strike her tracks , and then it was almost like he had to talk to himself not to open up and start bawling down the trail. I even heard him sort of whine but not really open up but he would be off on her track . If he happened to slip away from the other hounds or if I was hunting him alone and the track was pretty fresh it usually wasn't too long and I would hear him scream JUMPED! and soon he would have her caught. But if the other hounds stayed right with him bawling along many times she would leave us wandering around rock piles and get plumb away.
She finally got killed when she ran right across the road in front of a truck load of hunters and they dumped out on her and one guy shot her with a rifle as she ran in front of the hounds. Gone was my trainer but later I saw this dog do it on other lions and although I don't like a silent or semi-silent hound I have to say he was a smart dog and he got to thinking like a lion.
I have since seen other hounds do this and I have also seen jealous hounds run silent and catch especially when they get a little older and have some younger hounds pushing them for the lead.


I was just wondering if any of hunters had ever seen this?

[david]

Booger and the trainer are a good one for your book Mike. Maybe they are already in there.

I have seen dogs learn to go quiet on bobcat. I am thinking of one, and when she shut up, tyou knew we were about to hear the catch. I always wondered if she was going stealth mode, or if she did that so she could hear it better and close the gap by ear, then sight. She was not pure hound though.

In any case, if this is something a dog develops through experience, I always saw it as a sign of intelligence. If I was a breeder, I would breed toward it if for no other reason than an intelligence indicator.

[Jeff Eberle]

[al baldwin]

Mike I enjoy reading your post on lion hunting, did not realize lion get wise to dogs & get on the move at first bark. Have experienced lots of bobcats that do that making them very difficult to catch with an opened mouthed dog. However I have experienced a few lion that were difficult for my dogs to locate the correct tree. Recall once dogs were treed solid on a big busy tanoak, after searching that tanoak for 30 minutes or so spotted a small lion about 50 feet or so away about twenty feet up a smaller tree, clinging to that tree like a mounted lion in someone/s showcase. Sure wish I had a camera never seen anything quite like it before or since. Al

[david]

[Cowboyvon]

I've heard it from many hunters lately... like Mike said especially these female lions are learning to move out in front of the hounds heard it from Warner Glenn and Floyd Green .. Down here where I spent much of the winter I had a female close to the house .. conditions are terrible at best.. I trailed her around a lot but never could get close .. always felt like we were trailing at 2 mph and she was ahead trotting at 5 mph .. I did get her in some bluffs one day and looking back on it now I'm sure she doubled back on me.. walked down into them and then came on back over her own track .. it was late in the day.. As far as the mouth goes I have noticed when the hounds are messing around with a fox or bobcat they are more babbly and when they are trailing a lion they are tighter lipped .. and more interested in where he is going instead of where he's been

[david]

That sparked a memory that made me smile.
I was training a young Kemmer Cur that was looking like he was going to exceed what I had experienced previously. It only took one or maybe two scoldings on deer, then he started running them completely silent. Some dogs deffinately can learn that silence might help them get what they want most. Lol

Unfortunately, he got killed by a car because of sneaking away from me on deer.

[Mike Leonard]

Interesting stuff!

Brett,
I have a good trapper buddy that has hunted lions with me over the years a few times and my dogs caught a nice big tom for his brother, who had quite a trophy collection.

Anyway he spends a lot of time in the hills, and he told me he watched a lion hunter from a distance with a spotting scope coming down the road that ran along a rim and he had seen a tom's track cross it that morning. It was not completely dry and there were some patches of snow and he said he could tell from the tracks that did hit snow that the lion had crossed that night. He was down the ridge about half a mile setting out on a point with his spotting scope and had been watching some elk in the canyon below. So this lion hunter stops and they throw some hounds out on that track. He said as soon as those dogs opened up he caught a flash of movement across the canyon from where he was setting. He said a pretty big lion got up and started trotting down thru the rocks and boulders, He said the lion would stop every now and then and look back and listen to the hounds. The dogs were not making fast headway on the track as it might have been froze down pretty good because it was bitter cold he said. But they were coming along and had a young man walking with them and helping them by sight when they lost the trail.

He said that lion never broke out of the trot except when he stopped to listen. The lion went down thru the boulders circled around a little header, made a couple of small circles in there and then came back out and proceeded to hit the canyon bottom, and got in a sand wash and just totted out of sight.

Now then that lion was right there just minutes before when the kid with the dogs finally got to where he came out of his bed initially but the dogs never speeded up, and in fact they made a loss right there and the boy had to find the track and call them to it where the lion trotted off.

The trapper said the boy and the dogs spent several hours going around and around in that rocky little canyon and could never get that lion track moving faster than a snail's pace. When he finally did hit the sand wash it was all over, the dogs could smell nothing. He sight trailed it for a few hundred yards, and lost it.


My guess would be that the lion probably didn't go very far and bedded up again and probably heard them when they loaded up and went home.

Yes they do get smart at times.

As we know unlike bobcat scent which doesn't last long but can get airborne, lion scent hangs very low and can be faint but it doesn't hang up in the air for very long. It may remain however present much longer on the ground than the scent of a bobcat, fox or even a bear. Therefore a real cold trailer may stay on even a fairly old track all day long at times, but if that lion has been schooled on, you may never get any closer to him than when you started the track.

So maybe at times, one of those shut up and go catch dogs could be a blessing.

[Jeff Eberle]

[mark]

That Booger dog Mike speaks of and the way he handled those moving out ahead type tracks is exactly why i changed over to running x dogs. A very high percentage of the pure running dogs i have hunted and hunted around all pretty much shut their mouths when they happen to get behind a varmint until they are back up under it and then they fire away again. A dog that is smart enough to know it is losing ground on a varmint and shuts up until caught up again will catch a lot of game that would otherwise walk off and leave em. Took me a lot of years to figure that out. Maybe not so much to figure it out but to find the kind of dogs that run that way

[mark]

That Booger dog Mike speaks of and the way he handled those moving out ahead type tracks is exactly why i changed over to running x dogs. A very high percentage of the pure running dogs i have hunted and hunted around all pretty much shut their mouths when they happen to get behind a varmint until they are back up under it and then they fire away again. A dog that is smart enough to know it is losing ground on a varmint and shuts up until caught up again will catch a lot of game that would otherwise walk off and leave em. Took me a lot of years to figure that out. Maybe not so much to figure it out but to find the kind of dogs that run that way

[Rossco]

When it comes to rigging dogs. I have seen times where all the dogs box. When you let them down, I have seen older dogs that in the past have been wide open from the time they started the track at a young age hold back on opening at an older age. These are typically not a really fresh track. Thanks to GPS, a guy can see what a dog is doing a little better. These older dogs would go out and find a track and while the young dogs were still hunting close to the pickup, the older dogs would push the track out 800 yards or so before they started opening. I don't think a person should rely on a GPS to hunt. But, they are fun when you use them to study what a dog is actually doing

[Bluedog88]

I have a bluetick she'll run deer with I real high piched chop then whine. I can always tell when it's a deer. Maybe 300 tops and she'll turn back like just running them out of her area then she's back to hunting.