Breeding emphasis

[1bludawg]

Good hounds are rare no matter how you breed.Its been said only 10% of the total hound population are actually a top hunting dog and I agree with that.
I believe both Male and female are equally important but as a bobcat hunter I can tell you finding 2 top dogs to breed is very difficult and then if their parents are sub par you won't get much in the way of game catching pups..
I've bred top males to good females over the years and it seems 2 pups is the best I can get out of a litter of 10, 11 or 12 pups. I mean 2 pups that are completely balanced and can tree cat on their own.
I've had a little experience with inbred and linebred dogs but haven't seen the percentage of top pups in a litter go up.
My advice would be to try and stack a 3 generation pedigree with as good a dogs as you can possibly do and hope for the best.
I recently made a cross in which the parents and all 4 grandparents can/could tree their own bobcats..It has the potential of being the best cross I've ever made and I'm extremely curious if more than 2 pups will make top dogs. I kept 3 that are coming 8 mos old and they are doing very well as of this writing.

[macedonia mule man]

Blue dog, that is the most believable estimate on good dogs that I’ve read on this hound page. I’m thinking about 5% reall outstanding. There was a man came my feed store about 12 yrs ago looking for willow leaf pole butter bean seeds. While I was weighing out and bagging the seeds, he made the statement, I hear you are trying to catch bobcat. I said Fred who told you that. He just smiled and said ,good luck where are you getting your dogs. My reply was, I guess I’ll have to raise and train them myself. He gave me that Fred smile again and said you will never live that long. He said at one time in the early 50 he and his dad were the only people in Livingston Parish Louisiana that caught cat and they had some good solid self made cat hounds. I said, ok put some words of wisdom on me. He explained that all the cat dogs they had came out of a pack of fox dogs. Back in the day a fox dog would start liking cat better than fox and the owner gave it to them or did away with it. A true fox hunter couldn’t have a dog mess up a fox race for a cat. He said out of all the self made cat dogs they had, these self made cat dogs never threw a pup as good as they were. According to Fred they made quite a few breedings before giving up. He was right, I don’t think I’m going to live that long.

[lawdawgharris]

I agree with trying to stack those first three generations. It usually increases your percentage but those genes have to nitch no matter related or unrelated. I made a cross 3 or 4 years ago that I would've lost the farm over betting on them to be my best litter. The female was a producer out of every male she was bred to and a heck of a dog in her own right. Her parents were both excellent dogs as were their parents. The male I had never bred but he was a really nice dog had that little more bite that I thought I was needing to add. I had bred his litter mate brother a couple times and a litter mate sister and both were outstanding producers. They were both deceased so we couldn't breed to them obviously. The litter was poor. The ones that are being hunted are being hunted by guys that are as picky and don't mind what I consider major imperfections. They catch hogs but they don't know which way the good dogs went until they hear them bayed. The ones that worked also matured very slow and started late. That same male was bred to 4 females with similar results everytime. It was a major disappointment.

Mule man that's pretty neat listening to how your dogs are working together. I have 2 littermates right now (2yr olds) that really seem to work well together when hunted together. I also hunt their mother with them. If the 3 of them are on the ground together a get a split bay, usually the littermates are together and the mother is solo, not always but usually. Of course if I hunt with someone else that has dogs, my dogs will pair up and their's will pair up. I like that myself. This morning we had 3 littermates and an uncle on the ground. At one point the 2 male littermates (mine and another buddies) were bayed together, the uncle was solo bayed, and my littermate female was solo bayed, all within 300 yards of each other. Catch one and that dog would honor the next closest, catch that one and they went to the other 2 and we caught it. Caught 5 or 6 total but it was neat to watch them work. Like yours mule man, mine have pretty similar mouths and bay with the same intensity so it can be hard to tell them apart just by listening sometimes.

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[1bludawg]

Lawdawgharris, you're right about a cross nicking but to complicate matters I've heard of guys making a second cross after the first was so successful and the 2nd cross was a flop.Go figure !
I've also seen culls bred and a top dog come out of it .
I've seen good ones bred and outside of 1 or 2 pups you wonder where the rest of the litter came from, Mars maybe?
When we breed hounds we're breeding for several traits in one animal and they can present themselves in many different ways in varying degrees and it seems most not to our(mine anyway) liking.

[scrubrunner]

Lawdawg, I like females, I keep all the females and start em all because I want the best one. Once they get to running I'm going to pick what I want as soon as I think I can tell which ones. Sometimes I mess up but not often. The year olds I have now was a litter of 10, 5 females, 5 males so got rid of the males except 1, gave 3 to friends, sold one, man wouldn't take it without paying for it. I have just started hunting the ones I kept. Covid has forest shut down here, threw a wrench into my plans, these pups need to be in the woods!

[Nolte]

[bowieknife50]

I don't have anything intelligent to add but feel compelled to say that reading this thread has convinced me that I don't have a clue how much I don't know about dogs. Hopefully I'm able to do it long enough to get half the experience of you guys. Thanks for putting these insights out there.


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[Nolte]

Well the more I thought I knew the less I really knew.

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[lawdawgharris]

Scrubrunner I hope you get them there soon. Hopefully this stuff will start to fizzle out but I ain't looking good. I like having to knit pick pups to decide which one I'm gonna keep. That means the odds are better for choosing a good one. Maybe not the best one but a good one. Keeping all those gyps and not having an obvious cull or keeper could be good or bad lol.

That's very true about one litter to the next not being the same. It's the same in horses. You don't see many breeders use the same stud to breed to the same mare every time because of this very reason. We use to break colts for a fella every summer. He would give us a 2yr old to break 2 others. The first one we chose to keep was a bay stud colt. We cut him and man he was easy to get along with. He made a really nice horse that anyone could ride and rope off of. Not the most athletic but good. The next year we picked his full brother that was a year younger. An athlete and then some. If you ever relaxed on him he would fly you to the moon. I've seen him dump one buddy in the middle of a gravel road, break another buddies collar bone, blow up in the middle of a ropin while dallied off to a steer. He was and out law at heart. The next year we gambled and picked a full sister. Couldn't help it, she was just too easy on the eyes. She was somewhere between the two geldings in every category. She made a pretty nice horse in the end. 3 horses bred the same and 3 different types. It's the same in dogs sometimes too.



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[1bludawg]

Bowieknife50, I'll bet Nolte will tell you the same thing but the more dogs you work with and observe over the years the more you'll learn.Dogs like people are basically the same but different, about the time you think you've got them figured out an oddball will come along and teach you something new.

[macedonia mule man]

The most important decision for me to make is not who I’m breeding to or which pup or pups I keep but how long do I give a pup to prove I need it. Every day is time lost and dog feed down the drain. I’ve decided that if you put a 6-10 month old( I talking running dog) with a couple of good dogs that know what’s going on, it should be running and working a check in a dozen trips. What do you other running dog users think?

[perk]

Lawdawg I was gonna answer but then everyone else in the world would have access to the secrets of breeding and I wouldn't be smartest man in the world LOL. Personally prefer breeding smart dogs that are bidable, and put more emphasis on the gyp personally, I will say I don't wanna breed to a Male dog that doesnt have a strong desire to catch and finish off game.

Muleman depends on how many dogs I'm hunting, how a dogs bred, and what her ancestors were like on deciding how long to keep a dog. Hunted a really nice gyp pup 1 time 30+ times before she started and turned into an excellent dog, that being said I like a quick starter. Maybe not 1st trip but staying or trying to stay with dogs by 3-4 races. When decided when to cull, my rule of thumb is if at 3 yr old I leave you at home and dont miss hearing you in the pack, your basically filler and can find a new home.

[scrubrunner]

Hi Perk, good to see you pop up here.
Muleman, I'm talking running dogs too, I don't take mine hunting until 10 months to a year, they need to be physically capable of staying in a race because I'm going to throw them in it with however many is in the chase whether I'm alone with 6-8 head or with buddies and there's 20 head. After they've started they need to be able to stay hooked up after 3-4 races. I agree with you they need to be getting a pick up on a lose every now and then after a dozen or so races.
With that said, It depends on my dog situation how fast I cull, if I have more than I want to fool with, i cull fast and close (like about the dozen race mark). If I just have one or two pups and their not interfering with the race or causing me any problems handling or anything there's no telling how long I might haul em. I've also been guilty of hauling one too long because it's out of ol so and so.
My standards are not as high as they were when I was young, I had to have the cream of the crop, the best of the best. Now I just want a bunch of dogs and that can chase a varmit that dang sure knows it's being chased and don't embarrass me to bad when hunting with others.
I know I'm on here using a lot of words and not really saying anything, but dadgumit the communist forest service won't let me go hunting right now.

[not color blind]

[scrubrunner]

Not color blind, Federal, National Forest. It's a messed up deal. We have to have what they call a special use permit and can run fox only, when it's not hunting season in the forest. Fox/Bobcat season is Nov. thru Apr. 15. Our hunting is regulated by the state, but the special use permit has to be obtained from the National Forest Service by the state game department before the state can issue us a running permit. I have a screen shot of the application submitted by the state to the NFS which states "rejected due to Covid 19".
We just got it to where we could run fox in the forest outside of hunting season about 5 years ago. I got out of the hunting club that I could hunt year round in last year because it was a 2 hour drive and the forest is only 30 minutes and better hunting. But now it looks like these year old pups that are bearly started might not get back in the woods before November.
I did something with these pups I've never done before, I do not run coyotes, do not let my dogs run coyotes but due to the above situation I took them to a coyote pen out of state and started them on coyotes. Hopefully I can break em off em after I get em in some fox and cat races. But that bunch of pups can flat run a yote by themselves in a pen.