Pitts for catching bear

[bigboarstopper]

I have a hunting partner that hunts in the foothills of nor california. Sometimes he trees a bear sometimes he bayes a hog. Hes got his hounds and hes got his airedale/catahoula crosses. The hounds do the striking/trailing and the airedale/catahoulas stop the hog/pressure the bear to tree. Ive noticed that his hog races are a lot longer than mine but his bears tree faster than others I have hunted with. Running a pitt sounds like a quick way to get a dog killed. I have had many pitt catchdogs for hogs over the years. Males and females. Ive always looked for the most gentile/docile pitts for my catchdogs. Pitts almost always catch after a few hunts. Its rare to find one that wont. I just look for the easyest handling and best tempered.

[BARTAMENKO]

it seems if your going to run a catch dog that means catch, not tree when you tree a bear and he is only up about 20'
the dogs adrenalin really kicks in then a catch dog is going to catch whats ever closest.
come on 10 miles at 35 mi per hour easy on the sauce

[Pops]

reread it bart
it was 12 miles 25-30 from a curXbull and i built him up to it. i suppose if i'd known it was impossible i never would have tried. since i didn't i just kept picking up the pace & distance/ when he got slowed down from getting cut by hogs we would start over from where he was comfortable.
OTH i am sure i could get 35 for 10 miles out of my shag since he can just barely top 40 for at least 2 miles and in bursts can nearly reach 45. now if he could get up to speed faster he'd really catch alot more game.

[lrfarms27572]

Just wondering WHERE you guys are hunting bears and hogs in the same area?

We do both in NC.

as far as a "bear catch dog", i would say that's an oxymoron. if your buddy is hell-bent on doing this though, I might recommend an argentine dogo. i have seen them used quite often in big cat hunting. we love them for hog hunting, put a pitt to shame. hope this helps.

happy hunting.

[Jake Bell]

not sure about you boys but i like the happy medium for grit in a bear dog,
i like a dog gritty enough to stay with a mean one all day and maybe pull a bit of fur if he can, but not one psyco enough to pile drive a bear. Believe me,we had a 10 month old pup do this to a 475 lber. some may question this but he has had holes punched in him by bears since he was 7 m/o and even at a young age he was insane, even on caged coon@ 4 m/o. he treed the bear no doubt but he paid the price, was pretty close to putting him down but pulled a hale marry and he is still not recovered from his bite on the shoulders. i like him but he is too gritty to keep around, next time the vets is not an option, im hoping he learned his lesson that sometimes its better to stand back and bay.

[lrfarms27572]

jake makes a good point, and again i would certainly not advocate the use of a catch dog on a bear.

jake, something that may help dogs like this one you spoke of in the future. well looks like you might be doing something similar with the coon...

we start a high percentage of our bear dogs on hogs. the hogs beat on em a bit, dealing less damage than a bear (de-tusked hog that is). they get roughed up a bit and i feel like this teachs them to literally back up, obviously it encourages some dogs to go harder but most of them learn to keep their distance in a hairy situation. dogs seem to have little trouble adjusting to running a bear after a couple of times in the hog pen with a fairly mean boar. this helps significantly with us considering that almost all of our big bears are taken on the ground, not to many trees in our area that will hold anything much over 300lbs. our vet bills and doc time after a run have dropped off quite a bit after implementing this training technique.

this might be a bit a stretch for you considering you probably have a lack of hogs in your area, but i'm sure you get the idea.


happy hunting!

[Outlaw 3]

We used to run some pits mixed in with our hounds on bear and hogs and pits on bear equals dead dogs. One of my huntin partners bred half pit and plott litter and 5 out of the 6 of them were killed by bear in there first hunting season and he spent a few thousand at the vet keepin them alive that long. The one of them that was not killed by a bear broke his chain and killed to of the mans good hounds on their chain while he was at work and when he got home he put that dog down. That cross resulted in 8 dogs dead in one season. We had another dog killed at the tree by the father of the litter the next year and that was the last of our pits on bear spell. It works for a while but you better have plenty of them and not be attached to your hounds. We tree more bear now than we ever did then with all hounds.

Pits don't have the endurance for a long bear run. When they get there they get injured or killed and the same happens to hounds who hunt with them. They are rarely tree dogs (but some are).They are more prone to dog fight. We also ran some airdales but could not get them to tree to suit us. They were much better about dog fighting and keeping up with the race just no tree power.

[swampposh]

Plottpappaw-You suppose the reason the Plotts have the bad rep as dog fighters among hounddoggers is from a lil bulldog blood runnin in their veins? I suspect many of the Ol time Plott men had plenty of use for a bulldog.

Take care.

Where do you think the brindle comes from?

Haha.