Bobcat Jump Style

[mark]

Al, all my dogs play follow the leader ive been told so they all end up at the catch at the same time within seconds unless one weaved when it should of bobbed. Have never heard them bay for more than a few seconds. Have several videos of ground catches that reflect most all grounders. I wish they all would just climb and that would be it. More cats to run and a lot less antibiotics flowing through the dogs........... Somebody please shut the rain off while i still have a couple of friends left here. Lol Almost forgot: my point wasnt about the actual mixin it up when they catch but the mindset it takes to get to that point.

[merlo_105]

It's ok Mark I have a bunch of follow the leaders as well haha. It's funny the opinions of some my favorite is only one dog is doing all the work the rest are following. Yeah this rain sucks. Im going to go road the culls in it and hope they trip over one.

[blackcreekboy]

Interesting Thread......
dhostetler I don't understand your need to catch a bobcat on the ground other than maybe to try to prove something to yourself I guess.
Your cougar stretching ordeal aside(True or not), I don't believe you have owned or seen a real bear dog.If you had, you wouldn't question grit in your pack or try to defend it and I don't think the idea of stretching a little cat would be so exciting for you.
I also don't understand what the hell 5minutes has to do with anything, but hey whatever.
Interesting read regardless and good luck.

[dhostetler]

blackcreekboy, I don't know what I ever did to you to get an insult like that.

[Tanner Peyton]

[blackcreekboy]

Wasn't meant as an insult.
You want to know why your dogs don't catch bobcats on the ground where u live,if I understand this correctly.
Questions involving differences in cat density and geographical/climate differences between Oregon and Montana and if they affect cat behavior could lead to some interesting reading Im sure.
You question and defend the" desire to catch "in your dogs in this thread,the point im trying to make is that it wouldn't be a piece of the puzzle for u if your experience had included being around gritty dogs....u would just know.
It sounds like u have a nice pack of dogs and catch a lot of game so good for you.
I don't have experience with dogs killing a healthy 100lb cougar on the ground so I question it....
bobcats can be caught and stretched long after the first 5 minutes after its been jumped.
Good luck.

[Cowboyvon]

Interesting thread.. I don't have the opportunity to get to many "jumps" on bobcats around here.. we got smoked by one the other day in the grease wood.. hard enough to trail a lion in that stuff let alone a bobcat.. trailed for about 45 mins before we jumped him and got to watch him when he came out of a little canyon.. he came out flying before the hounds got in there and came back out over his tracks.. the hounds just couldn't figure it out.. and by the time we moved them to where we seen him they couldn't trail him up..
I've never talked to anyone that can do any good in that grease wood...and a lot of lion hunters here don't let their dogs run bobcats... just a waste of time usually.. but sometimes I have to try

As far as catching on the ground sometimes you have no choice around here

Locating tree dogs click on the link

..

[pegleg]

Keep going guys its getting better..

[mark]

Like i said in an earlier post here. I hunted cats for years and never caught one on the ground. I heard of guys in western WA. doing some and a few in western OR. Never gave it much thought as i was catching cats here pretty good (so i thought). The dogs either treed the cat or it got away and that was except able because it happened to everyone around me. Cats that treed were usually up real fast and the ones that got away were usually out of a lose early in the race (dogs just never seemed to recover) and that was that, oh well go find another. When i got out of dogs for awhile in 94 i hunted with some friends when i could and some guys that came from WA with dogs they had bred for years. I finally got to see a "Catdog"! When i got back into dogs i completely changed the style of dog and started seeing those looses get picked up and some of the races lasting a little longer to a tree. Looking back on it i see that i wasnt just treeing the cats that wanted to tree but was catching the ones that didnt want to tree as well. As time went on the dogs got older and more experienced and started getting through more of the challenges a cat can hand out quicker
and some ended up caught on the ground. In my case it wasnt a cat problem it was a dog problem.

[al baldwin]

There used to be large grease wood patches over coos county, Tom Barnett told me as a kid, the older hunters used to send into grease wood patches to try an spook the cat out. My early years old cat hunting many of those grease patch still existed, dang tough to catch a cat, that learned to use those. Others & I did catch some, a higher % escaped. Herbicides wiped out most all grease wood in this area. Bob Brown,( many in Marks country knew him) told me there was more cat here than any place he ever hunted, in the early days, when he came to hunt with Clarence Berg. Those days are gone, still cat , not like then. Mark guess I was lucky, got a trained dog from Tom Barnett in my second year of hunting, didn/t have much to help him, he still caught cats on the ground at times. Also got beat by numerous cats, before catching some of those. I agree, with the right pack of hounds most cats are going to get caught, I hunted with Tom Barnett/s pack when not many escaped, however there was always a few that managed to elude them. Of coarse, those dogs were hunted on Cat, bear & coyote, at one time I recall a few years when I would estimate about fifty% of the jumped coyote were caught. Hard for some to believe, but, I witnessed it at times. Al

[dhostetler]

I don't need to catch a bobcat on the ground to prove anything to myself.

A cougar is a killing machine with one or two dogs or caught in a hole, however they die very easily if dogs catch them in the open where they can swarm it.

Unlike some my definition of a real bear dog is not based on my vet bills. The better bear dogs you have the less bayups you have in my opinion.

What I was trying to get at with the 5 minute question is that if dogs can in fact run faster than a cat a lot of cats should be caught in the first 5 minutes of the jump. As that doesn't happen to very often, my theory is that dogs aren't faster than cats but have more endurance than cats and with enough time they can run them down.

[merlo_105]

The thing is where cats get hunted or pressured heavy they start getting out of dodge so your jumps aren't always going to be tight where a dog could actually run it down. Sounds like a lot of Cat's over there in Montana are shot when tree'd, there not ran again and again. Virgin Cat's are always easier for the most part

[blackcreekboy]

[fallriverwalker1]

holy crap d you've been in the snow to long////

[Unreal_tk]

Duane,

Quit comparing bobcat hunting to other styles of hunting. Catching a bobcat on the ground vs a lion are two very different things.

It's proven it can happen, some dogs bay up, some won't. Different styles of dog and bloodline handle these situations differently, also the handler has a lot of influence on this as well. It can happen on snow, or bare ground. The likelihood on snow is far less but does happen.

I'm a snow Hunter myself Duane, I know what it's about. I've also went to the far side of the state multiple times to try to give it a fair evaluation. And will continue to do so as to improve my dogs and my own ability.