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"DOG TALK" THE PERSONAL TRAINER, TRAINING & CONVERSATION PAGE |
This information is written to help and entertain anyone who lives with, trains and cares for their dogs. It is especially designed to offer information related to hunting hounds and how to handle them. Now and then, it may also contain some stories or my ramblings from past experiences but all is intended to help in some way, shape or form. No one has all the answers. It sometimes seems like there is no one their to help and in those instances, this letter might provide information that will help fill the void. It makes sense to take advantage of a resource that could save you money or maybe even save the life of your dogs at some point. I've spent a lot of my lifetime working with all kinds of dogs and have "been there", "done that". Let's put this experience to work for you and see if we can't take some of the work and worry out of owning and training a Coonhound. This page will be updated monthly so please drop back often and check out the information offered here. If you have ideas to share, email me by clicking on the email links and I can share those ideas with others in a future update. |
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AN EXCERPT FROM "DOG TALK" TIPS AND OBSERVATIONS FENCE. Here is another nice thing to have your dog trained to do. It isn't as it sounds, according to my terminology. Some folks might think that this means that we would teach a dog to cross a fence. My terminology means to have the dog wait while I cross the fence. I'll bet almost everyone out there has had an instance where they had a dog pull their hand onto a barb while crossing barbwire. I had this happen a couple of times and I decided that I wasn't going to have a dog that I couldn't have wait for me to cross a fence, no matter how bad I get tangled up. Remember back when we were teaching the dog to heel and sit? At one point I suggested that while you were standing there longer and longer waiting for the dog to become accustomed to sitting for longer periods of time, you should put your hand in front of the dogs' nose and say STAY. This is where that is going to start to pay off. As you are leading your dog out of the woods, you will almost assuredly come to a fence that needs to be crossed. When you get to the fence, you should stop and say SIT in a firm voice and then put your hand in front of the dogs' nose and say stay. As you start to cross the fence, you should pay attention to what the dog is doing. If he starts to get up, you should say STAY in a firm voice and if you can reach, you should put your hand in front of his nose and say it again. If he still tries to get up, you should actually take your hand and tap his nose sharply while you say STAY. At this point, he will get the message. Once you are through the fence, squat down and call him to you. When you start this training for the first time, you might want to actually hold onto the lead or hook it onto the fence wire. I have hardly ever come across a dog that will not learn this in one or two tries. After about 5 times you will be able to come to a fence and say STAY and drop the lead. Your dog will stand there and wait, or sit there and wait until you get through the fence. It becomes so much of a routine that you will just drop the lead, and commence to crawl through the wire without even saying anything to the dog. He will just sit there and watch you no matter how badly you get hung up. This is a very nice attribute for your dog to have and you will enjoy it a lot once he gets it right. HOW FAR SHOULD YOU GO WITH A MEAN DOG? I have had several questions pertaining to the same thing over the last couple of weeks. The questions had to do with how to handle a mean or aggressive dog. I will provide my opinion based off experiences I have had with dogs of this type. I have already answered this to the people who have asked so to them I ask that you bear with me on this for a moment or two. I can provide you a lot of information on how to handle a dog like the one you have but I am choosing to go a different route. Handling a dog like yours requires some advice and I urge you strongly to follow it. I am willing to do what it takes to succeed...some folks aren't willing to go to these extremes. I would no longer put the effort into a dog like the first one I am describing here. In the past when I have had dogs like yours and have worked with them I have had several close calls almost getting bit but in the end I always overcame the behavior. The problem is that once the dogs went back to their owners they reverted back to their old ways and continued to be a problem. There are several reasons for this but basically it was because they weren't handled the way I handled them. This isn't anyone's fault it's just the way it is with some people. They don't have what it takes to keep a moody or unpredictable dog under control. Let me describe how I had to handle a couple of these dogs to get them to respect me. One I can remember needed to be broke to lead and to handle but his disposition was such that he would fight or bully his owner the result being that the owner was afraid of him. When I got him he tried to bully me also but I put him on a spiked choker or training collar and when he attacked me I would swing him quickly away from me and then jerk him back and forth so he couldn't get ahold of me. Once he started to lose his breath and fight for his life, at least he thought he was, he started to fight the lead and not me. At this point, I would slack it off and we would have an uneasy truce. I would repeat my commands and he would do the whole process over again and the result would be the same, I would win and he would lose. After about 4 hours of this training over several days, he decided that he could not beat me and submitted to me and did what I commanded. He didn't like me nor I him but he realized that he could not beat or bully me so we got along. The next dog I had like this was one that wouldn't try to attack but would fight every effort to lead or do anything else until the owner thought he would die from the fighting. In this case I didn't fear personal injury so decided to handle it like a dog would. When he fought me I would reel him in on the lead and grab him by his throat making sure my grip was good so if he panicked and decided to bite he couldn't reach my hands. At the point where you have him by his throat, you have to lift him and turn him on his back and then choke him into submission. When they let their glands go, urinate or defecate they have totally submitted to you. At this point you let them up and you go through the command cycle again. If they react in an unfavorable manner again, you repeat the whole process choking them down and forcing them to submit. After a few times like this, they come to see you as the lead dog and will not challenge you again. At this point they will do what you demand. I don't say do what you ask, I say do what you "demand". This kind of dog will probably go on and turn out. They learn that if they don't fight, things get better. The first type of dog is always going to be a ticking time bomb. I hope by what I have just described, you will see that you are in a situation where you do have some choices but there is only one real choice that is the right one. No one should have to live with a dog that isn't willing to respect you and have your trust. Get rid of the dog!!!!!!!! Please don't wait until he attacks someone or some child. Please realize that a big dog can maim or injure a child seriously with just one bite and most deaths from dog attacks are related to just one bite. From my perspective and if I owned the dog, I would put him down the first time he would try to bite me or become aggressive. You know from having the other two dogs that you don't have to live with a dog that exhibits those kinds of characteristics and you shouldn't put up with it for a minute. The goal of having a dog is more than just keeping and caring for it, there should be mutual respect and enjoyment taken from the relationship and a dog like you are describing will neither respect you or care if you are around or not. Your story brings to mind a friend that I have. He had a wonderful coon dog but while he was growing up he became growly and aggressive as a pup. My friend thought it was cute when he was small but as the dog grew it got to a point where after a night of hunting he would not get out of the box, he would growl and snap at him so he just left him in there until the next morning. After a night of rest he would come out and be relatively normal. After a while he became so aggressive that my friend could only handle him while hunting. One day his dad went out to get the dog out of the box after a night of hunting. The dog bit him drawing blood so he had to come out and take him out of the box. A couple of weeks later his brother and his nephews came to the house for dinner and one of the kids went out and opened the dog box. Of course the dog was still in there from the night before and came out of the box like he usually did, all teeth, growling and snapping. He got ahold of the child by the face and even though he only bit him once he tore the little guys cheek wide open and it took 12 stitches to close the wound. A little further and he would have been blinded or perhaps killed. To make a long story short, my friend came out and shot the dog while he still was in the box growling. Please don't wait for something like this to happen. Although it is an unpleasant prospect I would put this dog down. There is no value he can bring to your life that will compensate for the grief he may cause you. If he has this kind of disposition he may also throw it into his pups so you will be doing the world a favor by preventing the propagation of this kind of disposition. I hope I'm not upsetting you by my remarks but I think you must understand that there is no place for dogs like this. You can do better and enjoy your experiences instead of fearing your relationships. I love dogs and own several Redbone hounds as a breeder and hunter. I breed for disposition and would not allow a mean dog to live. I know my advice is harsh but I am telling you this with your best interests in mind and my advice is motivated by experience and a true concern for you, your family and your future ability to enjoy your life with your dogs. You can do as you see fit but at least now you have some thoughts to help you decide. SUPPLY, DEMAND AND THE FUR MARKETS. We finished selling some hides this last week and we got what we thought was a pretty good price on average for our fur. This is compared to what fur was selling for earlier in the season. We sold 15 coons and averaged almost $15 for the lot with a top of $24 and a low of $6. Now, some of you may have done better than that but in these parts this is a pretty good price. After putting some thought to it I decided that this is a good topic for the newsletter because this should be used as a forum to try to benefit all of our readers. I feel there are a couple of reasons we got the price we did and I think that next year is going to also be a good year for fur but not if we don't use our heads and do the right thing. Over the years the fur market has cycled up and down with some dramatic changes from year to year. Some of the good years have always followed the worst years, on an average price basis. Have you ever stopped to think why this happens? If you live in the United States of America you know that our economy is based off of the free trade concept. In order for free trade to work you have to have products for sale and there has to be a demand for those products. This is a simple philosophy right? In our country we have all the knowledge to be successful in business and in life. We do have some faults as a general population that put us in some interesting positions once in a while. In agriculture for instance, there gets to be a demand for a product like pork or beef. What happens? Farmers all get into raising pork or beef as quickly as they can so they can take advantage of the high prices. When this happens there gets to be too many people raising these products and the result is that the market is flooded with pork and beef. The consumer, meaning all of us, has choices now because there is an abundance of good product available. When this happens the retailer or the stores we buy from can't sell their products at a decent price because there are so many farmers trying to sell the same thing that in order to sell anything at all they have to lower their prices or see the products spoil on the shelf. When this happens there is a large backlog of product that is in storage, on the feedlots or in the stores and it takes a long time to get rid of this product. While this over supply of product is still a factor prices are low even though there is a good demand. This same problem exists in all industries especially in the agriculture side of the economy. Poultry is another good example of an industry that continues to over supply the market even though prices don't support recovering your costs. You may wonder how this all applies to the fur markets but it is exactly the same thing. When fur prices fall, fur isn't worth the effort of going after. People stop hunting and trapping and the supply of fur in freezers and available to the market starts to disappear. Of course there are other factors that influence fur prices like the strength of the dollar over seas but supply and demand is still the largest motivating factor influencing fur prices. When the supply of fur dwindles and buyers can't get enough to fill their orders they began to pay more for fur. As soon as the hunter or trapper hears that fur prices have gone up they go out and harvest everything they see and soon the available fur will far outweigh the demand for fur so the prices go down again and the cycle continues. We as hunters and trappers can have an effect on this cycle if we use our heads and apply a simple philosophy to the way we go about harvesting fur. When you hunt, don't shoot everything you see. Try to be selective and bring in fur that is worth something and don't go for numbers. The buyers in our area told me that they weren't buying enough fur to fill their orders especially in our part of the country. They said their freezers were empty and that there was good demand. It all makes sense doesn't it? The buyers didn't buy much fur this year so the freezer stocks were depleted. The demand is now there but the fur isn't so the prices went up. In my opinion we can ensure better prices just by being more selective in what we harvest. Leave the little ones for seed because next year they will be nice fur and will demand good prices. You can still make enough to pay for some dog food if you select the better coons and get a better price. If you harvest everything you see the supply will again far outweigh the demand, the quality won't be there and the prices will plummet again. I know that it isn't necessarily the American way to show some restraint but in this case, it will help to ensure some consistent prices and better times for all fur harvesters. Enough of that. Well, that's about all I have this time around. I guess it is long enough so I'll call it a day and will talk to you all again in a couple of weeks. Remember to take care of your families, yourselves and your dogs. Tom Solberg "Dog Talk" The Personal Trainer |
