Story by Matt McLane
The first thing to understand about training a hunting dog is that you don’t teach a dog to hunt. Your part of the training is learning to communicate with the dog and giving it a ride to the field so it can sharpen its skills and apply its genetics to learn its trade. The hunt is bred into them; they either have it or not.
If you could train a dog to hunt, I could get a dog of any breed with ample brains and athletic ability, run it through a program, and turn that dog into a pointer, retriever, coon dog, squirrel dog, rabbit dog, or hog dog. Genetics would mean nothing; it would be a function of how well your program trained them. However, that is not the case; based on genetics; the dog is prone to point birds, retrieve, tree game, bay, or run a scent ignoring all other senses.
Selecting a Pup
Selecting a pup is tricky because a novice doesn’t know what they want. They look at the big names in the magazines, see the full-page ad and think, “yeah, I want a Grand Champion like that.” Most of the time, they are wrong. Many of these dogs are overhyped; some are high-strung and have faults the average Saturday hunter is unprepared to deal with. Think of it like buying a car. You want a safe, reliable vehicle with a low maintenance cost that gets you back and forth to work. Then you open a magazine and see an ad for a top-fuel funny car. If you bought that funny car, you wouldn’t get to the highway, let alone to work. It doesn’t fit your needs. The same is true for dogs. Learn what faults you can live with and ones you can’t tolerate. My advice is to hunt with different people and different dogs. Go to a few competitions and talk with the handlers. They have generally seen a ton of dogs, owned quite a few, and can tell you the difference between a competition dog and a pleasure-hunting dog.
I start by looking at the conformation of both sire and dam. They should be muscular and sound. I want to see good feet, no long toes or splayed pads. I want a well-sprung rib cage, good teeth with a good scissor bite. I avoid dogs that have blue coloring or blue eyes. This is usually a sign of too much inbreeding if that recessive gene becomes dominant. A genetic weakness can also be associated with heavily inbred dogs. I prefer a dog to have pigmented nose and lips, not a pink nose. Dogs with pink noses are more prone to skin cancer.
When selecting a pup, I ask basic questions.
“Why did you choose this breeding?” I am not interested if the answer begins with referring to a pedigree or only includes the sire or dam. Half of the dog comes from each parent. I don’t care if his dad is “Super Star Jr.” and his grandpa was “Ole Super Star,” and he is related to “Ole Super Star” on the sire and dam’s side. Name-dropping a successful dog means nothing to me. It usually means the breeder did the breeding due to names in the pedigree, not performance in the field by the sire AND dam.
“What faults does each parent have?” If the breeder can’t tell you the faults, they either don’t know their dogs or are holding back. I’ll happily tell you every fault my dogs have. Obviously, I live with those faults because if they had flaws I couldn’t live with, they wouldn’t be eating my feed very long. Some faults may be critical to one person and don’t bother another.
Some of the best rabbit dogs I have owned are a little mouthy on a track. That means they will bark some when they first smell rabbit. Their bark changes dramatically when they jump the rabbit from his hide and start to chase. That early barking doesn’t bother me a bit. That dog is communicating to the other dogs and me, “Hey, I got a good track over here.” In competition, dogs often have points deducted if they bark early, before the rabbit is jumped. However, I do have a problem with a dog barking on a track from last Tuesday.
A competition tree dog better not leave the tree – period. Once the dog selects the tree the squirrel or coon has climbed up, it should stay put until you get him. As a pleasure hunter, I want the dog to call me to the tree by barking “treed” and show me which tree when I get there by barking up the tree. I have had some that would leave the tree briefly, come to the top of a bank to see if I was coming, then go back. That doesn’t bother me too much. In a competition dog, that is a significant fault. However, a good competition “stay put tree dog,” is a fault when squirrel hunting. I have seen a dog tree, then see the squirrel timber out from limb to limb to other trees. If the dog stays on the original tree, that shows the dog lacks brains and has “too much tree” because it didn’t follow the game it was hunting.
“How do the sire and dam hunt?”
This is a big one, and preference varies from person to person. A person that hunts large tracts of open land where game is thin may want a dog that ranges way out. Another person may hunt small tracts and wood lots; they may want a dog to hunt more thoroughly and not range out very far. 
Competition dogs are generally fast and far-ranging. They have to find game before the other dogs do. Many pleasure hunters do not like a dog that will run to the next county to find game. I prefer a dog to be a hunting partner, not make me a cross-country athlete. Dogs that range far out are often called “straight line dogs” because they will run the path of least resistance until they cross a hot track, then follow that track to the game. This can be a problem in the steep hills and hollows where I live or in small plots where you aren’t allowed to hunt on adjacent properties. The polar opposite of this is called a “cold nose dog .” This dog will take an old track, walk it down until it warms up, and eventually hot enough to run and find the game. These dogs typically don’t show you as much game because they spend too much time on tracks that will not produce. Ideally, you want a dog with “gears”; one that does both of these well. A dog that will search out for game, but will knuckle down and work a warm track. In a pack of dogs, we like both types. When the scenting is good and game is moving, the hot-nosed dogs will produce more game. On those mornings of thick frost where they have to knuckle down and work a track, those cold-nose dogs produce more. Breeds or bloodlines of dogs that are used for large game are more prone to range out, which is good if you are bear hunting and not good for an evening coon hunt behind the house. Having had a coon dog swim Woodrum Lake and tree on the other side has happened to me, and I prefer it not happen again.
In some breeds, speed is a factor, particularly in running hounds. Rabbit dogs have a great variety of speeds across the bloodlines. In northern areas where there are hares, people generally run a “leggy” dog that is fast. Hares are far-ranging, and you need a dog that will keep it moving. Other guys like them medium-slow, especially guys that hunt cottontails around my area of West Virginia. We generally prefer a medium to slow rabbit dog. The reason is that rabbits and hares run a “circle” around their home range. A hare may take 45 minutes and go a mile out before returning to the area where it was jumped. A cottontail may only circle a small brushy bank. If a dog puts too much pressure on a cottontail, they are prone to run into a hole to hide. They know every hole in their home range. So, if a dog almost catches them or a hunter shoots and misses, they usually take cover in a nearby hole. With a medium-speed dog, the rabbit is more annoyed. It will run around the bank to a new hiding spot until the dogs get near, then sprint to the next hiding spot. Fast dogs put them in holes before you ever get a shot.
Mouth is another factor, but not as important as it was before modern tracking systems. In the old days, you cast your dog out, and it hunted within earshot of you. When the dog found a track, it barked on the track and communicated to you, “I found a track, and I am going in this direction.” You knew that you had to follow along and stay within earshot, so you wouldn’t lose the dog. This type of dog is “open on a track”. An “open” dog barking on track also alerts the game it is being chased. This gives the game animal a good head start and it runs further before the dog catches up where it had to find refuge in a tree. The opposite of an open dog is a dog that is silent on track. A silent dog doesn’t bark while running a track until they chase the game up a tree, then they bark treed. This style dog trees game quicker, because the game it was chasing didn’t get a warning.
In the old days, a silent dog was a major fault because when it got out of hearing range before it treed, we had to run ridges listening down into each hollow to see if we could hear it. Nowadays, with GPS tracking systems, I can zoom in on my tracking unit map and see exactly where the dog is. I prefer a silent or semi-open dog on a track, only barking when the track is really fresh.
These are some things I consider when selecting a pup. The terminology and traits for pointing, retrieving, and other types of dogs will change. The questions are still valid regardless of the type of dog. I want to know if the person that selected the sire and dam did so because they have the same solid traits, but do not share the same faults. I want a pup where the purpose of the breeding is defined and better for the breed. I don’t chase names or pedigrees or care if a dog is registered. Registering a dog means you paid money to get a piece of paper with the owner’s name (you), the dog’s name, and the names of the sire and dam. I already know these things; why would I pay money to have a piece of paper telling me what I already know?
In the next issue, we’ll cover how to train that new pup you’ve selected!