Dogs & Hogs
By Arlan Smedsrud
The DD is truly a dog
of many talents. I have to remind myself of this from time to time like recently
after returning from a WILD HOG hunting trip to the great state of Texas.
But first let me tell you about some different hunting close to my home in South
Dakota.
I like many of you have had a great passion for the outdoors
most of my life and trapping of fur-bearing animals is something that I grew up
with. So it was only natural for me to put my DDs to work on some fur on
occasion. Recently I left my house to do some pheasant hunting, it was
snowing some and this generally puts the birds into heavy cover and sitting
tight. So I headed to some tree claims with good stands of cedars.
This is where I expected to find the birds. As we started into the trees,
no more than 10 minutes had passed when the dogs started barking and carrying
on. As I arrived on the situation I found the dogs barking up a tree like
coon hounds and I knew right off what they had: Ringtails. The tree was an
old rotten ash tree that was only about 10 feet tall not a very good hiding
spot. I dumped a 12 gauge round into the tree and out the top came the
quarry one at a time and with a little prodding they hit the ground one at a
time there was three of them.
Those three mad a trip to the fur buyer and bought a few bags
of dog food. This is nothing new for me. I find quite a few raccoons
on purpose every year. We hunt the big sloughs up here in South Dakota as
the weather starts to get cold, but not cold enough to den the raccoons. I
like to run at least two if not three dogs at a time. A dog with a very
fine nose can find a raccoon from a ling distance and about 50% of the time,
come up on the critter sleeping. The dogs generally dispatch the raccoon
just like they are bred to do. I have taken as many as 9 in one day in
this manner.
This past summer I was booking pups for an up coming litter
and I received an e-mail from a man down in Texas that wanted two pups. We
conversed back and forth and he told me of a friend of his that hunts hogs with
DDs. This was interesting because we had a hog hunt planned for Texas,
hunting over baits.
I continued to e-mail back and forth with this man and things
worked out so that we would be able to meet him and I could deliver his pups
when we came hunting. About 4 weeks before we were to leave, this mans
friend called me wondering if maybe I had another pup that I could bring
him. We talked for quite awhile and he told me that DDs worked very well
on hogs and he was not the only guy doing this. They would just let the
dogs out i an area that the hogs had been rooting in, lots of times they would
bait an area for several days first. The dogs would pick up a hot track
and work it until they jumped the hog or hogs. A chase would start, hogs
can run fairly fast but not very far and the dogs would have them bayed up in a
thicket. The hunters need to catch up before the hog gets its wind
back. Normally the hog is shot with a pistol at this point. This can
be a dangerous situation, we shot pigs in the 250 lb range and saw some larger
than that. They carry a pretty good set of tusks and they know how to
fight. At 3 times the weight of a dog and built close to the ground, they
are no push over although some piglets can become dispatched by the dogs.
Wild Hogs are a very real problem in many parts of the U.S.
and the best that can be hoped for is trying to control them. Ranchers do
not care for them in the least, and many outfitters are selling hunts for them
in the winter months. That is what we did and had a great time and brought
home some good eating as well.
So remember that your DD was bred to be a versatile hunting
dog, try something new from time to time, and maybe you will discover something
new you and your buddy can do.
Arlan Smedsrud vom Jagergeist Kennel