Oak Ridge
UKC Forum Member
Registered: Aug 2003
Location: Indiana
Posts: 6168 |
quote:
Originally posted by kyhunter50
well if you aint gonna kill no coon,why even have a season on them,why bye a license,,,,,,,,bunch of crap.
Nobody said not to kill coon. But I ask myself every time I take the rifle off my back....why am I killing this coon? Is it for me, or is it for the dog.
A little story about a dog that I still own. He got started in the spring time, when the sows were heavy with kittens, or when they were nursing. I didn't kill any coon to him at all. He continued to tree coon, I replaced a dead coon with tons of praise at the bottom of a tree when he treed a coon, and he started eating up the attention. This went on all summer and into the early fall. I think at that point he had maybe 2 coon shot out to him his entire life.....
I noticed that when he saw my light coming to his tree, he would tree harder, and he was EXCITED TO SEE ME come to his tree....
Kill season rolled around, and hide prices were pretty high, so I was looking forward to giving him a good "taste"....I started walking in to the tree and instead of praising him, I would slide the rifle off my back and drop that coon out. I would still pet him over the dead coon, but not like I was.
Took him about five nights, and he quit treeing coon....he pretty much quit trying. I could not figure out what was going on, cause this dog was a coon treeing fool. I put him up for a few nights and got him back out. The first coon he treed, I walked in to the tree and noticed that he wasn't treeing harder when he saw my light coming...he was giving it a half effort....until I walked over, shined the tree, found the coon and went over and made over him like he had won the powerball...I swear that I could see the desire to please me fire up in him.....and the problem was solved.
To this day, at 11 years old, he could pretty much care less about a dead coon. He cares everything in the world about treeing coon and getting his ears scratched.
For the past 10 years, I've been training all of my dogs that way. I don't feel the NEED to kill coon for the sake of training a dog.
I've had dogs that were just the opposite...if you didn't kill coon they quit treeing coon....and in retrospect...none of those were as good of dogs as the ones that will do it for another reward.
I for one stay on the right side of the law...so it is illegal for me to kill coon from the last day of January to the 8th day of November every year. So for 83 days out of 365 it is legal for me to harvest a coon. Out of those 83 days, in my area we can probable hunt in decent weather for not more than 50 nights...in a good year. There are 23 nights that we can not hunt at all with our training season being closed. That leaves 259 nights that I can hunt without killing coon..... I need a dog that can and will tree coon without being fed a steady diet of fur.
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Joe Newlin
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02-26-2014 06:55 AM
