honalieh
UKC Forum Member
Registered: Jul 2003
Location: PA
Posts: 2154 |
Silent Dogs
I've never kept a stone silent dog (have had a couple). I did keep one that would bark once, and only once, on almost every track. I've mostly kept semi-silent dogs, bark a handful of times on track before falling treed. Even dogs that were wide open when young would typically tighten up when you started knocking coon down.
As far as silent and fully open, and the nose, there is no correlation. I've seen tight mouthed dogs with very good noses.
As far as showing coon on the outside, the tight mouth dog definitely has an advantage, more smaller trees, fewer den trees (they don't give warning). That advantage increases tremendously if you are cutting loose again in the same woods. The tighter mouth dog hasn't created a ruckus (warning) on the first track.
A tighter mouthed dog of quality usually has an advantage of being able to tree quicker (ahead of) an open mouthed dog of similar quality. But, when that tighter mouthed dog is consistently treeing 2nd, 3rd, or 4th (split or not), we're not talking about similar quality and ability anymore. Certainly, there's an exception to this rule when the 1st tree dog is a slick treeing fool.
Here's what I don't like. (1) Fighting dogs (usually described by their owners as; "He's not rough, but... (2) Fast Trash Running dogs. Simply because they can be so hard to catch. (3) Dogs that can't keep up so split off. They are popular under our current competition rules, where 2nd, 3rd, and 4th tree dogs can get 1st tree dog points. But, they can be miserable for actually coonhunting (whether hunting two dogs by yourself or hunting with a buddy. I've actually had 3 like this (none were high end dogs---if they were, they wouldn't have had to split so often---they'd have treed 1st). I actually kept one of these, because my good dogs---the ones she had to split from---were older dogs.
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09-04-2019 06:28 PM
