Brood Dogs

[Nite Hunter]

While cruising the Coondog and Beagle sites I keep seeing "Brood Dog", "Brood Gyp", etc for sale. Most of these that I'm seeing say the dog don't run. So my question is why breed to a dog that is not tested and proven hunting dog? It could have been the only one in the litter that didn't turn out, or get the right gene mix. I'm just a firm believer that a dog needs to be proven, and more than just 6 mos or so of running, to be worthy to be bred. Just wondering if I was the minority in my thinking.

[MasonsBeagles]

i go both ways. some of the best dogs ive seen were out of brood bitches only. everyone has there own ideas and truthfully none are wrong.

[xdawg2]

i go both ways. some of the best dogs ive seen were out of brood bitches only. everyone has there own ideas and truthfully none are wrong.

I have to second Will's post. Brood dogs aren't tested in the field, but once they start producing thats all the test i need to see..

jack

[Ronnyg]

I see nothing wrong with the people who have a brood bitch because they like her breeding and want that blood in their kennel and for their liking. What I have a problem with is someone who uses a bitch solely to make money off pounding pup after pup out of her. Some guys buy a well bred dog and exploit that bloodline to sale pups. I just dont personally agree with that practice.

[Ky. Hunter]

I have seen females and males also as far as that goes that have never ran a rabbit or they weren't as good as the great ones of the litter but when it came to reproducing they were the best of the litter at it. The genes were there but they just didn't work out as a hunter but were great at reproducing.

[fulcount]

Down the road what happens when some body else breeds the offspring of the worthless hound that supposedly produces these "good" dogs
Garbage in garbage out!
I dont believe in the brood bitch thinking we are supposed to be trying to improve on our hounds and that would preclude breeding a bitch that is inferior at its job GEnes or Not!!

[Pete Tuck]

Down the road what happens when some body else breeds the offspring of the worthless hound that supposedly produces these "good" dogs
Garbage in garbage out!
I dont believe in the brood bitch thinking we are supposed to be trying to improve on our hounds and that would preclude breeding a bitch that is inferior at its job GEnes or Not!!

I used to think that way also, until I got a bitch with one heck of a pedigree. When I began to hunt her I could see that she was one of, if not the best, hunting dogs I have ever seen. After a few times out I could tell she was not going to last long in my pack because she cold trailed too much. Well to make a long story short, a buddy of mine had a male and he liked both pedigrees and thought we should try to make the cross. We did, and now the pups are just over a year old. His male and my female are both very good rabbit dogs right now. Neither one has shown any of the mothers poor habits and to be honest we tried to make that cross again back in the spring, but she did not take. If, in the very near future, the pups begin to show some signs of faults like the mother then I will never have another brood bitch.

[wvduece]

Down the road what happens when some body else breeds the offspring of the worthless hound that supposedly produces these "good" dogs
Garbage in garbage out!
I dont believe in the brood bitch thinking we are supposed to be trying to improve on our hounds and that would preclude breeding a bitch that is inferior at its job GEnes or Not!!

is it a carved in stone law if you have beagles n decide to breed them you got to try to better the breed is it wrote down somewhere that we have to better the breed jb

[fulcount]

Duece as you can read from most posts on here nothing is "CARVED IN STONE"
but most houndmen try to breed better than they have and improve over their current hounds being that there is no perfect hound there is always something to improve on what we have and by having all solid rabbit dogs behind what we keep we can certainly
improve the breed for the next generation
Not to say if you are satisfied with what you have KEEP IT and dont try to improve it
it takes too much time for most to try to better their kennel by breeding

[fulcount]

Pete
I'd be looking at the fault to show up in the next generation as a lot of them do
more the grandpups than the direct pups off the faulty one

[davidc5936]

I agree that in a perfect world, we would only breed females who were superior both in accomplishment and in their bloodlines. It's not a perfect world. Some of the best producing females and best producing males were not that good at running a rabbit. I know of one great producing male from long ago that I saw try to run a rabbit and he couldn't get it done, and his owner made me swear not to tell anyone what I had seen. I understand that in his younger day, he was a good dog, but not for long. By the time he was 4, he couldn't keep a rabbit going, but he produced great dogs. I have also seen some of the best dogs when it came to running a rabbit, that never produced an offspring which amounted to anything, although they were bred to some of the best females around. Some females from good breeding were never taken to the woods. They were purchased to be brood dogs and that's what they were- and are. Some of them were great producers, but it takes time to learn that.

If it produces good offspring, that is the only test that should matter. I realize it takes time to find out, and often we don't realize how good a producer, either stud dog or female, is until they are on the downhill side of the ability to breed.

Boys, that's what makes it fun. If it was as simple as breeding the best running female to the best running male, it would be easy, but it doesn't work that way. I saw many of the early Pearson Creek dogs, and they weren't pretty. They were tall and skinny, with ears so short they barely flopped over and most of them had crooked tails, but they produced nice looking dogs that could flat run a rabbit. They produced. So every year we do our best and keep our fingers crossed and go to the fields with young pups and hope in our hearts. Sometimes we're disappointed, sometimes we feel OK about what we produced, and once in a great while, we come back with a big grin on our faces from seeing the payoff for all our hard work. Hope springs eternal for beaglers.

[SUNRISE10]

My grandaddy said you would get better pups....
Out of bad dog out of good line...
Than good dog out of bad line..,

[old blood beagles]

I have a brood female that has been line breed by the best field trial and gun hunting hounds that I can think of. She is not the best female that I have but I think she has a greater chance of producing better pups than my other female. I bought her as a brood female but I also like to hunt her and I think that if she was given the chance when she was younger, she would have made one heck of a hound.

[Pete Tuck]

Thanks for the advice fulcount. We'll keep an eye out for the next litter.

[Alabama John]

Only in hounds do we say these things.
If I wanted a milk cow, I wouldn't want to raise a calf out of a Black Angus, I would want it out of a Jersey. Both are cows.

Same with rabbit dogs, your odds go way up to get a pup out of good stock that runs and hunts like you want the pup to do.
The biggest problem is we don't know what the grand parents of the pup was like, and in most cases don't even know what the parents of our pup was like in the hunting and running department
Buying off trial results or what people tell you about their lineage or even worse, how many trophies they've won is the worse thing you can do. If how they performed didn't matter, we'd have just as good of odds to go get an unknown from the pound and breed them to get our pup. Sure, you might get a great one, but, the odds of doing so is slim at best.

FULCOUNTis right in my humble opinion, look at the grandpups and grandparents respectfully to see what your pups breeding has produced or your breeding is likely to produce.

The Female will carry more traits that are put in the pups than the male in my opinion.