Ep. 377: Houndations - How to Find the Perfect Puppy with Brent Reaves

This episode, with MeatEater's Brent Reaves, focuses on sourcing the perfect puppy, and how some bloodlines just work for us in way that is hard to describe.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today I am speaking with meat Eaters
very own Brent Reeves about how to pick the perfect puppy.
So this is going to be kind of a cool
new thing we're trying out here. We've been messing around
doing a little bit of interview based podcasts and it's

(00:24):
time to go pretty deep with some guests who have
a lot of cool stuff to stay.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
So today I've got the host.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Of this country life meat Eaters, Brent Reeves, huge into dogs,
He's trained retrievers in the past, been a duck guide,
and he is ate up with raccoon hunting, a hound guy.
Just really interesting perspective, and he has a cool story
to tell about getting his current puppy, which is what
we're going to get into. But we're going to do
a heck of a lot more than that. We're going

(00:52):
to talk about really what everyone should consider when they're
in the market for a puppy and how do you
go find that perfect puff for you. This episode of
Foundations is brought to you by Shields, an employee owned
outdoor powerhouse where you can get a new set of

(01:13):
golf clubs, a high end fishing rod, and of course
dog training supplies. You know, whether you're in the market
for a new crate, maybe an e caller, or maybe
just a fresh set of training bumpers.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Shields has you covered.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Check out their offerings at Shields dot com. Brent Reeves, Yes, sir,
I have never been more excited to talk to a guest.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
In my life. Really well, I must be your first one.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
No, I have done hundreds of these. We're sitting down
here in Arkansas at Duck Camp. Man, it feels like
the kind of place where we should be talking about dogs.
You've got a couple of them out there in the
kennel and your world. You know, we've spent a couple
of nights running around the Arkansas woods with head lamps
with your buddy Michael, looking for some raccoons and watching
these hounds. And you have two dogs here, Whaling and Jesse,

(02:03):
and Whaling is the man. Oh yeah, And the story
of Jesse, the pup starts with him, actually starts before him.
So let's get into that, like where did where did
you get this dog? And how'd that come to be?

Speaker 3 (02:18):
You know, I coon hunted as a child, and grew.
It's been in my family, and then my careers in
law enforcement did not allow me the time to dedicate
to it. So I was without a dog for a
long time during my professional career, and towards the end
of it, I was working in a place and in
a position where I had a lot more time to

(02:38):
dedicate to it. So I started looking. You know, I
told my wife Alexis we're getting a dog. I'm gonna
get another coon dog or going to get a coon
dog and start coon hunting again. So I started looking,
and I looked on the internet. I looked. I talked
to people that coon hunted, my friends at coon hunting.

(02:59):
All this this time I had coon hunted with them,
you know, but I was just going with folks that
had dogs, and it just really built that fire. So
the guys that I hunted with, I talked to them about, man,
if you hear of a dog, you know, I'm looking.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
I'm looking.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
So that went on for six months. I called people
on the phone, I answered, I looked at ads and
hunting magazines, and I wound up seeing. I talked to
I don't know fifty people during that six months and
looked at pictures of different dogs, but none of them
ever just popped out to me, nothing said this is

(03:36):
the dog for me, this is the bloodline that's for me,
This is the puppy that I'm looking at, or the
started dog that I'm looking at that interested me. And
I was waiting for that just one that one feature
that piqued my interest to take the next step.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
So hold on, when you say that, are you talking
some kind of intangible where you're like, I just needed
to see something that just clicked with me.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
Something that jumped out to you know, I'm looking at
beautiful puppies, that proven dogs, proven bloodlines of dogs, but
it just wasn't the thing that clicked that made me go,
I want to look at that dog right there.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
So what makes a what does that for you? I
will describe it. I can't.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
I can't because I could save myself. And if I
could tell somebody how to look at something that's gonna
trigger the dog that's gonna fit what they want, I'd
be a millionaire man. You'd be paying me to talk
to you right now, because if that is absolutely an
intangible it is just you just can't. You just can't

(04:39):
name it.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
I can't so when you when you talk about that,
I think about that, Like, we were just listening to
our mutual friend Hillary who's here with us, and she
was playing a terrible fish song, but she loves it.
Not our jam uh, but my current pup, my four
year old, I call her my pup.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
She's the younger dog. I know exactly what you mean.
I would.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
I was doing some stuff with Tom dowk and and
he had a couple of Lee and Tiffany Lakowski's dogs,
and one of those dogs when they let her out
of the crate the way she ran a lap and
showed up to work, I was like, Oh, there's something
there that you know. And you're surrounded by amazing dogs, right,
they're all super well trained, good blood. But there was

(05:22):
something about that dog where I was like, Tom, we
need to make a note of that, because when I
want a puppy, that's what I want.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
Well, you know, they have personalities just like people do.
And you're attracted to people that and dogs in the
same way that appeal to your sensibilities. And to me,
it all starts when I'm looking at something that's looking
back at me. Now, I said, I looked for six
months I didn't. I looked on through phone calls, text messages,

(05:51):
and pictures and I finally saw something of all things
Facebook Marketplace and I saw a video some is.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
Selling a coon dog.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
It just popped up on my feed and I looked
at this video and there was this a young a
six month old puppy a tree and walker puppy barking
at a coon in a cage.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
And I've said it before.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
You know, you can any kind of dog will bark
at a coon in a cage. You know, you show
it to them, they're going to bark because they don't
know what it is. There's no it's just instinct. They're
just barking at something. So it doesn't tell you anything
other than the dog will bark, you know. So I
mean that's step number one. You got to be able
to hear him. But something about the way that dog

(06:32):
looked it just I said, I'm gonna, you know, check
further into it. So I called the number. And I've
told this story of my podcast before, but maybe not
in this great detail. But when I called the folks,
they their address was like forty five minutes away from me,
and they were very motivated and selling that. You know,
I think they they were kind of in a financial

(06:55):
bind and couldn't really take care of the dog like
it should be, and they needed some money. So I said,
I'm going to come look at it tomorrow. So I
get there and look at it, and the the dog.
The conditions the dog were in were not part with
what it was part with what they could afford. But
you know, the dog just needed some help. So I thought, well,

(07:15):
you know, they want two hundred and fifty dollars for
this dog. I'm going to get it. If nothing else,
I can get my money back at it, because it's
a good looking hound.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
Right.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
So I'm talking to the to the lady there, and
she was not She didn't want to You could tell
that she had to sell the dog. She didn't want
to sell the dog. So that that made me think,
you know, it had some value. There's a possibility that
this dog is worth something. And then when she told
me his name, I said, what's his name? She said,
his name is Whaling. It's like some old singer or something.

(07:48):
Well that was.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
Just some random old say, some old, random old singer,
you know.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
Well that that had a nerve with me right there,
because he has been my favorite forever, and I said, okay,
I'll take him and bought him and I took that
dog home and from the minute I got him home,
my wife and my daughter just fell in love with him.
Which is a risk you take because if if Whalen

(08:13):
has no idea of what his just because he's a
coon a coon hound, that don't make him a coon dog.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
There's always a difference in that.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
You know, there's there's football players and then there's people
that play football. You know, there's a difference, and that's
that's the analogy that's always used. So you run the
risk of bringing a puppy into a family where immediately
the affection of how a dog looks and how they
act and interact in him come on as puppies.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
You know.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
And it was just very fortuitive that he worked out
to be the caliber dog he is because he is.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
He is a very solid.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
Coon down And what you're saying there without saying it,
is that you know, this is a this culture of hounds.
I feel like anyway, it's different than you know, the
the upland Waterfall world that I live in, where you
go get that lab pupp or you go get that GSP.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
You're not You're not washing that sucker out at oh yah.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
You know, whatever time in its life that dog and
and there are people to do that, you know that
are trialing or doing hont tests or whatever. But general population,
that puppy comes into your house and it stays until
it's it's done. But you're talking about you can't know
with those dogs, these type of dogs until you really
get down the road a little ways with them to
see what they actually have, right, and it's way more

(09:34):
common to wash them out, sell them, find somebody else
for them, and keep looking till you find the right one.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Well, I mean you, I was pretty lucky guy. I
got that dog home, like I got his papers. I'm
looking at his papers. I've been out of that game
so long. None of the names on this and this
registry meant anything to me. I had no history with
any of it. It was only you know, a two
or three generation paper there. So I really don't know

(10:04):
what this dog is, what his bloodline is. I just
know that something triggered me to like him, and I
brought him home. And once I got him home, there
he is, and I was I had had him maybe
a week and he's just in the backyard running around,
and I'm in my driveway. I'm cleaning out a guy
bought a new dog box to haul him in, and
I'm cleaning it out and a guy pulls up in

(10:26):
my yard. He says, man, I've been driving by your
house for a while, he said, and today I drive
out and I see that you're you got a dog
box in the back of your truck and I'm like yeah.
He said, are you a coon hunter or a duck hunter?
And I said, well, I'm both, but I got this
for a coon dog. Do you coon hunt? And he
said yeah, what kind of dog you got? And I said,

(10:47):
it's a tree and walker. He said, I said, you
want to see him? And I don't know this guy
from Adam. It's turned out to be a great friend
of mine, Rex Whiting. So we walked in the back
door and he said, man, that dog. Look he does
this pretty puppy. Let me see the papers. I show
me the papers. He goes, oh, bone collector. He's a
bone collector pup And I said, is that good? He said, uh,
that's that's pretty good. And turns out his grandfather he

(11:12):
was he was out of Willie Whalen's mama's name was
Bella and his daddy's name was Willie, and Bone Collector
was the father to both of them, so it was
linebred back to him, so he had a common grandfather.
It was this bone Collector dog who was extremely successful
one upwards above seventy thousand dollars in competition winnings, back

(11:38):
when winnings were not near what they are today. So
I mean it was very successful. And he said, you know,
these dogs have a lot of natural ability. So which
was he was the absolute perfect storm, Tony, because I'm
more or less just started hunting that dog and giving
him the opportunity to do what came naturally to him.

(12:01):
And I just kind of if he was if he
had a fault, if he started doing something I didn't
want him to do, I corrected that. I did not
train that dog how to tree coons. We just focused
on keeping him from doing the things that I didn't
want him to do, and that narrative focus on what
he was supposed to do and didn't naturally, and it

(12:21):
just made it worked out.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
So you you kind of luck into a oh very
a bargain. Yes, good dog. Uh, you get back into
the coon thing hard that Whalen's what's six now.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
He's sick. He'll be six August the fifteenth.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
All right, don't ask me my anniversary date, but Whalen's
birthday is August the fifteenth.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
So we go, we go from that to now, what
a year ago? When when do you start thinking, you're like,
I need another.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
Michael tells me, Michael, my friend Michael Roseman, who we've
been hunting with, who makes our lives that we hunt with.
He says, Man's only got so many good dogs in him.
He said, Brentier, in your late fifties, you probably got
two more dogs left than you. You need to start hunting,
hunting a dog. So Whalen now is like I said,

(13:11):
he's coming six years old this year, and I think,
you know, to hunt those dogs. And I'm not a
competition hunter, but we hunt a lot. You know, it
gets rich rough on them, you know, and coming six,
you know, by the time he's eight or nine, you know,
he's probably he's at the zenith of his hunting right now.
But he still got two and a half three years left.

(13:33):
That's where he's good shape, you know, and can go
a lot. But then from after that, it's it's going
to start going down. So if I'm gonna, you know,
keep that going, I got to get another dog. So
we started looking and Michael called me one afternoon and said,
Doug Compton, who was a friend of ours, who was

(13:56):
the original owner of Bone Collector, whaling grandfather has got
a litter of puppies who were AI pupps, artificial insemination
puppies out of Bone Collector. So Jesse I got, I
said Michael. I said, I'm in. I want a female.
So we get two females. He got one and I

(14:19):
got one. And so Whalen's grandpa is this dog's father,
so it's I guess an aunt and you know, a
nephew there. So but it's that bloodline, and you were
talking earlier about picking out a pup. That bloodline is
what I like, right, The quality and the and the

(14:41):
characteristics that are natural to that, to that set of dogs,
that line of dogs is something that appeals to me.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
That that is.

Speaker 3 (14:52):
Type of hunting and the kind of dog that I like,
And so I wanted to continue with that. And it's
a gamble whether or not. I mean, it's not one
hundred percent right, but you know that if you're starting
off with those genetics and that baseline of where you're working,
that you've got a pretty good chance of going in
the right direction or the direction.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
That you want to go. It's the best you're going
to do.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's the safest bet you
can make, but it's still a bet.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
When you were looking for Whaling, were you looking specifically
for a male? Yep?

Speaker 1 (15:22):
Okay, So with then why switch? Why did you want
a female for the next one?

Speaker 3 (15:25):
Because I want to I want to have a set
of puppies out of out of them Whaling and this dog.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
It should be a good cross.

Speaker 3 (15:33):
And I've used this analogy, you know, one hundred times,
and you said one similar earlier. But you know, Jim Kelly,
the Hall of Fame football player, is a friend of
mine and I've gotten to hunt with him several times
on filming some stuff with him. But he had like
four or five brothers. They are all good athletes. Only

(15:53):
one of those guys was in the Hall of Fame,
you know, And that's that's kind of the gamble that
you that you that you go at or that you're
looking at when you're doing that. So I wanted a male,
I mean, had I initially had a male, then I
got a female. So I'm going to try to recreate
some of that magic. And sometimes it doesn't happen, and

(16:15):
but you know, sometimes it does, and when it does happen,
it's really worth the effort, right.

Speaker 1 (16:20):
And I think that I think it's important to look
at this here. You know, everybody, everybody who goes and
gets some kind of sporting dog, hunting dog, you know,
falls in love with that dog, has the best dog ever. Yeah,
And when that dog starts to age out or it
passes away, they're like, I want that exact same dog,
So they go back to the breeder. A lot of
times that happens anyway, but you're like, you know, this

(16:42):
might be twelve years later, yeah, and you know, just
just going to the same breeder might not mean anything. No,
you know, like you don't understand what's in the blood there.
You don't understand what things have changed. And I know
the way that you're looking at that, to me, that

(17:02):
that is that is like definitely one lane to pick
where you're like, I know this line, this line works
for me, and I'm going to keep this going. A
lot of people that I talk to are like, you know,
I used to hunt pheasants a lot, or I used
to do this, or now I do this, and I
have this dog and I always have loved this dog.
And I'm like, well, you you might want to take
a look at your life today.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
And you know, if in our.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
World you have so many labs to choose from, you
have so many German short hairs, you know, the German
other German breeds have come on way strong. I'm like,
you have a lot of options instead of just defaulting
to what you had, or you know, even kind of
what you think you had. It's like, at least do
that due diligence a little bit, like you were talking
where you spent six months looking around, like what where's

(17:46):
the thing that speaks to me? Where's that one that
just hums at my frequency? I think a lot of people,
if they looked at that a little bit differently, gave
themselves some time to find the right bloodline, would end
up with you know, they're always going to end up
with good dogs. But that's how you get those dogs
where you're like this one is this one changed me?

Speaker 2 (18:04):
Yeah? You know, and.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
We are all products of our environment and our hounds
are to our dogs are too. You know where you
made me think of something there. You've got a dog
that you've had now for eight or nine years, and
you're looking to replace something with that. You need to
go back and look at how you develop that dog
to that point too, because they are one hundred percent

(18:29):
a product of their environment, how they're treated, and how
how the focus you put on them on their care,
not only their training, their opportunities to do what you
want to do, but just the everyday life of that dog.
Because it absolutely they have said it before. They all
have personalities, they're all different, they all respond to stimulus

(18:51):
in different ways. Some dogs you can get onto. Some
of them that you have to take a switch to
just to make some racket to get their attention, to
scare them. Whaling, I think you could beat him with
a tire tool and he's just here. I Am just
got to explain what it is that you want him
to do. Other dogs you can look at sternly and
they're just done for the day. It's that temperament and

(19:14):
stuff that you're looking for. So it's it's not only them,
it's you, and it's how you look at that dog
and each one of them has to be an individual there.
They're not a tool and a drawer. They're not a
hammer that you go out and get and when I
don't need it, I stick it back in.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
It's something you work on it every day. Right.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
You bring up something that's that's pretty important there. You know,
people have their preferences like I like a hardheaded male,
I like a soft female.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Whatever.

Speaker 1 (19:47):
But when you when you talk about that with whaling
that kind of dog, you know that that personality of
being like, I'm I don't care what happens, I'm mission focused.
That people will look at that and go. You know,
if you took that in like the Uplander the Waterfall world,
you'd be like, Okay, that's the dog that's going to
go hard no matter what, and that's the dog I want.

(20:08):
It's like you're kind of filling in the blanks there,
and you're you're potentially taking on a dog. Depending on
your training experience, that might be just more difficult for you,
Like you might be able to get away with harsher
corrections or whatever, but it.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
Might not be.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
It might not be what you need as a trainer.
And if you own a dog, you're a trainer, and
you know if people will look at that and go, well,
what if I if I get that little female and
she's real soft, I raise my voice and she lays
down on her back. I don't want that because what
if she doesn't pick up a goose? And I'm like, man,
the drive is different from that temperament, you know, like that,
and that can matter so much when you're training though.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
You know, the one thing that is always when I
and I can go back to Wilin to use him
at nauseum. Here is when when Rex and I started
hunting together and we started training Wilin and I use
training in air quotes because I didn't really train him.
I just give him the opportunity to do things. And

(21:06):
he's the first time we could cut him loose. Rex
is with me and he started barking with an old
dog that Rex had and they were running a deer.
I said, man, I think they're running a deer. He said,
I know he is. And I said, well, I need
to stop him. He said, no, let him run him
plumb out of the country if that's what he wants
to do. I said, if he's got he said, if
he's got the drive to go and chase and smell

(21:26):
something and get after Like that's what you're wanting him
to do. We can teach him not to smell deer
and when he gets rewarded for when he eventually runs
across a coon, you know, that's I can. He said,
you can. There's a million things you can teach a
dog to do, but drive ain't one of them. So

(21:47):
that's the first thing that we were looking at, and
he had that from the get go.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
He wanted to pursue.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
He wanted to chase that natural prey instinct, that that
genetic code that they can't fight that if it's in
there in the right spot, they're going to go when
you cut them loose.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
And he did that from the very beginning.

Speaker 3 (22:04):
It was an absolute lottery win for me, yep, because
it was the easiest thing I.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Ever did, was just get out there and let him go.

Speaker 3 (22:11):
And that was that was a lesson that that I
learned from Rex from the get go that I've heard
everybody says since and then I will testify to it
as well, is that if a dog has desire, then
you can there's something that.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
You can work with. Yeah, drives real important, Yeah, but
you also talk.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
I kind of want to clear this up because you
kind of you kind of joke about like not really
training him, just sort of facilitating the environments in which
he goes and haunts and develops himself.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
But there's also a million things that you have trained
him on.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Ohy, that that dog gets into a crate here or there.
That dog does a lot of stuff. And this is
this is something that you know, especially people who aren't
like they're kind of getting into hunting dogs or maybe
haven't run through a few of them. It's like, I
got to teach this dog to hunt. Like you don't
have to teach that dog to You have to teach
that dog how to behave when you're hunting. There you

(23:02):
go because they you know, you take you take my pups,
and that first exposure to a wing, they lose their minds.
I mean, it's just in them. And you know we've
all seen that and that dog. You put that dog
into the crp and a pheasant ran in front of it,
It's most likely going that direction till that bird comes up.

(23:22):
But you don't need it four hundred yards out, you know,
three hundred and eighty yards pass where you can shoot
whatever you need that dog, the recall, the you know, coursing,
the ranging, all that stuff. You're training it to behave
in a way that's kind of unnatural while it's doing
the most natural thing in the world, which is hunting.

Speaker 3 (23:41):
You know, and I say this forever. It's prey drive
that that you're taking advantage of on a coon dog.
And the last thing pray a predator wants to do
when it's chasing prey is make noise. But you look
for the characteristics and a dog while he's chasing that

(24:02):
his prey to make racket, which is you know, if
predators make racket when they're chasing prey, they don't go,
they don't eat that night. So you're taking advantage of
something and adding actually a fault. There's a fault in
there that you're taking advantage of. And this predator making
noise while he's chasing the prey, and if he does

(24:22):
that correctly, you can keep up with him. This is
before trackers, you know, and satellite collars and all that
kind of stuff. You're having to listen to this dog
go down through the woods and he's barking, and then
when he gets to a tree, he changes over to
a locate bark, a big long bark or a series
of chops, something that will let you know. It's called
a locate bark because he is letting you know, this

(24:45):
is where I'm at, this is my location. I've got
him up a tree, you know, come over here, and
then that dog will set there and bark until you
get there. And when you get there, he's don't get
to eat the coon. He doesn't get the eat what
he has instinctively ran through the woods to try to catch.

(25:06):
And all he's there for is your praise and affection
of you did a good job. Now let's go get
another one. So there's there is a lot of training
that goes in there. It's just exacerbated and a whole
lot easier if you just take advantage of the natural ability.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
Right well, and that's I mean acknowledging that I mean,
and that's puppy stage on is you know, I think
a really easy way to frame that up is you
you are asking this creature to do something unnatural. So
one of the things that you know, we've talked about,
recall you and I've been talking about it this whole
this whole trip, because you're you're cutting these dogs loose

(25:42):
and they might be seven hundred yards out. You might
need to get them back for some reason. And recall
and steadiness with hunting dogs, big problem, right, because that
dog naturally doesn't want to come back to you when
it's out doing the thing that it lives for. No,
just like a dog naturally doesn't want to sit in
a duck blind when the duck's fall is yeah, right
next to you, waiting for somebody else to give it

(26:04):
permission to do the thing it is dying to do.
But those are the things that make a good bird dog,
you know. I mean, as long as as long as
that drives there, and as long as the natural tendency
is there, then you're like, Okay, now I have to
ask this thing that I can't. I can communicate with,
but I can't just say, hey, I need you to
do this. I need you to do something very unnatural,

(26:28):
and I need you to do it over and over
and over and over again, no matter how many guns
go off, no matter how many green heads hit the water,
no matter what. And that's a that's hard, like, that's
a hard thing to train in and that takes time.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Well, yes, that's what I'm talking about.

Speaker 3 (26:44):
The time that it takes to go from bringing that
dog in the house to your petting them under the
tree for treeing a coon, or bringing that pup into
the house to the point that he or she brings
you back and sits besides you until you take that
duck away from its mouth. There's a long and winding

(27:04):
road between start and stop, and really there's no stop,
there's no finish wailing is I'm training him or correcting
him every time we go, I mean every time from
it all began with feeding him on at the in
the yard, getting him to come to me when I
wanted him to come to me, putting him on the tailgate,

(27:26):
getting him to go in the box when I commanded
him to go in there, wait till I tell him
to come out. There's so many things that go before
having a dog that is getting the reward and you
petting him when he's standing under that tree and there's
a coon up there. It's a whole lot goes into it,
and it's just a repetition every day of the of

(27:50):
the things that he gets the reward for. Within the
reward is you know, a pet on the head or
a rub on his ribs.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Right and it's impossible, it's really impossible to sit here
and talk about it and contextualize it in a way
that makes sense when you're talking about you know, really
really intensive training for a couple of years with a
lot of dogs and then sort of maintenance, kind of
keep it polished, work the rest of their lives. But
when you go back to you know, not only picking

(28:20):
a pup based on seeing something that you just like
and it works with you, you know, getting into the bloodlines,
getting into the pedigree, you're literally looking for a dog
not only that's going to have those that prey drive
to the nth degree, but you're also looking for lines
of dogs that know how to solve problems, lines of

(28:40):
dogs that have proven they can work with somebody in
a way where they're worth bringing back to the table
and getting another litter out of. And I think, you know,
I think that that's kind of a hard thing for people.
We sort of look at you know, we'll look at
German short hairs and we're.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
Like, well, they're all like this.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
They love birds, they love to point their hygh dry,
they're fun, they're goofy whatever, and it's like, man, they're individuals,
and you could have one just like kids that really
struggles to learn, really struggles to build confidence, whatever, and
just has a tougher go of it just generally, or
you can go find that bloodline where it's like there's
a reason these dogs have been bred. You know this

(29:21):
dog to this dog, this dog to this dog, this
litter whatever. And a huge component of it we don't
talk about a lot is intelligence and problem solving, and
those things make that journey we're talking about not only
just easier, which is great, that would be reason enough,
but it makes it a hell of a lot more
fun when you have something that that's you know, pretty

(29:43):
quick to learn and pretty quick to pick up on
stuff where you go to that new environment and they're like, okay,
well I know this drill, but I've never done it here,
and they just like work through it. It's like, okay,
we got that one, boss, what's next. That kind of
dog is a huge reason why those bloodlines and understanding
those petters are so important.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
Yeah, you know, we every I'm not a competition hunter.
I support competition hunting. Michael is pretty successful in it.
He's had some really good dogs in it before. He's
got one now that's doing really well. But as a
pleasure hunter and all the pleasure hunters, I know, where
do we get our dogs from?

Speaker 2 (30:20):
The competition guys, right.

Speaker 3 (30:21):
So it's everything that is that is selected and selectively
bred to produce the dogs that we have today or
all the.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
Even the pleasure hunters. That's where we get them from, right.

Speaker 3 (30:34):
And you know, over the last one hundred and fifty years,
coon dogs have gone from pack animals to independent dogs.
And you know, wolves hunting a pack where all our
dogs came from now, So that's something that has been
bred away from them. Like I talked about finding a
fault to begin with, a dog that would hunt by
itself back in the day was no good, you know,

(30:57):
but that has been taking advantage of because now you know,
hunting for food, you're hunting it at food.

Speaker 2 (31:02):
Really, So.

Speaker 3 (31:06):
Regardless of your end goal, whether it's to be a
world champion coon hunter or just a world champion weekend guy,
we're all getting those dogs from the same pool. And
understanding what each dog does, what each bloodline, the characteristics
it carries over one and another, is going to be

(31:28):
a lot easier to find a dog that's gambling, you know,
or would have a higher percentage of fitting what fits you, right,
And that's research and talking to people, you know.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
And I mean these folks are doing it for a business.

Speaker 3 (31:43):
And I have found no easier people to talk to
than dog people, because I can be a policeman or
carpenter or astronaut, whatever, but we've all got that.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
Common thing about dog.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
And when you're talking back and forth to people, I've
found that the large majority of them, they'll tell you
exactly what it is what a dog's looking at, and
give you the opportunity to see for yourself, right.

Speaker 1 (32:07):
And that's very important for me, big time. And you
brought up a really good point there. But the competition thing,
you know, I mean, I'm certain a lot of people
listening to this had no idea there was raccoon coon
hunt and competition. Yeah, And on kind of my side
of this thing are the field trialers and the hunt
test and crowd, which I don't have. I think it's cool.

(32:29):
I have no interest in competing in it. But our
dogs are coming from those lines too, or my dogs are.
And you know, people will say I don't need a
field trial dog. I mean it's essentially to a lot
of you know, a lot of people, that's like a
signal that you're going to get a dog it's unmanageable,
way too high drive. There's there's sort of a stigma

(32:49):
attached to it, and it's like, but those those are
the lines that have proven not not only what they
can do and what they're capable of in the hands
of somebody who knows what they're doing. But that's like
ahead your bet kind of thing when you don't know
as much as a pro trainer, you don't know as
much about somebody who's training one up to the level
to run it through the field trial circuit or whatever,

(33:10):
and you also have an undeniable aspect of health there.
And so people will say, you know, well, I'm gonna
get this dog because it's AKC or it's peer bread
and you're like, that doesn't I know that. For a
long time we kind of use that as sort of
a standard, right, like that that means something. Now, what
it means is it's just a peer bread dog. And

(33:32):
if you need a purpose bread dog, now you can
get a Golden Retriever that has nothing there hardly you know,
or you can go get a field bread golden that
will hunt just like the best lab just like whatever.
There's still golden retrievers, there's still peer bread, you can
AKC register them yep. And so there's a there's sort
of a maybe a knowledge gap. There maybe some misconceptions

(33:56):
about it where, yeah, you don't need a dog that
comes out of uh, you know, a line where they
got a million ribbons stacked up and they've won field
trials all across the country, national champions whatever. But at
the same time, those dogs that come out of those
lines and are bred from those dogs are going to
be They're they're generally going to.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
Be You're pretty good. You're kind of heads in your bed,
right do that? You know, because it's an investment, and
it's a long term investment. It's a gamble that that
you're paying for right now that it's not if you're
getting a puppy, it's not going to pay.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Off as far as the coon hunting goes.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
I'm getting him at eight weeks old, and I'm looking
at months maybe a year before.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
He used to be two years old.

Speaker 3 (34:42):
Back back in the day when my dad was a kid.
It was my first coon dog I got. He said,
you know, son, you're you're getting a puppy or we
can work. You can work and save up your money
and buy a dog. Somebody's already got started, he said,
because that dog is going to be eighteen months old
before you find not whether he's going to be good
or not. And that used to be the standard. But

(35:03):
you know, things change now. You know people are good
or bad. They're treeing earlier now and they're getting more
pressure putting on them. But they're bread to do that.
But going back to what I was saying, you pay
six hundred dollars for a coon dog puppy, which is
very easy to do, plus twice that or more. You're

(35:29):
hedging your bet because of the value of a dog's
value from the historical standpoint to know that when you
get to that ten, eleven, twelve, and fourteen month old stage,
that you've got something there, a good, good thing to
start working with. And it goes back to you talk

(35:50):
about health. You know, they're trying to breathe these dogs
to like for hips, you know, good hips, the same
thing with coon dogs without. They want them to be independent,
you know, healthy, quick learners, you know has some sense.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
You know a dog.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
There's always been an old misconception. You see cartoons of
gold coon hounds laying out in the yard, you know,
and they're lazy and they don't appear to have much sense.
And I've seen some of these dogs could be trained
to paint a barn if you just give my paint
brushing and open the can for them. So you're looking
for that from these breeders that are that are breeding

(36:34):
these dogs to be superior. They're just always trying to
graduate up, up, up up up, and in doing so
you may lose something here and lose something there, but
the vast majority of it, in my experience, is seeing
is the betterment of the breed, and to be able
to manip to manipulate, you know, this dog that I

(36:55):
may want to hunt this way, and you can get
one out of the litter and train it to hunt
the way you won't, you know, And just to be able.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
To specialize that dog to fit.

Speaker 1 (37:05):
The needs and the way you hunt right well right,
And when you're talking about that, one of the things
I thought about was, you know, I'm really not familiar
with the hound world all that.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
Well, like what and I'm.

Speaker 1 (37:19):
Going somewhere with this, Okay, it seems like there's a
low I haven't heard you guys talk about looks a
whole lot like appearance. It seems like this crowd, at
least your crowd is like very tuned into what's under
the hood and why that matters when you get into
a lot of upland up upland especially but waterfowl dogs

(37:42):
is some extent too. It's like, I want a red lab. Yeah,
I want a chocolate man, and that's priority.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
I know exactly where you're going.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
Some of these hounds look like homemade soap. They don't
favor a drink of water now. But it's very important
to me. But it's also, like I said before, one
man's trash is another man's treasure. But the shape and
the color is important to me. Some folks like a
lot of white on their hounds. And there there's a
line of dogs that have a lot of white that

(38:14):
look more like bird they're colored up, more like you know,
pointers than hounds. And you know, trycolored dogs. I like
them with the red or orange head, you know. And Jesse,
you see out there now, she's got black ears, but
every day that hair is turning red and will eventually
she'll have a red head, just like Whalingville out there.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
And that's what appeals to me. But other folks, I know,
they'll have a dog.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
They'll pull out of a dog boxing, like, holy cow,
you know, I need some glasses.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
That's the ugliest thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 3 (38:46):
Then you cut them loose and there are three trees
ahead of everybody. So a lot of folks that's it's
just you know, it's a difference in forge and chevrolets. Right,
it's if looks are important or performance. And you know,
I'll show my wife a prime example. She's so biased
about whaling. I said, I'm going hunting with so and

(39:07):
sod them, and she's like, what kind of dog they have?

Speaker 2 (39:11):
And I'll show a picture of them. She's they're not
as cute as.

Speaker 3 (39:14):
Whaling, you know, but that that's very important to her
that her dog looks the prettiest of all out there.
You know, he may not be the best coon dog
out there, which is important to me. But I see
it more lean towards having a dog that will they
can cut loose and tree a.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Coon rather than win. You know, a bench show.

Speaker 3 (39:36):
And there's a big there's a big bench show following
a big that's a big part of of coon. But
the folks that I run with you know, they'd rather
have look at a coon in a tree than than
a pretty dog on the tailgate.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
Well, and I mean, that's what I want to talk about,
is you're not buying You have your preference like everybody does.
But you're not buying a dog because it looks good.
You're not You're not buying a dog because of the
of its hair, Like you're buying a dog because of
what's underneath the hood.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
And it's an easy thing. And I hear.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
This, This is probably the the thing I hear about
more than anything when people talk to me about puppies
or why they got a certain dogs, Like I just
like the way they look. I like the way that
you know, these wire hairs, beards look. I like, you know,
the way a red lab looks. And it's like, you know, whatever,
personal choice. But if you're shopping on color or sthetics first,

(40:32):
like you said, it's it's like when you go go
to buy a new truck, are you like, I just
want a red one? Like, oh, Dodge Chevy, what do
you want? V eight V six just gotta be red?
And it's like that's you have to understand, you know,
like you have a kid, you're not like, I hope
this kid looks good. You're like, I hope it's healthy.

(40:55):
You know, I hope it's smart and healthy and compassion
and all this stuff. You're not like, I hope it's pretty,
you know. But with our dogs we can kind of
order up something. And there's there's you know, we have
access to so much information now where you can be
exposed to different dogs. And you know, we've been talking,
we've been making a bunch of jokes about French bulldogs
here and how how nuts over them people are. And

(41:18):
it's like, man, if you if you need a performance
driven dogs, if you're listening to this, you need a
dog that has a job. It's working dogs. Forty dog,
it's going to have a job. You know, the color
might matter later, it might be like a you know,
seventh down the list.

Speaker 3 (41:35):
There is an old saying in coon Hunt. You know,
I like tree and walkers. Clay Newcomb likes plots for
some unknown reason who knows, but that that right there
is a prime example. The old saying is if it's
a good a good coon dog, the color has never

(41:56):
mattered on a good coon dog, right And it's so
it's the end goal is what you're after first, before
the esthetics, and if you can have what you like
and it'd be good, that's just a bonus.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
Yeah, you know this reminds me so three dogs ago,
I had a golden I had to put down at
six years old.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
Taught me a real valuable lesson.

Speaker 1 (42:24):
And at the time I had a year and a
half old daughters, two of them plural. So my wife
was like, do not get a dog. Don't bring a puppy.
This is not a situation. We need another dependent. And
she had offhandedly said to me at some point in
that whole process, when I knew lux was going downhill,

(42:46):
like I think chocolate Lab puppies are the cutest puppies ever.
So I had to put my dog down and I
was talking to Doc on the phone. I said, you know,
she likes chocolate Lab puppies and he's like, if you
want me to find you a puppy, I can find
you a puppy. And he said it probably won't be brown,
it'll probably be black, but it won't matter. And I

(43:07):
just impulsively said, find me a pup here's what I want.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
And then I.

Speaker 1 (43:11):
Walked on eggshells in that house because my wife was like,
do not, don't do this to us. You know, people
are listening to this and they're like, oh, I had
babies that you know. I had a five and three
year old at the same time. And I'm like, you
have no concept of what you're talking about. You shut
your mouth right now, because people do that to you
all the time. Oh, I basically raised twins. My kids

(43:31):
are four years apart. I'm like, you have I'm gonna
hand you to newborn babies.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
Twins are different and your world's gonna what gaff I
can say.

Speaker 3 (43:39):
It's like having kids, like drowning, somebody handing you a
glass of water.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
Yep, having twins and be about the same thing.

Speaker 1 (43:47):
It's a heavy lift when they're young, young, young. But
I needed a dog and it was April. So I
was like, if I get one now, I can train
it up and at least late seasons start getting it
out there, you know. But the window was closing. If
I waited too long, I was going to miss a
season without a dog. And so through this whole thing,

(44:07):
my wife knew. She's like, don't, don't do it, Like,
don't don't freaking do it, buddy. And Tom's calling me
and he's like, I think your dog's in Kentucky.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
I think your dog's here. And I'm like, oh shit,
now I'm gonna have to drive.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
A thousand miles, pay pay up for a dog because
it's going to be a good one. And he called
me and he said, your dog is in East Bethel,
which was twenty minutes away from me. And he said
there's a litter there. It's blacks and chocolates. You're not
gonna get one of the chocolates.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
Whatever.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
I needed a female or I wanted a female. He's
take your take your wife and your daughter's up there.
Go show him this litter. And he said you'll be fine.
Oh yeah, that's and so I brought them there. Dude,
I brought those little girls up. They could barely walk
and there were I can't I think there were ten
pups in that litter. And as soon as that happened,
my wife wasn't even really that mad at me. And

(44:58):
I was like, this was just I just threw the
needle on this one. But it was at that point
to get a dog. I was like, I'll get a
brown one. I don't care. I just need one. And
Tom knew better and he's like the color will not
matter when when the litter's right and the litter was awesome.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
I mean, she was.

Speaker 1 (45:16):
She was the dog I needed at that point. Like
she she was. And I don't know if Tom knew this.
I don't know if Tom kind of instinctively understood this
about the kind of dog I needed. But she was
the kind of dog that didn't need tons of attention,
tons of love. She needed to work and so she
needed she needed to train, and I just, you know,

(45:38):
between having the girls and just a heavy travel schedule,
that dog got a tenth of the love that my
current four year old dog was getting at that age.
But she never really she was very independent and she
was like if you were if you picked up a bumper,
she was like, we are, We're just going And she

(45:59):
was the right thing.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
And I guess something that you need to absolutely because.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
I didn't have I needed to get a lot out
of that dog with a limited amount of time I had.
And I don't know if that was just I'm just
revisionous history here and I'm filling in the blanks, or
if that's really like something that he kind of instinctively knew.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
But it just worked out. But it was.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
It was an experience and it really kind of taught
me like, I don't I don't care what they look like. Really,
I care about what they're bringing to the table because
I I just want something that is going to turn
out in spite of me, you know, like I want
something that is going like I would have to try
hard to screw that dog up. Beyond some of the things,

(46:41):
you know, the gunfirewater introduction that you could screw up
and really ruin them, just the general development of that dog.
That dog is going to develop through all of my mistakes.

Speaker 3 (46:49):
Man, I've said that forever about Whitelum, that he might
he turned into a really good coon dog despite all
of my efforts. You know, he really did it, and
he It's interesting you said about getting a dog at
the right time. The day I went and picked up
that dog was March the thirteenth of twenty twenty. The

(47:10):
next day is when all everything broke loose and they
shut the school down. Bailey was in the second grade
and we were there at home and we had this
new dog, and that filled such a huge gap. But
it also was kind of intimidating because I know this
dog is here forever. You know, I'm either going to

(47:32):
be having to get another coon dog and just feeding
this clown with it, or you know, we're gonna all
bets are off.

Speaker 2 (47:38):
We're just going to focus on making this thing the
right way.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
And it was just such a perfect fit that he
turned into what he did.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
I through a lot of effort in a lot of miles.
You know. It was.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
Bailey was home, Alexis was working from home, I was
working from home. So at night they'd go to bed.
Nearly every night we'd hit the woods, and it just
got to be that routine. It may not be for
an hour, two hours, it might be three hours, but
it was repetition all the time. And last October, Austin

(48:15):
Clever at Old Chili works at Me either came down
here and we did a podcast down here, and I
took him coon hunting for the first time. And it
is he and he and I and Michael were hunting
and his first coonhut and Chili had ever been on.
And we knocked the coon out, bring back the skin
it and he's like, man, he said, these coons are cool.

(48:37):
I get it, I get why, or I see this
is fun. You know what y'all are doing from start
to finish. He said, but what is the deal with
the coons? Why is the coon such a focus for
you guys down here? And Michael just immediately, just like that,
he said, Man, it ain't about the coon.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
It's about those dogs.

Speaker 3 (48:58):
And you kind of see the light and I had
never really thought of it that way, but as one
hundred percent the light.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
Bulb went above off above my.

Speaker 3 (49:06):
Head, just like it did Chili's when he said that,
and he's and he said, oh, I get it. And
Michael said, you know, it could be a bobcat, could
be a fox. He could be a possum. But it
is the relationship that you build with this dog that
when you feel confident when you get to where you're going.
I never go anywhere that I turn my dog loose

(49:26):
and I'm not confident he has the best chance of
anything to triger coon before I get back. And you
do the same thing with you when you cut your
dogs loose for pheasants. You're not gonna turn it loose
without thinking. If he's out there, this dog will find
it right, you know. And that is such a bond.
And when they do it, it just it's just such
a bond. It just strengthened that bond, strengthens that bond,

(49:48):
and it's just there ain't a better feeling to me
than doing that and sharing that with somebody.

Speaker 1 (49:53):
Right, And that's you bring up a really good point there.
So I've been thinking about this a lot down here,
because you know my interest. I've been on some coon
hunts in the past, and I've been around hounds, not
a lot, but some, and it is not I was
thinking about it. I'm like, it doesn't appeal to me
the same way as you know, chasing grosse, woodcock whatever, ducks,

(50:14):
any birds. But I was thinking about this last night
when we were leaving the woods and riding that side
by side listen to Michael talk, and I thought, you know,
if the quail population here was like it was sixty
years ago, some of these guys would be running pointers
and they'd be doing a They would be going just
as hard but in a different direction. And then I thought,

(50:36):
if I lived here, I'd have to have a dog
doing something. So then I was like, I'd be a
coon hunter, or i'd you know, ducks whatever. There would
be something where the location I was in would just
kind of dictate what kind of dog and what kind
of direction I went. And then you know, I thought
about it, and I was like, well, the whole reason
I started duck hunting was because I had a bird dog,

(50:58):
had a retriever, and I was living in the suburbs
of the Twin Cities for the first time in my life,
and I'm like, I have no access to any wild birds.
I figured out the woodcock thing a little bit later
when they migrated through, but trying to find places to
hunt deer, you know, on chunks of public land up
there where we got a lot of water, and I'd be,

(51:19):
you know, out there glassing and I'm like, okay, there's
you know, make no to wood ducks on the pond
or whatever. Never really hunted ducks ever. And then you
sit there and think about it and go, well, this
is what I have and I never I had always
to that point it intentionally avoided duck hunting because I'm
the kind of guy who I'm like, if I go,
if I start duck hunting, I might be like a

(51:39):
duck hunter, like that might be it, you know, and
I'm like, I don't have the I don't have the
bandwidth for that, you know. I was the bow hunting
thing ate up so much of my time. But when
you're sitting there, you're like, oh, I I could probably
figure this out a little bit. And for several years
with that dog, most of the bird hunting I did
was you know, kind of small water ducks, figuring it
out with her because that's what I had. And I'll

(52:01):
tell you what, I didn't feel like I was missing
a whole lot, you know, I always missed the pheasant
thing a little bit or whatever. But I was like, oh,
this is this is just what I'm going to do
because I have this kind of dog and this kind
of opportunity, you know, and I think, you know, I
did a podcast. I did a Foundation's episode about this
where it's like you kind of got to take a snapshot.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
Of your life where you're at and go.

Speaker 1 (52:22):
You know, I grew up grouse hunting with my grandpa
up in the you know, the big Woods. But now
I have four kids in sports, and I live six
hours away from real grouse territory, but I have access
to these kind of birds, and so, you know, buying
a dog off of memories or buying a dog off
of hopes that you're going to be doing this thing,
you know, whatever, like, it's your choice. But where are

(52:44):
you at now? What can you get to? And again,
a lot of a lot of this. You know, you
guys live in a place where you facilitate this and
you have big chunks of land to do this. A
lot of people are like, well, I do the you know,
the South Dakota thing. You know, five days a year,
I bring my dog out and I hunt pheasants. Well, okay,
then three hundred and sixty days a year. Your dog's
a house dog. So what do you need out of that?

(53:06):
And what would be fair to that dog or the
kind of dog you could get. It's not just about
that one five day window. It's about what's the relationship
going to be and how how much can you give
that dog instead of just what can that dog give you?

Speaker 2 (53:20):
When you're looking for a puppy?

Speaker 3 (53:21):
Yeah, yeah, that that is so important and it's something
that a lot of people don't think about. You know,
there was a I've heard this more than once from
a guy long several years ago. We had black and
tan puppies and would sell them for one hundred dollars
apiece and with a guarantee that if the folks got

(53:44):
tired of them, he'd give them their money back after
a year. Well, folks were behind these puppies up and
after a year they're like, ah, I wasn't going to
coon hunt, so I can get my money back on
this dog.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
But what this guy was doing was farming. Puppies have
to be raised by people for a year.

Speaker 3 (54:03):
He'd get them back and he would start training them
and sell them.

Speaker 2 (54:06):
So hold on.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
So he was like, hey, you take the VAT bill,
you socialization, you take the terrorist stage of the six
month old puppy.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
You tell me that guy wasn't thinking.

Speaker 3 (54:17):
Now, that guy was thinking, this's happened in the state
next just east of us here. But it was an
absolute genius plan of how he did that.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
But you.

Speaker 3 (54:31):
There's there's so much to be considered when you bring
one of those dogs home, the not only the care
that you had to give them. Because now, if you know,
my daughter's fixing them, she's twelve, almost thirteen, and she's
a competition dancer. So a lot of our weekends we're gone, well,

(54:52):
guess what, Whaling and Jesse, they're not going with us.
So I've either got to boredom or I've got to
have somebody come and take care of them, and there
is there's no greater responsibility you have than another living
creature dependent upon you and you got that's that's tier one.
You got to take care of that. That's just the
way it is. There's if you if that's not your

(55:14):
primary focus when you walk out the door, is this dog?
But these dogs going to be fine when I when
I leave the house, then you don't deserve them to
begin with. So that's there's so many things to think about.
It is a limiting factor on your life and something
that should be considered before you ever start looking for one.
Am I going to have the term to do this?

(55:36):
Am I going to have the resource to take up
the slack when I'm not here? Because I mean I
can't think of anybody's kids that don't. They're not involved
in either dancing or travel ball or whatever. You know,
they're going somewhere doing something a lot. So there's there's
just so much to be considered in the welfare of

(55:59):
when you're not there taken care of, not to mention
the things that can happen to them once you get
them out in the woods.

Speaker 2 (56:06):
Right well, I like to think of it.

Speaker 1 (56:09):
I mean, for me, when we got married, and I
moved from a town of two thousand people southeastern Minnesota,
little dairy farming community to the suburbs of the Twin Cities.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
I mean, I was miserable. Miserable. That's a bunch of
folks who live there.

Speaker 1 (56:23):
There are way too many, way too many. But for me,
it was like, I just need to be in the
I need to be away from people. I need to
be in the woods. I need to be on the water.
That's just what I need. Like that's I'm not. I
don't do very well if you keep that away from
me for too long. And I'm sure that a lot
of people listening to this are like that. And if not,

(56:44):
you have other needs.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
We look at a dog and go, I'm gonna find
this puppy. This puppy is gonna be awesome at this
and awesome at this, and it's gonna give me all
of this stuff, like it's going to do for me
a ton of stuff.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
That's good.

Speaker 1 (56:59):
But what am I doing for that dog? And if
I get this kind of dog, is my lifestyle conducive
to giving that kind of dog, not only that breed,
but that that individual dog that litter, you know, the
high drive. Whatever whatever they bring to the table, am
I going to be able to get that dog what
it needs? And so you see this a lot, and

(57:19):
I'm sure there are a lot of veterinarians listening to
this who've dealt with a lot of you know, dogs
that have been given way too many treats because people
equate that to love or you know, we do a lot,
we play a lot of games. You see this a
lot where it's like, well, I take my dog. I
take my German short hair that's eight months old. I
take it for a walk every day for a mile
and a half. And that's like almost doing nothing when

(57:40):
that dog because of what it needs, you know. And
so we can kind of, if we want to, we
can convince ourselves that we're doing the best for that
dog because the dog is going to be happy, like
I'll do. You know who the humor calumnists Dave Barry is,
Oh yeah, yeah, he wrote you know, he's written ton
and tons of stuff. But I'll never forget. He wrote

(58:01):
a line one time about they were doing an experiment.
I think it was on the International Space Station, but
it might have just been a man mission up.

Speaker 2 (58:09):
Into space a long time ago.

Speaker 1 (58:11):
And they brought a frog up there to test how
like distressed a frog would be. And the whole thing
was about, like, how would you tell if a frog
was distressed? Right, Like, if you could pick one critter
that's like pretty stoic, it's a frog, right, And I
always think about that. I'm like, yeah, if you go
get a dog and you like, you can watch it

(58:33):
when we walk up to your dogs in the kennel here,
their tails are going nuts. They're like, he's coming. He's
the best thing that's going to happen to me. Then
you take that dog out and you let it go
off the side by side at night, and now that
dog's like, this is the best thing that happened to me.
And then you feed these dogs whatever. It's like we
can we can convince ourselves that we're giving them everything

(58:54):
they need because of just what they are, why they're
so special. But to be honest about that and go,
you know, I live in this little apartment in the city.
Maybe that you know, uh drought or that wire hair.
It's not the best choice for me just because I
like a dog that has a beard and a you know,
as a cool temperament or whatever. Like we have to

(59:14):
be fair to the dogs too. And that starts way
before you find that litter. That starts when you're like,
you know what, maybe I'm not this breed. Maybe this
breed isn't it anymore. Maybe I need something like this
because of X Y Z and the dance schedule and
where I live and where my job takes me and
all of a sudden the travel. You got to be
fair to them too.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
Or maybe you just don't need one.

Speaker 3 (59:34):
There are sections of it, you know, Like during that
twenty plus years of my career, I didn't have a
coon dog because I couldn't justify having that dog set
in the back in the in the pan back there
and me not hunting.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
That's just not that, ain't That's no bueno. That ain't
the way to go. Did you have house dogs at all? No? No,
until you got married. Not until I got married.

Speaker 3 (59:57):
Then you had house Now we got row see the
jack Russell whose only job is to crop dust hair
from one room to the other. But you know, growing up,
we didn't on the farm. We didn't have any dogs
that weren't serving a purpose for something, right, you know,
cow dogs, good or bad or at whatever level they were,

(01:00:17):
they were if they were if they were eating food
at our house, they were they were serving a purpose
of course, coon, I mean hunting dogs out the wazoo,
but there was no house dogs there. But you know
that's but that was a sacrifice that I made because
of my commitment to having to treating the dog the

(01:00:39):
way they're supposed to be. You know, I don't treat
them as humans. You know, they're I don't think they're people,
and they shouldn't be treated like people. They are animals.
But they are our responsibility to take care of. And
I take that very to heart. You know that that
that it is my responsibility to take care of me
and Whalen, who's never aged a day until we brought

(01:01:03):
this puppy home. And I can look at him now
and I can start seeing the gray in his face.
You know, he'll have a home at my house and
until he leaves this world for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
I mean that's a stressful.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
My older dog, when we brought that pup home, she
was not super excited about it, you know, but that's
just how it goes.

Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
They figure it out. Yeah, they play together now.

Speaker 3 (01:01:26):
I mean he has always been Michael has always called
him a big puppy.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
He's like a five year old puppy.

Speaker 3 (01:01:32):
That's way Rex refers to him, just because he's just
so full of energy and just the way I mean,
you can he can jump up on you and you
pop him on the head and he's.

Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
Just hih, you know, he's ready for more of it.
Just he's just a.

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
Lovable toddler really is what he is, is his temperament.
But the first few days he was like, what.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
Is going on? Why is this creature here?

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
You know, I'm the baby, the I'm I'm the one
who's supposed to be sitting in Mama's lap, you know,
in the lown furniture out back. But they get used
to it. And the way you do that as you
treat them both the same, you know, and and we
did that. But it's a it's a fun journey. To me,
there's nothing any more fun or any more pleasurable than

(01:02:20):
seeing a dog figure out what their purpose is, why
they're there. And what I'm wanting them to do is
when they figure it out is like I mean, they
literally look back at you and like this is outstanding,
you know, And not only is this fun for me,
but you're happy that I'm happy, right, and you just
you can see it if you pay attention, you can

(01:02:41):
absolutely see the expression on that dog's face and in
their temperament that that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
They like it too.

Speaker 1 (01:02:47):
Ye, I mean it's I can see that, you know.
I mean when you I spent quite a bit of
time with Michael, and he talks a lot about when that.
When that dude talks, you're like, they're here is so
much knowledge, Oh, hitting me upside the head, you know,
in such a soft, very just like modest delivery. He's

(01:03:13):
not trying to impress you. He's just saying, this is
just what it is. And you can see that where
it's like it's a for him. He's doing that for
the dog. He's doing so much that's just for the dogs,
but it's for him at the same time, even you know,
like his motivation isn't I'm doing this for me. I'm

(01:03:35):
doing this for the dogs. But because of that, it's
just a different thing.

Speaker 2 (01:03:39):
Man.

Speaker 3 (01:03:39):
He's been such a I could not have had a
better coach than this guy. Then Reck when I first
started out with Rex, he's very knowledgeable. And then Michael,
who we hunt together all the time and he's never
like you need to do this, you should do that.
I'm like, I wonder why he's doing that, and Michael said, well,

(01:04:00):
could be it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
Or I'll say should I do this? No, you should
do this.

Speaker 3 (01:04:05):
He's always waiting and that has been so important and
been a big factor in Whalen's development of like should
I be doing this or should I just let him
figure it out himself? Like Rex told me, you know
at the beginning, you know, if he'll chase whatever he's chasing,
we can. As long as he'll chase something, we can

(01:04:25):
get him pointed in the right direction. Well, Michael has
been a great steward in that and allowing me to
let that dog develop naturally and me correct him when
I needed to correct him. And his knowledge comes from
he does this every day. Coon hunting is this man's life.
I mean, he's making these lights for coon hunters. So

(01:04:45):
every day he's talking about this. Every day he's dealing
with and we hunt together all the time. He's so
analytical about it. There's so much more to it than
just cutting the dog loose and waiting for him to
start barking. And it's he has been It's been such
a blessing to me to have that knowledge to be
able to pick and call him on the phone like, man,

(01:05:08):
this is what's going on. I've called him before. I've
been out in the field but hunting by myself. Well,
what's what's happening? What did he do? What did you do? Okay,
you messed up? It ain't the dog you made up.
You made an error. Ye, And it's just pointed me
in the way to go to direction. And all that
comes from paying attention to years and years of data

(01:05:29):
that he's been logging in his head, which has started
with me. Now I've got five years of data on
this dog. I can, I can. Last night we were
watching on that garment. I said, okay, Hillary, look right
here the last time he barked when he made this
track right here, And this garment is a screen and
this track and wailing and showing his track on the

(01:05:50):
satellite view of where he's going, and he ain't made
a peep, but I can see he's making a circle.
And when he gets back to that spot right there,
he's probably going to bark again. And Sam, as soon
as he got there, he did. And it's just from
knowing and paying attention to the tendencies that that dog
has and kind of understanding what he's doing while he's
out there. And those tools have been beneficial, and well,

(01:06:15):
the number one, they keep hunters from having to spend
the night in the woods. Like when I was a kid,
my coon dog didn't come back. I'm laying down there
in the woods the last place I saw him and
waiting for him to come back, or I'm leaving a
coach there and going home and coming back to next
morning anybody, yeah, to come back to get him. And
that has totally eliminated that. But it's also shown how

(01:06:38):
these dogs work. The bird dogs the same way. You
can actually physically see how they're working a piece of
terrain and like, well, you know by now, he's probably
got this covered, he's got that cover, and you look
on there and he was one hundred yards from where
you actually thought he was. You know, so but that
day to reinforcing all that stuff and keeping a journal.

(01:07:00):
I've got a journal when I first started hunting whaling,
and I keep it and I go back to it now.
I look at the things that I was thinking that then,
about where I thought this dog was going and why
he was doing that. And I was either right on
spot or I was totally wrong, but it's it's very important,
and Michael has that knowledge of keeping up with stuff. Well, man,
we'll be going down through there and he's say, you

(01:07:22):
remember when Whaling treed this coon right over here, And
I'm like, uh.

Speaker 2 (01:07:27):
No, I don't. He said, yeah, that was that night.

Speaker 3 (01:07:30):
He'll finally remind me of some I'm like, yeah, I remember,
it's hunting that night. Well, you tread three coons, and
heck treed five and.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
We did it here here, here, here, and there.

Speaker 3 (01:07:39):
I'm like, sweet Jesus, Michael, I can't remember what I
have for breakfast this morning. But he's such a student
of it. And that's what it takes to be consistently good.
And that's why he always has good dog.

Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
Right well, And that's I mean, maybe that's a good
point to kind of end this sucker on is when
we talk about you know, you talk a lot about
getting whaling, getting other dogs whatever, and getting out there
and getting those reps in over and over and letting
that dog develop those skills. Because some of those raccoons
go up there and they sit in the first four
of the tree, some of them getting those logs like
we saw last night. So some of them swim across

(01:08:13):
the water for a long ways. But when you do that,
not only are you allowing that dog to figure it out,
he's learning his job out there in a dynamic environment
with a critter that's trying real hard to get away
to get away, but also you're learning how to work
that dog. And so when we talk about that commitment
of like, well it's to develop your dog, you want

(01:08:34):
to give that bird dog two years of training every
single day, working on the foundational level stuff, getting up
into the upper level stuff the hand signals, a long
distance work whatever. You're also learning how to train that
specific dog and work together with them. And it's the
same thing, you know, I see. It's kind of my
nightmare when somebody's like, hey, I want to go pheasant

(01:08:56):
hunting with you, Like, I don't want to. I got
a few people I want to hunt with, but mostly
I want to go solo. But when I do hunt
with somebody who doesn't get out there a lot, their
connection to that dog and the dog's connection to them
is different because they just haven't got the reps together
and so they're not working the same way, like they're
not just in tune, and it's like a kind of

(01:09:18):
an intangible thing that's like hard to recognize until you
watch somebody who has that relationship and they're always like,
that dog is amazing, and they're not wrong, But that
relationship to that that person has with that dog is
what's amazing about it too.

Speaker 3 (01:09:34):
I'm so anxious to see how Jesse responds to to
when we start hunting, because I have to be able
to adapt to her.

Speaker 2 (01:09:42):
She should not have to adapt to me.

Speaker 3 (01:09:44):
She's going to have to adapt to me to do
the things that I want her to do or to
not do the things that I don't want her to do.
But I've got to go at the speed of her
learning curve. Well, Whylon it was pretty easy.

Speaker 2 (01:09:55):
You know. She may be a different category altogether.

Speaker 3 (01:09:59):
But if I tried to train her or to teach
her the way that I did with Whaling, that's my fault.

Speaker 2 (01:10:05):
If she don't get it.

Speaker 3 (01:10:06):
I've got to go the way that she learns and
the way that is best suited for her at whatever
speed that is.

Speaker 2 (01:10:12):
She may be faster, who knows.

Speaker 3 (01:10:14):
I hope she is, but that's one thing to consider,
you know, on that second dog or third dog or whatever,
and it may be the reason why the others the
first dog you got after the one that was so
good didn't work out, They're they're different and you got
to look that way.

Speaker 1 (01:10:31):
Always, Brent. It's always so much fun talking to you.
Really appreciate you having us down here, showing us your
life out here in the Arkansas coon woods. Where can
everybody find you? All of your stuff you're making.

Speaker 3 (01:10:45):
Oh, this country life is on the Beargrease feed, on
the Mediator podcast anywhere you get a podcast, you just
type that in there and whip it up. We would
have some stuff coming out on the Meet the Clips
and I've got some some hunts and stuff that will
you on the main medi Eater channel.

Speaker 1 (01:11:02):
And they might even be able to go to that
media clips channel and see you, uh teaching how to
how to work with dogs a little bit and do
some stuff and figure out figure out a few skills
that you might want your dog to have.

Speaker 3 (01:11:13):
Here it comes, man, I'm excited. I'm looking really looking
forward to seeing what we can do this.

Speaker 2 (01:11:17):
Thanks brother, thank you. Mm hmmm