The American Beagler Forum

You purchase a young started dog in the summer. You hunt her for a couple of months with your other dogs. She shows you that she is a brush busting jump dog.She has no tremendous faults other than she will open going to another dog if they jump a rabbit. She could be a little faster. Just a solid medium speed dog. She just turned a year old, you feel she is ready to be singled out and soloed. To avoid the deer hunters you do a lot of running at night. One night she jumps what you think is a rabbit in the soybeans. She makes a circle in the beans and then it lines out and runs for about 550yards up the hill. You see all this on your Garmin. Once up the hill it makes a hard right. You then are about 90% sure it isn`t a deer but a fox.You knowing from past experience with other dogs how the deer run in this area and are able to make this assumption.

The hunts really aren`t all that important to me. I am a pleasure hunter. I may put her in a few hunts when she is ready.
Do I leave her alone and let her develop to her fullest potential. The fox population isn`t huge where I am at. I am thinking that it might be nice to have a dog that can run fox.With the technology that we have today by way of Garmin it isn`t that difficult to be able to keep up with dogs. We can usually catch them within 10 to 15 minutes.

What would you do ?

If you are mainly going to gun hunt her definitely break her now. Do you want your dogs taking off on a fox race when you want to hunt rabbit?

If you don't mind the occational unexpected fox chase let her have at it. Being aware that if she is allowed to run them the rest of the pack will too. Fox sure are fun to run and worth about $25 if good color.

Mybeagles

I would wait until deer season over. I wouldn't run her at night.

I say break her now while she is young. You never know what may unexpectedly change down the road; at least then you would have a straight rabbit dog which in my opinion is far more desirable than one that runs both rabbits and fox.

I'd break her now, Like mybeagles said I think it will cause problems with your other dogs in the future.

break her now the sooner the better and dont play with your transmitter hit her hard but dont let her think you were the one doing it when she comes back to you take her n put her on rabbits thats the way i have been doing young dogs for years and it has worked for me i have drove around n set a pup up on deer when i see a deer i let the pup ot n walk her right through the fresh tracks where the deer was n if she shows interest n takes the track i wait till she opens then hit her on 6 till she dont want even close to a deer track jb