I see a lot of talk about stud dogs lately. Here's my question. How many gyps do you guys bred to your studs a year? I can do a search on here and only find a few that I see are producing a good number of pups that are able to place. Very few off the same dogs are placing in derby and aa hunts? Why is that? I asked one man and he said he bred 48 gyps to his in 1 year. That's a LOT of puppies but only to see a few that have placed. This dog only won one High end hunt. So why do we keep breeding to the same dog? I think there is a lot of name bredding going on and less real bredding to improve the bloodline. Thank you.

One area where foxhound breeders have always been way behind is in evaluating how good a stud or (brood gyp) is at producing good and great hounds. Part of the problem is we put too much faith in a great hound being a great producer. Fred Walker had a hound, Red Bud, that won the Masters and placed 2nd at the Masters the year before. Fred thought he was the best field trial hound he had ever owned. Over 100 females, maybe 150, were bred to him and the offspring were never as good as the Sire and most of them were not even "good" hounds. Sometimes that happens. We imagine that if a hound came into existence that is so great he was able to win all the major hunts USO, National, Masters, All American, Top Gun, etc, with no cheating and no performance enhancers, and every hunter that ever saw the hound run knew that this hound was the best that had ever been born, we imagine that this hound automatically will be the best producer of all time and we should all breed a female. The truth is sometimes the truly great hounds are poor producers. The way we operate today I think we are wasting a lot of effort breeding to great hounds that are average to poor producers when if we had all the data we would breed to the hounds with less impressive field trial records that have outstanding production records. We also sometimes put too much weight on the sire or even on the dam. If a cross turns out great all that really means is that one cross worked. It doesn't necessarily mean the stud is great or the dam is great. If the cross doesn't work then it doesn't mean the stud or dam are poor producers, it just means that cross does not work. Only by looking at the big picture and all the breeding information can you hope to make some conclusions about the ability of the stud to produce.
I think egos of stud dog owners have gotten in the way of improving the breed. Most stud dog owners will not tell you how many times their stud has been bred or how many crosses "worked" or how many great offspring he has produced relative to how many poor offspring. They would rather feed you their own propaganda instead of making the information available to the public. These days it only takes one or two great offspring to get us all fired up about a stud. When OTB's Coot came along the whole world was on fire for Jaybird. Everybody wanted some Jaybird and if you had asked most hunters about Jaybird before Coot started winning they could not have told you anything about him. To be clear, I think Jaybird is probably the case of a great producer without a great field trial record and it took a great hound dog man in Paul West to realize what he had and make the right crosses that will improve the breed. It is a good thing that some hunters know what they are doing and we have all benefited from their diligence. My point is that most of us are quick to jump on the bandwagon of the next big thing. If one great offspring pops up we run to the sire that produced it and believe we are going to get a great litter. A lot of times we just get a lot of culls. What we should be doing is looking at the percentages and watching for studs that produce higher percentages of great hounds and good hounds and lower percentages of culls. Thank God for the stability that the great breeders have given us over the years. Folks like the Hill family, David Hellums, Leon Canoy, etc that stuck to a strain of hounds and carefully and slowly improved it with each generation by making occasional outcrosses but always holding on to the foundation bloodline they started with and making sure not to compromise quality in performance just for the sake of making the pedigrees look attractive. There are a lot of good breeders still making progress today like Lakehills, Kyle Ladner, Whitey and Brenda Turner, The Hoehners, Clif Parker, and many more but I think we could always use more breeders like these. Some hunters make outcross after outcross for many generations and have left us with unpredictability and sometimes low quality hounds.

I agree and glad to see it brought up! When I see a good hound that's only had 10 or so litters out of a it off of different style females and every one of those litters had good hounds in them I put more faith in that than a big time stud hound that's had 150 females bred to it and only produced a few here and there! I believe your gyp has the biggest part of it that's y u see big studs with the adds for proven females or high dollar stud fees. They weave out the lesser females hoping for better producing which will improve the way their stud is looked at by the hunter which brings in more money... It cracks me up when someone says I know where a couple are that are or were bad son a guns... If I had a couple hundred kids I'd produce a couple good ones myself I'm sure! Lol

Good gyps is the key. I've seen some gyps it didn't matter what they were bread to. Just my opinion, and I'm really nobody

I'm only in my 30s and haven't been breeding hounds a quarter of the time most hunters have, but like Heath touched on, I believe in breeding to a good producing family of hounds. Not a freak out of a little of this and a little of that. Many old timers drove it in my head to breed a great strain of hounds til you are too close to do it anymore then outcross on another great producing family or strain of hounds Not just 1 great hound. Again as Heath stated above. The hoehners, hills, David hellums, the hales. Etc. didn't get to where they are by breeding all kinds of hounds. They picked and sorted carefully out of only certain familys. Thanks for a topic worth reading Heath

What is some these stud dogs that doesn't have an impressive field trial record but has a good producing record.