The Importance of Training Bray Hounds

The hunting ability of hounds is partly inherited and partly acquired through strict training since childhood. A qualified hunting dog often comes from the results of the hunter's hard training. Without strict, continuous and timely training, no matter how good the dog's innate breed is, it will not become an excellent hunting dog. Therefore, hunting dog training is very important.

Bray hounds require dedicated training

Training of hounds must start from the young age of the dog, with a dedicated person responsible, and the dog owner cannot be changed midway. If you change the dog head coach midway, it will be difficult to achieve satisfactory success. Not to mention you can't keep it for two days and let it play with it for a while. This will inevitably distract the energy of the puppy and seriously affect the improvement of hunting ability. If you treat a puppy as a plaything, it will only be a dog for fun when it grows up.

Training items and time for Bray Hounds

An excellent hound must possess the three hunting skills of searching, chasing, and picking up prey. Therefore, tracking and searching, chasing and attacking, and picking up prey are the focus of training. The purpose of training is to form a strong hunting conditioned reflex in the minds of puppies and learn these three hunting skills so that they can complete the hunting tasks assigned to them by hunters in the future. The six, seven, and eight months after a puppy is born are the fastest period for its advanced neurological development, and it is also the golden period for training puppies to hunt. At this time, the puppies must undergo strict and systematic training so that they can have good hunting conditioned reflexes. After one year, the development of the hound has been completed, the quality of the hound has been determined, and retraining is very difficult.

Selection of places to train Bray Hounds

The primary training of puppies can be carried out in the hunter’s living area, such as a wide courtyard, a rural threshing floor, an open space outside the village, etc. However, puppy hunting action training must be carried out in a real mountain forest hunting ground. Through hunting ground training, the hunting skills of hounds are fully developed. The puppies are taught to track, search, chase and attack, pick up prey, and overcome activities that do not meet the requirements of hunting. The more times a puppy participates in actual hunting training, the better its hunting skills will be. Therefore, hunters should often lead their puppies on training hunts.

Basic methods of training hounds

The basic methods of training hounds are encouragement and coercion. Encourage the development of its hunting movements and force it to correct activities that do not meet the hunting requirements. To this end, we should talk about combining encouragement and force as the basic method of training hounds. Encouragement methods include luring. When the puppy completes an action, the hunter should encourage it with meat in time. If the puppy is timid and dare not go into the water to pick it up, the hunter should drag the puppy into the water. When hunters use encouragement or coercion to train puppies, they must be gentle and cannot kick or hit them at will. When the puppy's activities do not meet the requirements for hunting, the hunter must stubbornly and repeatedly correct its wrong actions, and patiently teach it the predetermined hunting actions. It must not be accommodating and indulgent, otherwise, it will leave bad defects on the hunting dog. , affecting future hunting.

Note: You cannot ask hounds to hunt beyond the range

Dogs only have a certain amount of primary experience and the ability to control their own behavior. It would be wrong to compare these behaviors of hounds with human thoughts and behaviors. Therefore, unrealistically high requirements cannot be placed on hounds.