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Hog-Doggin

Calif. Hunter

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Not sure if this goes in the Hunting Dogs or Wild Hogs section, so here it is:

A Squealing Time Hog-Dogging at Uncle Earl's
At La. Event and Others Across South, It's Hounds Against Boars

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A03

WINNFIELD, La. -- The unearthly yowl rattling the swing gate out at the fairgrounds offends the eardrums in almost unimaginable ways. It crosses from a squeal to a grunt and back again, a blaring, impossibly awful incantation.

The gate cracks only an inch or so before the beast shoots out, all 250 pounds of snorting, speeding, sharp-tusked meanness. The mushy bogs where that peerless political scamp, Louisiana's Earl K. Long, once hunted can't offer up a creature more surly than this one: a fully grown, fully cranky wild boar.

Junior Toler waits, squatting warily behind a splintery wooden box and holding back a yapping Catahoula so eager to chase the pig that it has stretched its collar to a windpipe-crimping tension point. Toler is a bit of a scamp himself. He runs a boar hunting excursion business as far south as you can go in Georgia, and he boasts that he'll let you kill those hogs anyway you want: bow, gun, knife -- heck -- bare hands, if you're in the mood.

"Y'all don't take away points if we get to bein' a lil' crazy?" Toler asks the judge.

Bill Huff, a ruddy, big-boned man with a clipboard, just smiles. "Y'all do whatever you want."

And that is when Toler cuts loose, releasing his dog, like a bullet from a rifle, and shuffling his rubber shrimping boots as if he were at a hoedown, instead of a modified rodeo arena.

"Stop that hog. Talk to him. Talk to him. You better stop that hawwwwwwg. Whoooooo-eeeee!"

The crowd, often as quietly mesmerized as a symphony audience, bursts out laughing. Anything is possible at Uncle Earl's Hog Dog Trials, even a jig-dancing Georgian, and they're on their feet straining to catch a glimpse.

Just about every weekend somewhere in the South, audiences such as this one are lining up to watch dogs chase hogs. The events -- part obsessively tracked competition, part southern fried festival -- play out like down-home antidotes to the manicured rigidity of the Westminster dog show. Here, redneck is a compliment -- a high compliment. The Confederate flag is cool, and Wranglers are more than jeans, they're a uniform.

No hog-dog trial is bigger than Uncle Earl's -- the Super Bowl of hog-dog trialing, which ended Sunday with the crowning of the top dog, Hunter, a yellow black-mouth cur, from Beaumont, Tex. Uncle Earl's is held not far from the bumpy lane in Winnfield, where Long lived in a ramshackle country place called the Pea Patch until he died in 1960. Winnfield gave Louisiana three governors -- Long; his brother, the Kingfish, Huey P. Long; and their pal O.K. Allen. Now it offers the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame, where their motto is: "We induct 'em, they indict 'em."

Uncle Earl, whose last campaign featured one of the great slogans in American political history -- "Vote for Earl Long; I ain't crazy" -- hunted hogs with flair. A few years back, Claude O'Bryan, who used to cure pork to Uncle Earl's specifications -- 25 pounds of sugar, 100 pounds of salt -- got to thinking there should be a way to honor the old governor. The vagrants who had taken up residence in the Pea Patch had burned the place down, and there wasn't much to remember him by, that is, except tapes of Paul Newman playing Uncle Earl in the movie "Blaze," about Long's scandalous affair with the New Orleans stripper, Blaze Starr.

A hog-dogging event seemed like a natural, and the inaugural Uncle Earl's in 1995 coincided with a burst of hog-dog trials across the South, a phenomenon that has grown into a circuit of bawling hounds. O'Bryan, wearing "Sunday overalls" that barely contain his 305 pounds, presides over his creation from the driver's seat of a four-wheeler. Lean, sinewy strong dogs -- more than 800 of them, not counting the puppies sleeping everywhere in tangled piles -- are tied to trees and fences, curled up in tents next to teenage boys, lounging in horse stalls, crawling out of camper shells. The air fills with deep-throated baying; walking on the grass is, well, inadvisable.

If hog-dogging has an 800-pound gorilla, it is Billy Long, 64, whose sun-scorched neck looks like creased leather. When Long's wife is around, he says he paid $10,000 for his dog Coushatta, a pretty yellow, black-mouth cur -- but most everyone knows the price was probably closer to $15,000. When his dogs don't win, Long -- no relation to Uncle Earl -- buys the ones who do, hoping to secure thousands more in prize money.

Long's dogs, all 12 of them, ride to Uncle Earl's in a custom-made, stainless steel trailer with air-conditioned and heated cages. "My wife rides in the back of the truck, my dogs ride here," he says, flipping open one of the cages.

A good hog dog, such as Coushatta -- a three-time Uncle Earl's champ -- casts a spell. The Catahoulas, Louisiana's state dog, fix eerily beautiful blue eyes on a snarling pig and stare down the beast until it freezes. It's a bit of a mind game. The best of them can hold an entranced wild boar for seven hours or more while home, pulls off the hat for closer inspection of its faux sweat ring. This is backwoods fashion in 2004: sweat rings without having to sweat.

"I've got one that comes with the sweat marks, like where you put your thumbs," he crows.

Bando, with her shoulder-length white hair and her even whiter pants suit, ticks off the competitors: There's "Stupid" and "Trashy" and "Ugly" and "Boudreaux" -- those are the dogs, by the way. The handlers come from tiny specks on the map, country towns with names like Okolona, Miss., and Telephone, Tex., where the hunting is right out the backdoor. There was a time when they went nonstop for 36 hours at Uncle Earl's; lately they knock off about midnight before starting up again at sunrise.

Put two dogs on a pig at once, and the sound is deafening. The dogs don't wait for their partners to move; they leapfrog each other. But pigs have moves of their own, scampering away and occasionally flipping their yelping pursuers into the air like playthings.

No one has the stamina to watch every run, so they retreat to their pickup truck campsites and their barbecues. Roy Reed, a 6-foot-3, 260-pound pile of Texas manhood who fancies himself as a blend between John Wayne and Augustus McCrae of "Lonesome Dove," leans back in his chair, with a long chain of dogs sleeping at his feet.

"The Bone," his prized redbone hound, can barely keep its droopy eyes open in the Louisiana heat. He's got a blue tic cur and a yellow black-mouth cur -- "That's what Ol' Yeller from the movie was," Reed's son-in-law-to-be, Justin Wayne Norris says.

Reed wears a five-gallon hat with a wild turkey feather and four matches in the band, placed there to remind any farmer who objects to him hunting on their fields that a corn crop can flame up in an instant. Reed figures he is doing the farmers a service anyway, by removing an animal that loves to feed on their livelihood. A 10-inch knife blade with an elk antler handle is in Reed's back pocket.

Reed -- who, being a true hunting man, keeps pictures of his 200-gallon meat smoker in a photo album -- started hog hunting about a decade ago when his 15-year-old son died in a car crash. The adrenaline and the blood and the chaotic chase was all that he could find to release him from the pain. He lost a lot of dogs in those early hunting days in the fields around his north Texas home. Now, he usually equips them with little vests made of ballistic materials that even a boar can't penetrate.

"I got tired of cutting through the collars and leaving 'em laying there," he said matter-of-factly.

Off in the distance, Bando's voice is crackling in the evening air. Toler, whose daddy ripped out the seats of their 1953 Ford Fairlane to hold the pigs they shot, is handing out fliers for his Broughton Island hunts. And up on the hillside, a little curl of smoke is tickling the pines. The smell is familiar. It's the scent of roasting pig.
 
Hey Cali, remember thoses big pit bulls at Choppers, I bet they could win a pig hunt or two.
 
Yeah, Dan, those were neat dogs. They were American Bulldogs, though, not pits. Longer legged and leaner than British bulldogs. I wouldn't mind having one of those guys!
 
not much in the swamp is as exciting as hunting hogs with dogs. the pigs start squealing the dogs are growling and if the get off in the water you can hear the splashing from 1/4 mile away. then you go in and actually grab ahold of the hog and kill it how ever you want. or sometimes you catch them pull the dogs off and let them go!!!! if you do that you better be ready to move quick.
 
PEAX Trekking Poles

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