Paralelamente, os donos dos petzinhos condenam e muito quem ainda usa os cães no trabalho, especialmente quando este pode ser fatal para os bicharocos. É o caso do Dogo argentino. Aqui fica uma historia, contada por Marcelo Fernandez (aka dogoman), canil Calfucurá
"I am arriving to Neuquen; it’s Thursday night. Weather is nice for this time of the year; actually quite warm (in the 50’s). My dear friend Ricardo picks me up at the airport and we head down the supermarket, where we buy all we will need for the next 4 days, and then some. We always like to leave Luis’s storage full; it’s hard for him to go shopping, so to speak.
After doing the groceries, we head down to the nearby small town of Allen, where Ricardo and Leo live. Actually, less than 20 blocks away from where the immortal (literally; he is almost 80 and still going strong) Amadeo Bilo lives.
Ricardo’s place is as warm and cozy as always. His sweet wife Veronica is waiting for us with some great home-made cooking, and Ricardo’s daughters (3-year old twins Trinidad and Valentina, and the smaller midget, Juliana) are as sweet and rambunctios as ever. I always feel at home here, and the kids make me remember my Sophie, who according to my wife is already asking for me. Leo comes, and we crack open a bottle of Domingo Molina Malbec 2000. Strong, spirited; a rich, full-flavored red wine which lights our spirits for the upcoming hunt. Doesn’t last long, unfortunately, but helps to start getting into the appropriate climate.
Leo leaves after dinner; I stay and sleep at Ricardo’s. In the morning, we jump into the truck and go to Ricardo’s fruit farm; 150 acres of good land full of apple, pear, and peach plantations. We pick some of the dogs we are taking: Lihuel, Antu, Pial, Tigre Viejo, Tigrero, Fiel…most of these are veterans, some running over the 10-year old mark. Pial is a younger Dogo we sent down with Victor. Small dogo (son of Bombon, but unusually small); maybe 80 lbs, but a grip like a vise. Luis is waiting for us with his usual stuff (Charly, Allen, Jingo, Rusa, etc, etc), and some of the new blood which has been added: Candunga, Mate, Falucho, Flaco. Flaco is still recovering from a hunt in which he lost a 8x5 skin-losange from his right hand; muscle showing itself. The dogs are supposed to be young but proven hunters (and they DO are), but how will they blend with the rest, is still an enigma. Luis has done some hunting with them but at night; but in order to see how each of them works as a pack member he needs to take them out during the day in horse-hunts. That way he can see the whole package.
We finish our duties at Ricardo’s farm (which included some tinkering with the irrigation pump and system), and we finally head east, towards Choele Choel and Luis’s place. We have decided not to bring the boat; the island where the monsters were had been treaded and “dogged” only a few days ago by my friends; 1 hog was killed and another wounded, so the chances of the third being still there seem to be slim.
After and uneventful 3.5 hours ride, we reached Luis’s place. We embraced with the same sincere affection we always do and feel for each other; Guido, another friend and excellent hunter is also there. There is another guy I didn’t know, whom we call Quitino…turned out to be quite a character later on. Great, funny guy.
We download the dogs and chain them to different trees. They look good…actually, “too good” to me. Not as skinny as they always are. Not in “pet-weight”, of course; much leaner than that. Yet, I’ve seen them leaner. I take a look at the new dogs; they look good. Both Mate and Falucho are strong dogs with powerful heads and jaws. If they have the adequate grit, they will make good fighting and catching dogos. Regarding how they do the rest (scenting, tracking, running down)…that remains to be seen. There is also a nice 5-monther with a strong head, heavy bones and clear almond eyes…reminds us of Allen a lot. And Flaco…he is also a mystery as to how he will adapt to this pack…a mystery that will soon be developed.
We have dinner, plus the regular chat, jokes and stories. We update each other on the events occurred since our last hunt. Time ceases to run and be considered in the usual manner; it just dissolves into the twilight zone. It’s just day and night, like everytime we get together.
Soon we are packing. It’s late at night and we start gearing up. We choose the dogs; a mixed pack. Several new ones plus some vets like Lihuel and Antu. It is interesting to see the way these latter dogs have evolved with age (they are around 10 or 11 years old). They have never lost the grit or the joy of hunting. They do work differently, though. They are now almost never the first ones to jump-off the truck; and they definitely are no longer the last ones to come back on a failed attempt. They will jump after scenting and will disappear in the brush, but will come back sooner and wait to try to hear if any of the other dogs catch. If they do, they will shoot again. It’s like they have lost some of the edge, the fury, the willingness to scent and track miles away, leaving that task for the new “tender feet”. Allen, on the other hand, is a non-stop working machine. We go out, hours pass….3, 5, 7 hours scenting from the truckbed, several misses…yet, I look at the rearview mirror, and I always see Allen’s head, nose-up, face against the wind, scenting frantically, as if he had just began. Speaking of the wind, btw….what a hellish night. Strong crossing wind plus whirling gusts; a curse for the dogs and ourselves. Too strong a wind means scenting from miles away when facing up-wind, and the dogs will jump from the truck trying to catch a hog that could be very far away. And you can forget about hogs down-wind; even if they are 100 yards from the dogs, they will just not scent them. Hogs are sooo smart…sometimes the dogs will scent them and jump from the truck and the first thing the hog will do is run across full speed, trying to place itself down-wind with regards to the dogs. They can even cross the path we are standing in, wires and all, 30 feet away from us, and we can feel all the frustration in the world buidling-up while we hear the dogs trashing the vegetation in their frantic search, scenting up-wind.
Anyway, a less than ideal situation. Very strong wind, a mixed pack untested as such…hours pass by, vain intents piling-up one after another.
Suddenly, for the nth time, the dogs scent and jump off the moving vehicle. We stop, and so does the other truck (we are 6 hunters deployed in 2 different trucks, although the pack goes in one of them). They shoot like bullets in a Y race; entering the brush to the back and the left of our position some, while a few others go to the left and front. Not great, but not as bad as it could have been given the fact that the other truck is 200 yards ahead of us; they can take care of what happens with the dogs that go upwards The wind is coming full force from the left, and the pack has split. Luis, Ricardo and I start walking backwards and then stop to listen. We hear a deaf bark, the type our dogs give just the moment before catching, and a loud grunt. We start running but before we can cover 200 yards in the brush, we hear a dog’s yelp. Then we see Charly, a fast crossbred, coming and suddenly dropping to his side. We go look at him and we find evidence of a heavy hit on the low belly region, near the testicles. Not a cut, but is seems to hurt a lot when we touch it. Charly almost doesn’t want to get up. We shout some commands and he does get up, limping. We take him back to the truck. It is clear he has been hit pretty hard, although the damage will only be totally evident in a few hours. Being as it is that there is no cut, we can speculate that he could have been hit by a round-tusker, those big boars with tusks which are so long that after they curve to the inside they can no longer cut with them, but instead, hit.
The rest of the dogs come back, empty. It is clear that whatever Charly tried to tackle, he was on his own, and he received a nice dose of sour medicine. We started thinking the pack wasn’t working so well, after all. I mean, Charly is faster than the rest and we know it, but he is also tough and has a long history of catches, even alone. The fact that no dog was able to be there when he tried for the catch doesn’t look good. It is only later, when we gather with the boys from the other truck, that we learn that the rest of the pack (those that had gone front and left) had followed another hog, and that was ther reason Charly was alone.
It is late (or early, depending on how you look at it); about 7:00 am. It will soon be dawn, and we have been hunting for the last 8 hours, with the dogs making many runs due to the wind and it’s tantrums. We decide to go back home.
When we reach Luis’s place, the sun is coming out. Now we take a better look at Charly, and we see a huge lump, a big swelling forming around and near his testicles and penis. We give him some pain killers and 1 cc of dexamethasone, IM. A few hours afterwards the swelling will be much better, but we won’t know it till then. Time to get some sleep now, after a long, tiresome and difficult night. Hey, this is hunting, and we know it: If we could bring the bacon home 100% of the times, it wouldn’t be that fun. We would soon have a chance for revenge, although it wouldn’t turn out as expected either....
That Saturday, after our fruitless previous night, we slept till noon, and after a great meal prepared by Leo, we took an additional nap, not before I did the dishes, btw. Good thing my wife is not here to see this…she might start getting some wrong ideas…;-). Sleep was essential since we wanted to be fresh for what we thought would be a long night’s hunt.
The day before we arrived, Luis had released the horses into open land, so they could grass on richer pastures. Although “pasture” is not a word that can apply to Patagonia, I should say. Winter is hard in this region, and though this has been an unusually rainy one, tender grass is still not abundant. Luis has half a dozen horses, which are now grazing somewhere else. Only his own is right here at his place. He will gather them on Sunday, thinking of a possible horse-hunt that will finally not take place this time.
At night, we are off again. Some changes in the pack: Luis has added some dogs of his own: Jingo, Rusa, and Allen. Allen is such an extraordinary dog and works in such a manner that it is difficult for me to describe it, more so being English a foreign language for me. A 3.5 year-old son of the late Lanin, Allen is currently Luis’s top dog. It was given to him by Ricardo; all of us always exchange dogs, and Luis is the one who has more time and opportunity to train them. Some kind of disease (which I will never know exactly what it was) has worn out Allen's teeth to a degree that it undoubtedly affects his catching power (Leo jokefully tells Luis that Allen doesn’t catch hogs, but sucks them instead…lol). It has nothing to do with regular use, and I have never seen it in another dog. Yet, his scenting ability, his heart, power and stamina, and most of all, his unrelenting, never-ending business-like attitude towards hunting commands my love and admiration. I love this dog to death. When the hours pass and the rest of the pack starts showing lapses in their concentration or simply some physical tiredness, Allen will always be on his tip-tops, head-up, running up and down in front of the wind, always meaning business. And regarding the fight…he has faced almost any conceivable boar, and he has also had to stand the pain of being a “teacher”: Sometimes when he catches a big sow we will let him fight (without killing the pig) until the green dogs arrive so they can see and bite, starting to develop their own stuff. Allen will stoically keep on fighting until the green dogs arrive and then the boar is finally killed.
Allen
The beautiful thing about building-up a pack is how the hunter has to work to blend the individual characteristics of each dog into a homogeneous mix that performs like a team. Hog hunting with dogos is teamwork, and the sum of 6 good dogos does not necessarily means the conformation of a good pack. It is almost like building-up a philharmonic orchestra; the music is only as good as what the whole group of musicians can make. A good hunter knows his dogs like the palm of his hand, and has to be able to read them all the time. Like I said before, good dogs work as a team, but that doesn’t mean each of them doesn’t have it’s own individuality which needs to be evaluated constantly. Pain, for example, is not demonstrated in the same manner by all dogs. A dog that shows no pain might be more severely wounded than another dog that is voicing his pain more vocally or even physically (limping, etc). In general terms, dogos don’t show pain, which is something that forces the hunter to keep an eye on them every time they come back from a run, to try to detect cuts or wounds (or even closed contusions, which are trickier because they don't bleed openly) that might go unnoticed.
Back to reality. So, it’s Saturday night, and we go out again, hoping to have better luck. Like I said before, Allen, Jingo and Rusa have joined us. Jingo is a fast-running cross that, same as another dog we are not taking, called Lorenzo, has the characteristic of hunting waay-off the rest. Lorenzo, in particular, has caught hogs as far away as 2 or 3 miles, and that’s the reason we prefer not to use him at night (specially with this fu/&#?\gly strong wind which keeps blowing…grrr!!), but on daylight hunts, when the horses allow us to provide him support when he catches so far. Veterans Tigre Viejo, Tigrero, Lihuel, Antu, Fiel; seasoned but young Pial, and the rookie Falucho are coming. Charly, recovered from the hit suffered the night before, is also joining. And…Flaco, another rookie that was about to prove once again that building and maintaining a pack is an art and that a non-educated member can spoil-rotten the whole night.
Eleven dogs, with 2 of them being rookies, 6 hunters, 2 trucks…I wonder what is out there waiting for us…if anything.
We start the usual drill. Like always, Allen can be seen from the rearview mirror, his head above the rest, scenting frantically. His eagerness and happiness are such that I cannot help but think how much these dogs love what they do; this is something that strikes me every time I go out hunting, and I’ve been on this for a long ride already. If only I could take a peek inside his brain and see his thought-process (if that expression can be used when talking about dogs)…I would love to see what’s going on in there. Not that his body language isn’t explicit enough, of course; yet…
From up to down…Allen, Falucho, Charly. Of the 2 half-heads seen at the bottom of the pic, the one at the front belongs, I believe, to Fiel, while the other is just a shadow and I can’t tell for sure. The pic was shot aiming at the rearview mirror.
We are going through the usual motions. Mostly silent, like we always do, aside from some isolated joke from one truck’s radio to the other. Usual hunters’ stuff: Dirty jokes, healthy fun. My mind wanders a bit towards my big-city origin. It is interesting that many people think of hunters and their activity as something morally incorrect. Most of the fellow hunters I have known were and are honest, straightforward, and decent people, full of solidarity; people I could rely on in whatever situation I might be involved, and who would walk through life with a few, very simple but monolithically-solid codes of ethics. We care for each other, we love each other, and there is a general sense of brotherhood that bonds us together. Many of the people I know who look down at hunting and / or hunters couldn’t hold a candle to any of my hunting comrades.
Luis’s shuffled, emotionless voice brings me back to more pedestrian thoughts: “Now”. Which to me means…“pork”. The dogs have jumped from the truck bed; Ricardo stops the truck (we usually drive at between 15 to 20 mph when scenting), and we step out of it trying to do the least possible noise (which includes no slamming of the doors thank you please, so help you God if you do). Off they go, upwind, in a particularly “dirty” area, full of low brush and trees with thorns as large as 4 inches long. Five minutes afterwards they return, jump up the truck bed, and off we go again.
Luis suggests trying a plot of land that has suffered some burning during last summer. It is about 5.000 acres of pretty clean land; the darkness of the night (which is still total, since the moon is showing-up at about 1 am) doesn’t allow us to appreciate how different this topography is: A sandy surface punctured through by scattered black sticks of burned-down trees and some low brush already growing. If we find something here, it should be a piece of cake for the dogs. No place to hide, no thicket to run through…suddenly the dogs yelp and jump off again. We stop and step down of the truck with the almost certainty that this will be it. I just cannot imagine a hog getting away from our dogs at this place.
We stand in silence, as usual. The dogs have disappeared into the night, running up-wind. We hear the scattered galloping of the dogs, plus the heavier, thump-like sounds of hogs’ hooves. We can also hear branches breaking…I am already feeling something is not good, and Luis mutters… “Dogs are scattered and running in all directions…what a mess…if we don’t catch here, we better go to bed, since we won’t catch anywhere else…” I silently agree; I, like the rest of us hunters, am already used to that strange sensation of being always anticipated by Luis. Simply put, the guy is always ahead of all of us.
From the noise we hear, it seems the hogs are running trying to go down-wind (because we hear them approaching us, and we are in their way to their target); the dogs seem disoriented. We hear some barking; unexpected, unforeseen, and absolutely unwanted barking. This is not our classical “torido” (the short, deaf bark of the dog which is just about to catch), but seems more like the barking behind a trail…holy shit!! I can’t believe our bad luck and I want to kill the dog that’s doing it, although I am not sure which one it is. “Flaco”, said Luis, like he could read my mind. “That dog is barking on the track. He is confusing the rest of the pack and moving them away from the hogs”. I can sense Luis’s frustration, which surprises me. Luis has hunted so much for so long that there is almost nothing that can move him by now; he has the typical stoic philosophy which identifies the people who only worry about things that are within their scope of control...
had walked down with Luis; about 500 yards back off from our truck (the other one was 500 yards ahead of the first). The burned forest to our right seemed alive with all kinds of noises, like a class-B horror movie. Suddenly, we hear an opening, and a small hog just crosses the road 50 feet in front of us, desperately seeking to put himself downwind in regards to the dogs. He hits the wire fence to our right, dodges, and passes through under the last wire. It didn’t last more than 5 or 10 seconds, but it seemed like an eternity. We would later learn that one more hog had passed between our truck and the one in the front, and at least 2 more had done the same 100 yards ahead of the first truck. We feel like a fishing-net full of holes, helpless while all the fishes go through. I mean, we have 11 dogs running down what looks like a small herd of pigs in a relatively easy although large piece of land, and they just keep going through us like we are a football team with no defense!!
And all the time we can hear Flaco barking. Damn...
After a few minutes, it’s all over. The dogs start coming back. Luis is incredibly pissed, like I’ve never seen him before. Although we have only been hunting for a couple hours, he sentences…”well, we better go to sleep tonight. If they did not catch here, they won’t catch anywhere”. He sits down on the ground, while we wait for the rest of the pack to arrive. I can hear him mutter…“if I wanted to feed someone for charity, I would give food to hungry children. I won’t waste food in dogs that cannot catch”. In spite of the situation, Luis’s phrase makes Ricardo and me burst-out laughing, and we tease him heavily. The man is poisoned, he really is. Luis concept of dogs is so intrinsically embedded in function and working ability, that it has been a long time since I have discovered he has absolutely no grasp of the concept of beauty in a dog. Every once in a while I would ask him (on purpose) if he liked x or z dog, and his answers would inevitably hovered around how they work. He never addresses conformation issues, and I guess a dog could have 2 heads and 3 legs and he wouldn’t even notice it, as long as it works well. On the other hand, a dog could be a beautiful specimen, yet it wouldn’t last 2 weeks in Luis’s hands if it couldn’t earn his food or at least show some promise.
From then on, the hunt is almost doomed. Of course we insist, till about 7:00 am again, but we have no luck. We go back to Luis’s house, and while Leo is preparing something to eat, I can see Luis slipping into his bed. Ricardo and I look at each other and grin…the man really IS poisoned. Like we’ve never seen him before. We are also very pissed, and I wouldn’t want to be in Flaco’s place. But the good thing about hunting is that it always gives a chance for payback. It has been a long, long time since we have had such a drought. But we never give up, and this was not going to be the exception…we still had a full Sunday to try.
(continua)
, take a brief sleep, and then yes, go out with the horses to try a day-hunt. 
