MORE ABOUT THE BAD, WILD HOGS
GENE BROOKS HUNTS
Breeding Cur Dogs
 Editor’s
Note: Gene Brooks of Dublin, Georgia, who hunts hogs
in three different states is on call to a large
number of landowners and farmers. When a bad hog or
a pack of hogs starts eating and destroying crops, tearing
up roads and killing dogs, then landowners and farmers
call Brooks, whose motto is “Have Dogs, Will Travel.”
Although Brooks catches and removes any hog or group
of hogs that terrorize the landscape, he specializes
in “killer” hogs – those that have
been hunted before by other hog hunters. These killer
hogs are so bad that they leave bulldogs, curs and hounds
lying on the ground like casualties from a bombing raid.
This week we’ll continue to look at the man, his
dogs and the hogs he hunts.
 The
evolution of Brooks’ hog cur dogs is interesting
too. As you learned yesterday, when Brooks first started
hunting hogs at the age of 18, he used the same English
foxhounds and Plott hounds he’d used previously
to hunt coons. But over the years, the hogs where he
hunted developed a hound education. The hogs learned
that when they heard hounds wailing in the night or
singing that sweet mountain music during the daylight
hours, they had better pack their bags and get out of
town. They learned to move to water, swim creeks and
go into deep thickets to lose the dogs. “We finally
realized that if we were going to catch hogs, we had
to have dogs that wouldn’t bark on the trail,
but would bark when they bayed a hog,” Brooks
explained.
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