Dogo vs Bull Arab (comparison in hunting ability)

[Deleted]

I heard BAs have a better nose (expected) and are more reliable, and that Dogos are gutless hence APBT outcrossing. If Bull Arabs were imported to Argentina to try and replace Dogos do you think it'd work? Particularly if they couldn't tell the difference? Like if you said ''here's a Dogo'' and it turned out to be much better than a pure Dogo they'd end up crossing them under the guise it's just a really good Dogo.

[Hardcastle]

I'd wager bull arabs are definitely better on average, that should go without saying due to how many shitty show dogos and pet dogos there are. Shitty pet bull arabs ARE on the rise, but still nothing compared to dogos.
I think even on their best day the dogo only peaks at a bull arab level, all the weirdly elaborate variety of breeds and so called careful breeding of the Dr Martinez all doesn't actually equate to anything, it's just a matter of having the bullbreed/sighthound/gun-dog genetics and then letting the work whip them into shape. When dogos are whipped into shape by consistent real work they probably are just as good as the best bull arabs and it would come down to individuals, but like I said Bull arabs are generally in better shape these days and I think people who have tried both (Hawaii and New Zealand, primarily) tend to usually prefer the bull arab, probably because it's from real working lines and the dogo often isn't.

[Hardcastle]

Doesn't help the topic at all, but just something I wanted to make for fun.

[pinky]

It’s always seemed to me Martinez got a good result despite his breeding not because. When you look at the number of breeds in there it’s like an over excited teen planning a dream dog.
Dogs now seem to be the epitome of “once you give it a name it’s ruined” - the Arab has had s name just as long (?) but given our colonial cousins mind set, they did keep adding to it. (As I I understand it most boarhounds in Oz are called pig dogs anyway, what Im rambling to is dogos are now bred for appearance as much as anything else, Arabs are not)

[Hardcastle]

edit... pressed submit too soon

[Hardcastle]

Honestly I consider both Antonio Martinez (creator of the Dogo Argentino) and Errol "Mike" Hodgens (creator of the Bull Arab) to be con men or "snake oil salesmen" if you will. The evidence against Hodgens is actually worse than the evidence against Martinez, but the clues against Martinez aren't great. Hodgens is a puppy milling criminal legally banned from owning dogs who has appeared on the news on more than one occassion as like a nightmare neighbour lunatic with hundreds of unregistered dogs in a shit-filled suburban yard. He is by all accounts a total cretin of the worst kind.

Martinez never "faced justice" for his misdeeds and they aren't as well known, no one gave a shit about animal husbandry in the 40s ( and no it's not "just as long" ftr, dogos were established a few decades earlier). BUT his bio talks about him having too many dogs to feed and feeding them bread and cheese and etc. You can imagine it was a fucking mess and the animal welfare league or whatever would have strung him up.

"Creating a dog breed" is kind of inherently a scam, and I say that as someone who wants to do it. It is a puzzle that keeps me up at night because it's basically impossible to achieve without being a piece of shit.

Dogos and Bull arabs both succeeded at becoming serious working dogs despite their creators. Evidently both knew a little something. Both were closely observing and somewhat involved in a pig dog culture, and had the lightbulb go off to try and capitalise on a niche they perceived.

Luckily for them, hunters are often not the sharpest tools in the shed. Honest hardworking country folk largely sheltered from city scheistering who lean towards trusting and helping their neighbours and etc in an upstanding way to build a solid "reliable" reputation in their little community. Scamming doesn't work out well for you in a small country community, so it isn't a favoured behaviour among country folk and this leaves them somewhat oblivious to what it even is or when it is happening to them.

When Martinez and Hodgens both made their presentations and shot their "spiel" to the country folk about their "super dogs", the simple people just took them at face value and believed it. Took the dogs and went on their merry way.

Real hunters adopted the dogo argentino and the bull arab, and put them to work. Little did they know that THEY were creating the breeds by doing this. They were improving and establishing their lineages as legit working dogs, by working them. I will say Martinez and Hodgens got enough right where it was possible for the hunters/farmers to do this. The DNA was in the mix to facilitate the production of legit boarhounds. But they deserve basically no credit for making them functional and elite, it was the real hunters who bought their snake oil, they made these breeds serious hunting dogs via through the only real possible way - working them, and letting natural selection do the work.

The Dogo argentino is today on average worse because they've actually been a recognised breed since the 60s, which means SOME people have been breeding them for no reason for that long, without working them. Bull arabs have been primarily working dogs for most of their history. Some (or many) certainly fall into the "rescue" system, but they are all de-sexed and effectively irrelevant to "state of the breed". Not many people are now in the business of breeding bull arabs for money. They're just not worth anything and their upkeep costs a lot. It's an idiotic business venture. So through that the bull arab persists as mostly a legit working dog.

The dogo has legit working lines, and a real serious working dogo I wouldn't consider inferior to a bull arab, but on average many more dogo argentinos are "bad" and dysfunctional than bull arabs.

[pinky]

Its a dilemma we’ll never solve, I fear, the breeding for “no reason “
If we just bred working dogs & culled them as such I think there’s risk of inbreeding, or loads of dogs being fed on, as you note, bread & cheese whilst living in squalor.
I know we’re going over old ground but I do see value in pure breeds, as a bank, as an easy store of obvious qualities we can tap into & refine thru work.
Dogos it seems suffered from being so cool looking, more so that Arabs anyway; I mean I (as you well know) find the ba nigh on the pinnacle of aesthetics in dogs but to Everyman? The dogo just looks better. It is a great looking dog. So big now, though, they seem. I say “now” like I know they were smaller once, I’m figuring they must have been.

[Hardcastle]

That's a good point, the bull arab isn't even that appealing to the "cool tuff dog" crowd who fuel the breeding of pointless dogos and boerboels and cane corsos. They look like vaguely buff pointers a lot of the time, and are also never cropped, which makes them look like dorks in pics and thus limits any online hype/hysteria.

Epic pics like this of cane corsos for example-

generate legions of "bad fans" and in turn bad breeders and over time their state as a breed worsens.

Bull arabs are protected in a bubble of boringness.

The point about the purebreed bank being valuable is a good one, and in a weird twist the dog show world actually isn't the biggest enemy. I think worse breeders exist for unregistered hype machines. I consider the english bullmastiff in better shape than the boerboel for example, even though they've only had a few decades to ruin boerboels, they did it quicker and more thoroughly than nearly 200 years of pointless bullmastiff breeding. The conformation standards of bullmastiffs seems to have actually kept a lid on things going too crazy.

[Deleted]

Feb 11, 2023 8:16:54 GMT pinky said:

Its a dilemma we’ll never solve, I fear, the breeding for “no reason “
If we just bred working dogs & culled them as such I think there’s risk of inbreeding, or loads of dogs being fed on, as you note, bread & cheese whilst living in squalor.
I know we’re going over old ground but I do see value in pure breeds, as a bank, as an easy store of obvious qualities we can tap into & refine thru work.
Dogos it seems suffered from being so cool looking, more so that Arabs anyway; I mean I (as you well know) find the ba nigh on the pinnacle of aesthetics in dogs but to Everyman? The dogo just looks better. It is a great looking dog. So big now, though, they seem. I say “now” like I know they were smaller once, I’m figuring they must have been.

I've noticed a phenomenon of gutless and giant dogos, like 140lbs. And numerous dogos getting shitwhipped by boars screaming and bailing, you couldn't tell it was even a Dogo. Fucking garbage because juvenile dogos lug boars and cougars in pens in rural Argentina where vast majority are no worse than a BA at actually catching but with stamina and nose sure a bit worse.
Dogos get totally shat on in working dog communities because of those terrible dogs. I quote - ''A dogo will get you hurt on a big hog in the middle of a corn field!''
forum.gon.com/threads/dogo-pit-crosses.212938/
There are a lot who like them because a lot are good but I've never seen a boarhound get as much hate as dogos do. To be fair, they're expected to perform as well as everything else but since they're on a slippery slope to destruction they end up as a disappointment.

[Hardcastle]

Bull arabs DO have haters among aussie pig doggers. But seems to be based more on petty personal rivalries. Though at the same time the people who love "hairy" may have a point in some ways. That wolfhound/staghound blood does seem to have some genuine perks.

I notice among the american guys there's a bit of an aversion to running catch dogs in general, they don't really mesh with the coonhound and cur game. They then also, as rednecks, have an aversion to breaking from tradition. So to them catchdogs are "bulldogs" (pitbulls or MAYBE american bulldogs in some places) and anything else is new fangled airy fairy bullshit. They don't want it to work because they want things to stay "normal". A dogo argentino is almost like a transgender or something to them.

But yes, also, I think there probably is a genuine problem with sourcing dogo argentinos from "dogo argentino breeders", who breed big sloppy loser pet dogs and the hunters then being like "wtf?" when they suck.

The legit ones, I maintain, are as legit as anything else. All we can criticise are like "average" dips due to overabundance of shitty ones. Even good boerboels are... good. Nearly every breed does have "good ones".

[Deleted]

No, Dogos are fine to us. We just eased into these large bullshit dogos easily. Dogos, pits, ambulls, corsos, catbulldogs, hybrids of the above, random shit kicking around sometimes. Those are our options. All of them are big and relatively poor RCDs but the Catahoula Bulldog perhaps has some perks the others don't. Probably running catch dog ability and nose. However because we have a lot of curs we don't give a flying fuck about that too much. BTW I think the Aussie pig dog gene pool would benefit a lot from them.
I stumbled across a video that really screams ''southern redneck'', I'm going to try and find it. Lol.
I plan on blasting everyone's ass with running catch dogs in the future. Say ''Ayo try this, you don't need curs.'' and pester them into trying it out.

[Hardcastle]

I don't personally like catahoulas but the fact is they are gaining a lot of traction in the Aussie scene. Their popularity pure and in crosses has grown more than most "foreign infiltrators" over the past few decades (maybe... all?), so they must be doing something right.

I plan on blasting everyone's ass with running catch dogs in the future. Say ''Ayo try this, you don't need curs.'' and pester them into trying it out.

Reminds me of that texas guy on Ozziedoggers, I think "Lone star" but can't remember. He was a coonhound, cur and bulldog guy for decades and from a long line of such ancestors. Got on the internet and saw the aussie stuff and was like "hmmm interesting", then bred dogo x american staghounds to emulate the aussie style of dog and was like "yeah these are way better" pretty quick. He said there were SOME settings where coonhounds and shit were still necessary. But for more open country the dogo x staghounds were way superior and caught more pigs.

[Deleted]

Feb 11, 2023 9:59:55 GMT Hardcastle said:

I don't personally like catahoulas but the fact is they are gaining a lot of traction in the Aussie scene. Their popularity pure and in crosses has grown more than most "foreign infiltrators" over the past few decades (maybe... all?), so they must be doing something right.

I plan on blasting everyone's ass with running catch dogs in the future. Say ''Ayo try this, you don't need curs.'' and pester them into trying it out.

Reminds me of that texas guy on Ozziedoggers, I think "Lone star" but can't remember. He was a coonhound, cur and bulldog guy for decades and from a long line of such ancestors. Got on the internet and saw the aussie stuff and was like "hmmm interesting", then bred dogo x american staghounds to emulate the aussie style of dog and was like "yeah these are way better" pretty quick. He said there were SOME settings where coonhounds and shit were still necessary. But for more open country the dogo x staghounds were way superior and caught more pigs.

It's not the catahoula part, it's the fact that they get catahoula perks while being as hard as an ambull and they're not the shitty ambulls Australia happened upon. Just sounds like a good get. Would lean towards being a heavy hanger and I think you'd soon get ''Catbull x Staghound'' or whatever. Still, they might as well be hard lugger ridgebacks and Australia loves ridgebacks.