SURVIVAL DOG

You'd avoid any recently evolved dog type. Primitive dogs are going to do the best, speifically dogs from cultures that frankly didn't take very good care of them. Nordic spitz breeds and pariah type dogs specifically. But then, when I look at your question again, I guess there's nothing to say you wouldn't take good care of your dog when you and it went to live in the wild, in which case your options would be much more flexible, and you might then start thinking about what kind of dog is going to help you flourish, rather than what kind of dog will survive the wilderness, and when you do this you will definitely focus on the more recently evolved dogs. Any dog can survive the wilderness with someone there looking after them. Dogs that will help you flourish will be elite hunting dogs like sighthounds, deerhounds thriving in probably the widest range of climates (contrary to what people might guess that they don't like the heat, they handle it better than most shortcoated dogs- a long muzzle and lean frame does more for heat tolerance than coat shortness). Ideally though, like if you want anything done right by dogs, you're going to want a mongrel. A hybrid of types. From there you need to work out what will be required of this dog? Hunting? Guarding? Pulling you or supplies on a sled perhaps? Will it need to be able to survive by itself sometimes? What kind of wilderness are we talking? Lots of dangerous predators? What kind of prey animals? Etc

Before I got married and had kids I would have LOVED to do this. It's an interesting question. It would depend on the environment as mentioned. If it were me I'd look at some of the larger curs. They can be really good all round hunters and catch dogs. They can also be protective. They are also pretty low maintainace.

I would take my dog! She has the build, speed, power, nose, agility, prey drive, protection drive, jaw, and brain. Her Catahoula/Black Mouth Cur blood seems to dominate her AB blood so far, this is why I think she would do great. Her coat is short, but if I can survive the freezing temperatures in a tent, so should she.

Bvl [QUOTE]Double coat like Anatolians have do well in very hot conditions and really cold cimates and even can handle snow. Many CAO types could fit the bill. [/QUOTE] What possible service could these dogs provide you? Are you taking a dog out there just to sit with you and endure the temperature? Because that's all they'll be good for. Didn't you start the thread about everything here coming back to LGDs and it being annoying? I feel like you just plagiarised that criticism from me btw, and when I made it, it was because of posts like this one you just made. Someone will ask "what would the ideal dog be to catch a rabbit" and someone will be like "I've heard of a sarplaninac killing a rabbit, so I think they would be ideal", what the? Some threads have to not feature LGDs, please, and this would be one of them since he didn't mention anything about taking a herd of goats out with him that would need to be watched while he was in his log cabin making raccoon hats (and who knows how he got his hands on a racoon with only LGDs to help him, maybe bought the racoon from the chinese food market before heading out). [QUOTE]I mention that, as black people are by far lesser negatively affected by sun than the white people. But again coat cannot be compared with skin and I guess a totally smooth coated black dog is easier affected by very hot weather and simply gets "hotter" and will overheat faster than an ambull for example.[/QUOTE] As I mentioned, coat is not the huge factor for canine heat tolerance that we assume it is as people who put coats on to cover our cooling systems. You mention an ambull as being especially heat tolerant because it's white and short coated, but actually ambulls have one of the worst heat tolerances. The lean rangey performance types with their longer muzzles are not so bad, but the big bulky short nosed ambulls are about as bad at tolerating heat as a dog can be. A husky is considerably better. Bulk and size heats a dog up faster than anything else, and most american bulldogs these days (as opposed to real farm bulldogs) look like they're jacked up on steroids. Also the dog's cooling system is it's mouth and tongue and nose, all that area is wet and then the evaporation off it is what cools the animal down. It also helps with enduring the cold, as the air is heated by nose before entering the body. Basically the bigger and longer this area is, the better the dog can regulate it's body temperatures. Then like I said in the heat you don't want too much bulk, in the cold you don't want too little. Ambulls aren't well suited for the hot or the cold. Boerboels neither. People often think of boerboels when they think of great heat tolerance, like surely an african mastiff would have unreal heat tolerance, but no they don't. Certainly not the giant boerboels bred by "boerboel breeders". The real 90 lbs boerboels aka bullmastiffs bred by farmers aren't too bad, but the 150 lbs boerboels people have sitting in their yard which they boast about having great heat tolerance would roast to death in minutes exerting themselves in a hot climate. There's no magic "heat tolerance" pixie dust sprinkled on some dogs and not others, if you're a big bulky dog you don't have great heat tolerance, I don't care if you come from the deserts of death valley, you've evidently been relaxing in the shade while there. If you also have a short muzzle you really definitely do not have good heat tolerance. As for black coats vs white coats... I've seen communities of boardoggers ask this question of if black dogs tolerate heat less well than other dogs, and it's pretty much a unanimous no. It just doesn't seem to be the case, and they should know as their dogs are running, truly expending themselves in the hot tropical sun all the time, and frankly overheating to death with some regularity. Lots of the successful surviving dogs are black. It's not a coat colour that isn't favoured. There's really no identifiable correlation. Now I do think the tan with a black mask type coat has to be probably slightly better for heat tolerance, but it's a very negligible difference if there is one. Much more significant are things like size and bulk and muzzle. Cawkazn [QUOTE]how good would a pariah type dog be for helping you? thai ridgeback maybe? I just thought to myself perhaps the best type dog for this situation would be something veral similiar to the feral dogs in my area but that would be more based off the dog simply surviving in the wild vs benefiting the human as these feral dogs are mostly scavengers although i do see them hunting sometimes.[/QUOTE] Yeah I take back what I said about primitive dogs being ideal, for some stupid reason I was imagining the dogs needing to independently survive in the wild which makes no sense. If this was the case primitive pariahs like thai ridgebacks and etc all the way hands down, but since it isn't the case such dogs are not ideal at all. They won't help you anywhere near as outstandingly as more modern dogs. A pet lab would serve you better honestly. Modern dogs have been evolving to excel in assisting man, and the fact is you can take a modern non hunting dog like a border collie hunting and it will actually help you find and catch more animals than some primitive actual hunting dog like a basenji would. Believe it or not, I know this to be a reality proven through extensive trial and error. I would definitely think collie blood should be high on the list of breeds to be incorporated in this mongrel. They're super intelligent as we all know and also enthusiastic to work for you and to help you all day every day. They'll also stay alive and avoid injuries, and they will add this quality to a cross too. Heat tolerance is a bigger issue than cold tolerance honestly, any normal sort of dog is going to tolerate cold temperatures better than you, but not many if any dogs can tolerate heat better than you. But like I said searching for some magical desert dog to tolerate the heat isn't necessary, you just need a dog that's not too big and bulky, and has some decent surface area in it's mouth, through a longish muzzle. You know, when I think about it this has all been done by americans back in the forming years of your great country- they produced the staghound. It's a sighthound based mongrel, predominantly greyhound/deerhound but with collie, terriers, bullbreeds/mastiffs and scenthounds in there as well. It's going to be the most handy dog for someone trying to survive off the land by a good margin. You could recreate the wheel, and your recreation might be great, but yeah it's been done. It's already there if you want it.

Weimeraner would be ok, but you honestly wouldn't want a serious nose dog really because how are you going to keep up with them when they take off for miles following some old scent trail? Scenthounds worked with horses, and they work today with tracking collars, but without either of these things people prefer sighthounds, and if they want scenting ability they like a "hot nose", which is a nose that's best for detecting fresh scents of close by animals on the wind, rather than cold old scents in the dirt. Pointers and other gun dogs provide the best hot noses, rather than scenthounds which provide a better cold nose (and all the tendencies to follow that nose with tunnel vision and etc). Weimeraners are a gun dog with a good hot nose, so yeah a weimeraner is a very versatile sort of dog and will help you find and run down a wide variety of animals, but it's nothing compared to a stag.

I don't see how you could go past a Bull Arab. If you know what you are doing, with one of those and a decent knife, you would never go hungry! And a good one would be handy for defence too.

In parts of australia that is certainly true, but BAs are fairly specialised for big game only. A stag is going to be able to catch a much wider array of prey animals, and I think targetting small to medium game rather than big dangerous game is probably more practical, less dangerous for both you and the dog. Even a great dog is probably going to get injured sooner or later going after boars and scrub cattle, what then? With a stag you could target mostly rabbits and small deer, and then opportunistically target the odd larger animal when circumstances make it feasible. The stag seems a much more sensible and practical choice for living off the land. Mind you if you had a pack of dogs you'd want a big-game specialist or two for sure. If I had a pack of 5 dogs, I think I'd have two stags for fast game (two because cutting off fast game escape routes is half the battle), a terrier for grounded game, a bull arab for big game and a bandog as a back up heavy hanger/guard. Keep in mind this is probably going more in line with my tastes than what would purely be most practical. 6 dogs and the next one would either be a collie or kelpie, and they'll be the ones putting in most of the hard yards working to find and flush out the animals in the first place. If I was being unbiased they'd probably even be the first choice.

I guess I am coming at this from a personal perspective (do all boys want to run off to the wild?) but I could probably trap most of the smaller stuff myself. I would want a dog that could catch and hang off the bigger stuff. So for me, as I said earlier, a Bull Arab would be perfect.

I thought about trapping too and I'd go more that route my self. But big game hunting is a luxury of in the wild. You can't risk your dog on a pig, when he's all you've got. That's assuming you didn't bring antibiotics and stitching stuff. In which case a small cut could kill. If it were me I'd trap the big game and I'd scent and catch the small stuff. Though unless it were below freezing all the time I wouldn't catch much big game because you've only got a day or two to eat it before it goes bad anyway. A man and a dog can't eat a 150 lb boar in that time. Though maybe you could build a smoke house, and preserve it that way. That's why I think a 70 lb Cur would be about perfect. They have nose they catch, they are tough and they want to hunt. They don't eat much or need much maintenance. But that's also assuming I'm in the kind of environment I'm use to, the south eastern US. That's the environment Curs like Catahoulas were bred for a different dog might be better built for somewhere else though. I think the whole idea does call to some ancient male hunting instinct. Notice no ones talking about training the dog to scent out water or berries?

Cawkazn, Here's what I did. I took one Sarplaninac with me, not more than one dog because of food limitations etc. The double coat was ideal for the Northwestern climate (Montana), rain simply perled off like on a Teflon-pan, snow didn't bother him a bit, and the heat was tolerable as well (within reason). For a big dog he was incredibly modest, actually it was surprising how little food at times he could still thrive on (i.e. I recall 4 days without basically anything!). The size of my dog was important as well, he radiates heat at night, if you keep him with you in the tent. Also, his presence took the edge out of weird noises in the forest that one hears all the time at night. Being a superb protector, it would come in handy more often than one might think, I encountered numerous large animals and predators, the howling of the wolves at night for example seemed way too close to be comfortable. To be honest, I wouldn't take a smaller dog with me. The scariest moments in hindsight were probably a Moose mother with her calf and perhaps a Vietnam veteran who just didn't like people - at all. LOL Anyway, I also believe now that having a gun is in order, all I had with me at the time was a Ka-Bar Fighting Blade and a small axe - well, and the dog. Oh yeah, I had bear spray with me, too, just in case. In general, take more stuff than you think you need, both in tools and in food supplies. But make sure you can carry all that crap comfortably over long distances. And take the "coldest" sleeping bag you can find, one can always open it up a bit if it's too warm. Some nights all that was showing was my nose and even that kept me awake during very cold nights. LOL Back to dogs, I can't imagine a better fit dog than a Shar for going off the grid in a mountainous and forested region like Western Montana. It seems they instinctively know what to do, you don't have to tell them a thing. They somehow know this is serious business now. And they can cope well with the stress, both physically and mentally. And don't underestimate the aspect of protection, over longer periods of time even rare events are highly likely to happen. Dan

I can see that in Montana you'd need more dog, than Mississippi. Though I'd be partial to bringing one of my Bandogs.

[quote1316374532=MidgardKennels] I can see that in Montana you'd need more dog [..] I'd be partial to bringing one of my Bandogs. [/quote1316374532] Sure, why not, I just don't have any experiences with these kind of dogs. Based on some of my encounters in the wild perhaps I'd be a little nervous that such a dog could opt to charge a large animal right away instead of sending a signal of "we're just passing by and don't want any trouble, but you definitely shouldn't seek any either". That is what I liked most about my Shar, he never acted hot headed but always first tried to deflect the situation while being in complete control. I am not implying that this must necessarily be different for bandogs, I am just wondering how the higher prey drive could affect the outcome, that's all. Dan

Good point. I'm use to me and my dogs being the biggest and baddest thing in the area. The most dangerous animals I'd run into around here are dogs, coyotes, boar, red wolves, and crazy people. I'd trust one of my dogs against any of them. When we're out there and we run across a deer or anything they are on them right then running, but running headlong into a herd of elk or moose or a mama grizzly, not such a good idea. Crazy drive and courage aren't alway good things in the wild. Good point Astibus.