ZALMA, Mo. (AP) - Smiling on a stark day in Zalma, Joe Newell watches his 12-year-old stepdaughter, Mady, scurry across the lawn, teasing a floppy-eared gaggle of English blue tick coonhound puppies with a dishrag.
She and her 10-year-old sister, Laney, take turns with the rag, giggling at the pups' clumsy chase. Mady falls to the ground to be swarmed by the tumbling pack.
While the sisters roll in puppies, Newell shakes his head, the Southeast Missourian reported.
"This is what we do every day," he says. "Just play with puppies."
There's gentle sarcasm in his words, but in a way, it's the truth. Newell, who runs Triple N Coonhounds, is one of the region's most reputable coonhound trainers.
"They just love chasing a regular old dishrag for some reason," he explains. "And depending on the dog, I can't start really working with them until they're about 9 months old. I have to see their maturity level."
But, until then, they're too young to work with pelts or live raccoons, and the most effective teaching tool for pups like this is play. Their natural eagerness to chase is probably in their blood. Newell's mother, Saundra, says her son is a meticulous breeder with a knack for pairing compatible bloodlines.
"He'll be right in there at the kitchen table with family trees and diagrams spread out all over," She says. "And any one of these dogs here, he can rattle off who the father and mother were."
Newell's affinity for animals is a product of his own nature. He didn't exactly plan on starting a hound training business, but he just couldn't resist.
"I sent him to college to pick up his textbooks, and he came back with a coondog," Saundra explains.
Newell laughs and admits it's true; and he's been training coonhounds ever since. He's earned a somewhat unusual reputation as a trainer, both for living with cerebral palsy and for working wonders with dogs that other trainers deemed hopeless.
"I just do it plumb different than other people," he says. "It's more about finding a dog that you can connect with - one that works well with your personality."
Saundra says Joe has an empathy and gentleness that helps reach dogs that others don't have the patience for. Then again, she says, the dogs might just identify with Joe's own stubbornness.
He once got a phone call from another trainer who told him he had a dog that was impossible to work with.
"He told me, "I'm gonna put her down since I can't do anything with her, but I know you take stubborn dogs. So if you want her, you can come pick her up,'" he says. "And when I got there, I got the dog, and he gave me a .22 bullet and said, "You're gonna want to hang onto this.'"
He kept the bullet, but instead of using it, he got to know the dog, he hunted with her and, eventually, she tied for first place in the Missouri Governor's Cup state hunt later that year.
"Those are the ones I want," he says. "I want the dogs that other people say can't be worked. Those are the dogs that have personality."
Saundra says Joe just has an amazing natural rapport with animals.
"He bonds with these dogs. They connect," she says. "Shoot, I've even caught Joe petting a wild coon before. He just has a way with animals."
But an English red tick coonhound named Dan means more to Joe Newell than the others. He says Dan's what shook him out of a depression after his father, Norman, died.
Newell's father never liked hunting, but wanted to get into the training with Joe in 2003. That was the birth of Triple N Coonhounds. The business cards were ordered.
Norman's first hound, Roscoe, had just been registered in his name when Norman was struck and killed by a car while helping some stranded motorists. Joe was devastated.
"I didn't want to hunt after that. I didn't want the dogs. I didn't want to do anything," he says.
But on the insistence of a neighbor, he went out one night with Dan. Slowly, he was able to get back into training and hunting.
"It was Dan who helped me after Dad died," he explains. "I honestly think I'd take a bullet for that old dog."
But Dan is an old dog now, and Newell won't be able to keep up the business forever, either. His doctors have tried time after time to convince him to stop hunting. So he's teaching Mady and Laney how to take over, once he decides to hang up his hunting boots.
"You know you'll have to sooner or later, Joe," says Saundra.
"I will hang "em up eventually, I know," he agrees. "But only if it's to break in a new pair."