Texas Wildlife November 2010
by
Henry Chappell
Maybe you overestimated your ability and took an ill-considered shot. Maybe the buck moved just as you were squeezing the trigger. In any case, you shot him badly. Now he’s gone. If you don’t find him, he’ll die a slow, horrible death - if the coyotes don’t get him first.
So you wait. Hopefully, if you don’t push him, he’ll lie down and stiffen up. After half an hour, you start looking for blood, praying for bright red arterial splotches, or pink froth indicative of a lung shot. Maybe he’s just over the next rise, dead.
But he’s not, and the scant blood you find is dark. Your buddies come to help, but by nightfall you’ve lost the trail. You want this deer, of course. That’s why you hunt. But now it’s about what you don’t want. You don’t want him suffering. You hurt him. It’s your responsibility to end it. What now?
You’d do well to call in a houndsman with trained deer tracking dogs.
Hunting deer with dogs is illegal in Texas, but using as many as two trained dogs to recover wounded deer is not only legal but highly encouraged. Fortunately for hunters and wounded deer, Texans can run their deer tracking dogs off-leash. In many states, dogs must be kept on-leash, a less than satisfactory approach when the deer can still run.
Robbie Hurt, a South Texas rancher and houndsman recovered 63 wounded deer last – a typical season. “Almost every time I’m called out, the hunter will assure me that the deer is dead and simply needs to be found,” he said. “That’s the case maybe two percent of the time. We’d almost never catch a deer if we had to keep dogs on a lead.”
Robbie runs a pack of bobcat hounds – mostly running Walkers, occasionally crossed with colder-nosed treeing breeds – and always keeps a pair of deer dogs on hand. He’s certainly not breed-blind. His first deer dog was a hound-border collie cross.
“A good deer dog is one that gets the job done,” he said. “Cow dog crosses often work out real well. In fact, Labrador retrievers take to blood trailing naturally, but they usually lack the grit to bay the deer and hold it until you can get there.”
In Europe, breeds that we Americans usually think of as versatile bird dogs, especially the German shorthaired pointer and German wirehired pointer, are expected to track and bay wounded big game and are bred for the job. In this day of specialization, it’s easy to forget our modern pointing dogs’ hound ancestry. We use only a fraction of their abilities.
Nowadays, Robbie selects especially bright, trainable prospects from his cat hound pack to pull double-duty as deer dogs.
“I’m way ahead when I start with one of my cat hounds because I know he has a good nose and he’s already deer broke,” he said.
Already deer-broke. That’s not as counter-intuitive as it might seem at first.
Robbie said, “You can’t have a dog just running deer. He has to follow a blood trail, and if the blood trail plays out he has to follow only the foot and body scent associated with that blood.”
That’s how the Germans are able track wounded big game with their bird dogs without them blasting off every time they jump a stag or boar.
Robbie compares this scent discrimination to a bloodhound’s ability to track a single person across a crowded cityscape after being introduced to “scent article” such as an item of clothing.
All of Robbie’s dogs learn on the job. He sets up no artificial blood trails. He simply introduces the young dog to the blood and encourages him to track. Having been deer-broke, the dog won’t immediately follow foot and body scent. Rather, he focuses on the blood. Since the hunter usually knows which direction the wounded deer ran, the handler can get the dog started in the right direction. With experience, the dog learns to cast and circle, using the wind to acquire or re-acquire a lost trail.
Whenever possible, Robbie starts a young dog with an experienced dog. “My pair of deer dogs usually consists of a solid dog, and an up-and-coming dog,” he said. “Just watching my older dog, I can see when my young dog gets off-track and I can correct him.”
Here again, breed doesn’t matter. Robbie started one of his best young hounds with an older rat terrier with a talent for following blood trails. “The terrier didn’t have a good enough nose to take out with paying clients,” Robbie said. “But he was perfect for getting that hound off and running.”
The best deer hounds are mostly silent on the trail so as to keep the deer on its bed as long as possible. “If a seasoned dog gets too noisy on the track, I might give him a gentle bump with the electronic collar, but once he jumps that deer, he’s going to open up, and that’s really fine,” Robbie said.
Although hounds are infamous for independence, if not outright hardheadedness, Robbie expects his deer dogs to handle like bird dogs. He uses his electronic collars sparingly, but won’t put up with a hound that doesn’t come promptly when called.
That’s especially important when you’re hunting a low-fence area. “The thing I worry most about is one of my dogs getting off on a neighboring property when the hunters haven’t alerted the landowner and gotten permission to pursue. That’s about the only time I’ll put my young dog on a lead,” Robbie said. “I don’t want to get into a trespassing situation.”
Just how effective are the dogs? Trails of five miles or more are quite common, especially when the deer keeps flushing.
A few years ago, a hunter asked Robbie to look for a wounded mule deer out in the dry, mountainous Trans-Pecos, near Sanderson. The track was 24 hours old when the hunter called. Robbie agreed to meet him in camp the following night so he could be on the trail at daybreak to take advantage of even the slightest dew. By that time, the track was nearly 48 hour old.
His dogs picked up the blood trail right way. Using a GPS tracking collar, Robbie followed his dogs’ progress as they tracked the deer down into a dry valley between two mountains. The dogs seemed to lose the trail but picked it up again near the base of the far mountain, worked it to the other side, then across another valley and over a second mountain where they finally brought the deer to bay – a trail of ten miles or more. The shot had broken one of the deer’s legs. The hounds saved it from days of agony and took a burden off the hunter’s shoulders.
Robbie stresses that hunters should call him sooner than later. “Oftentimes, the hunter has tried really hard to find that deer, but in the process he and his buddies have tromped around and dirtied up the scent trail, making my dogs’ job harder. Typically, if you don’t find the deer pretty quick, within a couple hundred yards or so, you’d better be calling in somebody with a dog.”