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Hunter's Best Friend
http://www.outdoorlife.com/outdoor/hunting/huntingdogs/article/0,19912,676081,00.html
Hunter's Best Friend
By Michael Veine
Your Labrador can be easily trained to recover
wounded whitetails.
October 2005
Though most bowhunters spend countless hours scouting
and shooting their bows as they prepare for the
upcoming deer season, they rarely consider what
they'll do if an arrow goes into the wrong part
of the deer's anatomy. When this happens, they
either spend days on their hands and knees looking
for blood or just start looking everywhere. I've
made this mistake myself. But then one year my
arrow didn't hit where it should have and after
hours of hopeless tracking I was frustrated enough
to find a solution. I decided to find out if Shrike,
my 6-year-old Labrador, wasn't too old to learn
a new trick.
Getting a Dog Started
New York, Wisconsin, Maine, Vermont, Indiana,
Texas, British Columbia, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio
and Alaska all recently passed laws to allow the
use of dogs to recover deer and other big game.
It is also legal to use a dog to track wounded
deer in most of the South, though some states
regulate it on the county level. In general, the
practice is gaining acceptance across the country,
but you should review the regulations to be sure
it's legal where you hunt.
Not long after a law was passed in Michigan making
it legal to use dogs, I began training Shrike
to blood-trail deer. Labrador retrievers make
good blood-trailers. Breeds like dachshunds, bloodhounds,
basset hounds, beagles and curs are also good.
Basically, any breed of dog with a good nose can
be used to trail deer. It's all a matter of the
right training.
Deer blood for training can be collected from
deer you harvest. Every time you thaw out some
venison, blood drains from the meat and can be
collected. You can also use Ziploc bags to collect
blood during field dressing. I like to transfer
the blood into old syrup containers, which work
well for dribbling out training trails.
I trickle out a sparse blood trail and leave a
piece of deer hide at the end of the scent line.
Before starting a dog on a blood trail, let the
trail age for at least 15 minutes. As your dog
gains expertise, age the trail longer. Keep your
dog on a lead during the trailing process and
give him plenty of praise when he finds the end
of the trail. I even put little pieces of meat
scraps at the end of the trail to sweeten the
pot for Shrike. Keep the training sessions short
and fun for the dog so that the dog looks forward
to the training. Once a week is plenty. In a few
months the dog will be a pro.
The Payoff
I put Shrike's tracking skills to the test for
the first time after I arrowed a huge buck in
a remote cedar swamp in the Upper Peninsula. Unfortunately,
it started raining soon after the shot, so the
visible blood trail was washed away. I knew the
hit was good, but the area was so infested with
coyotes and bears that leaving the deer overnight
would have been chancy.
Returning later with Shrike, I really didn't know
what to expect. I put his nose down near the area
of the hit and told him, "Find the deer."
He started pulling me in the direction where the
deer had run off. He made steady progress, and
in just a couple of minutes was sniffing my dead
buck. Since then, Shrike has tracked down many
deer for others. He is definitely my best four-legged
friend.
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