October 2, 2024 • 17 mins
In this episode, Tony takes a look at what we know about the history of hunting big game with dogs, and how it still plays a major role in today's whitetail hunting culture.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundations podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson. Today's episode is a special one given that
it's white tail week here at meat Eater. So I'm
going to talk about how we've been mixing dogs and
deer up for a long time and how cool that
really is. So you just heard me say it, but
I have to say it again so I don't get
fired and replaced by AI. It's white tail week here
(00:25):
at meat Eater, and that means we have deer on
the brains. It also means we have an unbelievable sale
going on. If you head on over to FirstLight dot com,
you can shop around and if you buy something, you
might just get a steep discount on it, but depends
how much you spend. So this is the first time
that meat Eater is offering just blanket discounts. So whatever
you buy, it's not just new stuff. So for example,
(00:46):
if you drop one hundred and fifty bucks, you get
free shipping. Eh, bump that up to two hundred and
you'll save fifty dollars right off the top. It's pretty good.
You spend four hundred dollars save one hundred bucks. You
can go all the way up to eight hundred bucks
if you really need a new whitetail kid or something big,
and they're gonna take two hundred dollars right off the top,
So twenty five percent discount just for shopping during this week.
(01:07):
So you got to go over to first light dot
com and you got to do it now. All right,
enough of that salesy stuff. This episode is a nod
to all the ways in which we have used dogs
in the deer woods. You know, it's not just an
interesting look at the history of working canines, but also
highlights some of the behaviors in certain breeds that you
might want to encourage or you might want to suppress.
I guess it all depends on what you want your
(01:29):
dog to be like in the field. That's up to you.
For now, enjoy this deep dive into the world of
white tails and what wants. Were wolves, but now are
our four legged best friends. If you want to understand
how we've been mixing dogs and deer for a long
long time, you might naturally assume that Europe is where
(01:52):
it's at. There's so much modern dog culture that comes
from Europe, and so many of the breeds we love
today were fine tuned and handcrafted across the pond before
ever making it to North America. While europe and European
breeds definitely play a pretty big role in the story,
they actually didn't come first. It seems. If you want
(02:14):
to understand big game hunting with dogs and where it
all got started, you might want to head to the
northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia. Of all places, there, engraved
into rocks throughout the arid desert are thousands of depictions
of life that dates back to several thousand years before
(02:34):
the Great Pyramids of Geez that were completed. While pinning
down exact dates its tough due to the conditions, the
best evidence suggests that these carvings date back to anywhere
from nine thousand to five thousand BC. Many of them
show hunters working with hounds. The scenes, you know, which
are an incredible glimpse into one facet of life from
(02:54):
so long ago, show humans with dogs bow hunting for
a wild game. Some of them show dogs on leashes,
and many of them depict coordinated efforts between those hunters
and those dogs. What makes this even wilder is that
there is a clear difference between the carvings that show
(03:15):
hunting scenes and the carvings that show herding scenes. Dogs
are prevalent in both, but it's the hunting scenes that
are fascinating. One carving shows a hunter with tethered dogs
at his side while he draws a bow on a
game animal. Those ancient hunters didn't just draw stick figure
dogs either. They carved out specific shapes. Many of the
(03:38):
dogs have a short snout, pointy ears, a curled tail.
Some have a telltale shoulder stripe or spots. The detail
is wild, and we can fill in the blanks to
some extent on why that is. It must be because
they were an important part of life, and an important
part of that part of life, which was the means
(03:59):
to feed themselves. It also explains, or at least lays
the groundwork for why we are not only so emotionally
attached to our dogs to this day, but also why
we so naturally want to take a grip and grin
photo when we kill a deer, you know, and then
carve it into the digital cave wall that is social media.
(04:20):
It's hard to say what game animals those as desert
dwellers were bow hunting with dogs seven thousand years ago,
but it wasn't a whitetail. The dogs used in Europe
much later, they weren't hunting white tails either, although they
were closer to setting the stage for modern deer dogs
here in the States. Take the Scottish deerhound here, which
(04:41):
you know by its name, you can deduce an awful
lot about where it was bred and what it was
bred for. These tall, shaggy dogs are affectionate, friendly, and
pretty rare. Their roots date back to Scotland in the
sixteenth century, and they've gone by a few names, the
Highland deerhound, the rough greyhounds, Gottish greyhound. While it's easy
(05:02):
to forget since hunting is a sport mostly available to
anyone here, that wasn't the case in Europe, and still
kind of isn't the case, although it's not reserved solely
for nobility these days. The Scottish deerhound was bred to
hunt deer in two ways, by coursing and by stalking.
They could kick them up and allow someone else to
(05:23):
get a shot or catch them themselves, apparently, although information
from the sixteen hundreds is a little murky on that front.
Other breeds, many of which hail from Germany, were used
in a similar fashion for a long long time. This
style of hunting with dogs naturally followed people as they
left the Old Country and landed on the shores of
(05:44):
North America, where the white tail was waiting for them.
By then, firearms were popular enough that the dogs weren't
really tasked with catching fur as much as getting it
moving in front of the hunters. This type of deer
hunting was common, and it exists to this day in
some Southern states, although we kind of have a weird
view of it. In fact, I'll admit that I have
(06:05):
a very weird and not a very practical or logical
view of hound hunting, white tails and big game in general.
While there is nothing I love more and this is
the honest truth, than when my dog gets on the
scent of a rooster and finally forces him to fly
hopefully within shotgun range of me, I have a hard
time getting behind the hound hunting thing. It's stupid, it's
(06:27):
a personal hang up, and I don't really know where
it came from. I mean, part of it has come
from dealing with some hound hunters who chase bears in
Wisconsin where I hunt, where it seems like they view
property boundaries as a mild suggestion, especially on Monday morning
when most folks are at work. That's not the dog's fault, though,
And honestly, I don't know why it matters to me
so much, but maybe it's something that most of us
(06:48):
have been fed for a long time a certain narrative,
which is, you know that running deer with dogs is unethical.
How that has become the pervasive mindset in the white
tail hunting culture is weird, and it really doesn't make
much sense when you consider that baiting deer is widely
accepted in plenty of states. And to make it even weirder,
is it on that bait pile you can run a
(07:09):
cell camera and put up a box blind, which tips
the odds in favor of the hunter in a way
that might make someone question the ethics of the whole
thing if they thought about it too hard, especially when
compared to something like how hunting. But we just take
that as how modern hunting is, and we don't generally
like to think of folks releasing the hounds and then
posting up at the end of a swamp to shoot
a deer as they run by. Now, for people who
(07:31):
have never done it, that might seem unfair, a little
too easy for anyone who is still into it. They
know how much bullshit it takes to make that argument.
Deer have been avoiding canines for tens of thousands of years.
I doubt there is a place with wild whitetails to
this day where they don't face the threat of at
least coyotes on a pretty much daily basis. In many
(07:55):
places now they also face the threat of wolves. Somehow,
Despite this, there are new deer on the landscape every year.
Dogs are good, canines are good hunters, but deer are
often just a little bit better. It's common for hound
hunters to talk about deer doubling back, which is a
simple and effective way for them to avoid getting shot.
(08:16):
To those hunters, it's clear the deer learned the game
pretty quickly, and why wouldn't they. White tails live off
of their noses, just like canines. Sight and sound both
pretty important, but scent is the truth and there is
no denying it. While we don't know if deer can
reason things out, they must inherently know that canines can
(08:36):
follow their scent, just as they follow the scent of
one another. They must also know that running a certain
way or swimming or whatever allows them the chance to
leave the dogs behind, and in my opinion, that's cool
as hell. Now, while it might be hard to understand
the use of dogs when deer hunting, you to a
lot of us, A good way to get there is
(08:58):
to read Robert Ruark's book, Old Man and the Boy.
In fact, if you like the outdoors at all and
you can read, you should put that book at the
top of your list. Really, anything ruurk Road is there,
but if you want a gateway drug, that's the one.
In it, he describes the Southern hunting culture and how
he was introduced to deer hunting through that. It's a
(09:19):
reminder that we know what we know, and we accept
what we accept because we know it at a deeper level.
But deer and dogs aren't accepted at a deeper level
in many places. Although the tide is shifted somewhat in
that regard due to the undeniable fact that dogs are
much better at finding mortally wounded deer than we are tracking.
(09:49):
Dogs are all the rage lately, and for good reason.
There is no point in history where canines haven't been
pretty interested in deer, and they have a good nose
for following the scent deer laid down. They have a
really good nose for following the scent of a stressed
out wounded deer, which, if you think about it, makes
(10:09):
a hell of a lot of sense. If you're a
wild canine heading out to find a midnight snack and
you don't want to waste all of your hard earned
energy chasing healthy deer that can easily outrun you, then
the old factory signature of a wounded deer would get
your attention. Now the calculus changes, and the effort is
worth it because the advantage is real. Dogs are masters
(10:32):
at finding wounded deer, and we've slowly realized that while
not everyone approves of chasing deer with dogs, most everyone
with an ounce of common sense knows that using the
best tool available to recover mortally wounded deer is the
right thing to do. The cool thing about this is
that you can train your own dog to be a
(10:52):
tracking dog. Now, even if you have a bird dog
that is dedicated to feathers, you know ducks are upland
or both, you can train them to find orderly hit
deer and it won't take anything away from their bird skills.
It's just an additive thing. It's a cool addition to
a bird dog's toolkit, and there are a few options
out there to help you train. Jeremy Moore, who's one
(11:13):
hell of a dog trainer, has a line of dog
bone products out there, including a kit that is designed
to help you jump start the training process for tracking dogs.
It's not any harder than training a dog to do
some other type of pursuit, but it does take the
right stuff. You know, the right setting, and some reps
on actual blood trails. And if you've never seen a
good dog work a blood trail, you're in for a treat.
(11:34):
My first real experience with this came from a fellow
in northern Wisconsin who owned some draft hors and graciously
volunteered to use his dogs to help find a dough
my daughter shot in the north Woods a few years ago.
Those dogs did a great job, even though we didn't
get the deer. It wasn't their fault though. We just
randomly had a monster bear come through shortly after she
(11:57):
shot that deer, and while I don't exactly know what happened,
I do know that that bear took a ninety degree
turn right down the blood trail. Twenty minutes after the shot,
and the whole thing turned into a two day search
that left all involved wondering if Yogi just carried that
young dough off through the swamp to leave us scratching
our heads. Now, don't let that discourage you from exploring
(12:18):
this route if you are a white tail hunter who
might want some help on your next tracking job, or
maybe if you want to add a few new keepsakes
to your trophy room in the form of shed antlers.
This is a category that absolutely blew up about ten
years ago and is now kind of sort of leveled off.
I guess now, while not every dog is capable of
being a shed antler finding machine, any dog with some
(12:41):
level of retrieving desire it's definitely a possibility. Three dogs ago,
I owned a Golden Retriever that wasn't what you would
call a hunting machine. She hunted, and if the bird
scent was fresh, she'd go from boot liquor to all
about that flushing life. She was, by all accounts, a
sweetheart who could not hold a candle to the lab
(13:02):
that replaced her when she died at six years old.
But she did have one thing going for her that
really stood out she would bring me anything. Lux was
a pleaser, as goldens off and are, and she figured
out if she brought me something I wanted, she would
get some love and attention, which is the fuel that
keeps Golden's going. If I knocked down a rooster, or
(13:24):
a grouse, or a woodcock, or some ducks, or eventually
a cotton tail or a snowshoe hair a squirrel, she'd
bring it to me with her big golden butt swinging
just as wildly as her tail. She was a retriever
through and through, so I trained her to find shed antlers,
which honestly is kind of an awesome off season task.
I think sheds are easier to train for than a
(13:46):
lot of pursuits, but it's a matter of working their
eyesight as well as their noses, which is where some
folks get hung up. Now, Lux was good enough to
find some antlers where very few antlers existed, and the
crowning moment was when she found a giant shed on
some public land near my house in the Twin Cities.
That antler is one of my biggest ever, and I
have shed hunted a lot. It also led me down
(14:09):
the path of looking for that deer because you don't
get the chance to hunt a legitimate boone and crocket
buck on public land very often, let alone when you
have about four million people living within fifty miles of you.
I didn't kill that deer, but I did find him
and a couple of his buddies, and I did arrow
one of his buddies, and it was pretty awesome. It
was also, without a doubt, something that happened because months
(14:30):
before I took a walk with a somewhat well trained
dog and it found what it was supposed to find.
I'll probably do a deep dive episode on tracking dogs
and shed antler dogs at some point, maybe this coming winter,
But for now, the point that matters is that there
are different ways to mix dogs in with the deer
hunting life that so many of us live now. While
(14:52):
we might not use them the way Scottish nobility did
five hundred years ago, or how some good old boys
with deep roots in the southern swamps use them to
the this day. In the few states that still allow it,
we can still incorporate our modern dogs into deer hunting somehow,
and honestly, you don't even have to hunt deer to
do this. There's nothing that says you can't train a
tracking dog to use on other people's deer, although you're
(15:16):
going to need access to some hide, some blood, and
several fresh blood trails with actual dead deer at the
end of them. Eventually you know which is easier to
come by. If you're plugged into the world of deer hunting,
you can be a step or three removed from that
and still train a dog to find shed antlers, which
is the kind of hunt that anyone can come by
pretty much anywhere they live. Although it pays to keep
(15:37):
your expectations reasonable and to understand that the training part
is the fun part mostly well, I mean that's not
exactly true. The training is super fun, especially because you
get to watch your dog learn how to solve a
new problem and get very excited over it. But it
is also pretty sweet when they actually find an antler.
This is also something that can happen in the months
(15:58):
of you know, Anyuary through April, when life has a
tendency to slow to a boring crawl. For a lot
of us who not only love the outdoors but love
spending time in the outdoors with their four legged besties,
there's a lot to be said, and to learn about
how dogs have shaped us as deer hunters and how
their roles in that realm have changed over time. To
meet us where we are. It's pretty cool and I'll
(16:21):
bet that relationship isn't in any danger of dying off completely,
although it will undoubtedly keep morphing into something new. It's
fun to think about if nothing else. So do that
come back in two weeks because I'm going to talk
about something that is an unfortunate reality and working dogs,
especially hunting dogs as we settle into the heart of
hunting season, injuries in the field. That's it for this week.
(16:46):
I'm Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation's podcast as always.
I just want to thank you so much for listening
and for all your support everybody here at Mediatter We
truly appreciate it. We have nothing without you. Find men
and women out there listening to our podcast us or
watching our videos, reading the articles, doing whatever, So thank
you for that. If you want some more hunting information,
(17:06):
you want a recipe, maybe you want to read an
article on dog training, You want to maybe listen to
Wanna Clay's Bear Grease podcasts or several of them, because
you have a long drive out to your bird hunting spot.
Whatever the mediator dot com has you covered, so much
good content there, go check it out again. Thank you
so much for your support.
Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundations podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson. Today's episode is a special one given that
it's white tail week here at meat Eater. So I'm
going to talk about how we've been mixing dogs and
deer up for a long time and how cool that
really is. So you just heard me say it, but
I have to say it again so I don't get
fired and replaced by AI. It's white tail week here
(00:25):
at meat Eater, and that means we have deer on
the brains. It also means we have an unbelievable sale
going on. If you head on over to FirstLight dot com,
you can shop around and if you buy something, you
might just get a steep discount on it, but depends
how much you spend. So this is the first time
that meat Eater is offering just blanket discounts. So whatever
you buy, it's not just new stuff. So for example,
(00:46):
if you drop one hundred and fifty bucks, you get
free shipping. Eh, bump that up to two hundred and
you'll save fifty dollars right off the top. It's pretty good.
You spend four hundred dollars save one hundred bucks. You
can go all the way up to eight hundred bucks
if you really need a new whitetail kid or something big,
and they're gonna take two hundred dollars right off the top,
So twenty five percent discount just for shopping during this week.
(01:07):
So you got to go over to first light dot
com and you got to do it now. All right,
enough of that salesy stuff. This episode is a nod
to all the ways in which we have used dogs
in the deer woods. You know, it's not just an
interesting look at the history of working canines, but also
highlights some of the behaviors in certain breeds that you
might want to encourage or you might want to suppress.
I guess it all depends on what you want your
(01:29):
dog to be like in the field. That's up to you.
For now, enjoy this deep dive into the world of
white tails and what wants. Were wolves, but now are
our four legged best friends. If you want to understand
how we've been mixing dogs and deer for a long
long time, you might naturally assume that Europe is where
(01:52):
it's at. There's so much modern dog culture that comes
from Europe, and so many of the breeds we love
today were fine tuned and handcrafted across the pond before
ever making it to North America. While europe and European
breeds definitely play a pretty big role in the story,
they actually didn't come first. It seems. If you want
(02:14):
to understand big game hunting with dogs and where it
all got started, you might want to head to the
northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia. Of all places, there, engraved
into rocks throughout the arid desert are thousands of depictions
of life that dates back to several thousand years before
(02:34):
the Great Pyramids of Geez that were completed. While pinning
down exact dates its tough due to the conditions, the
best evidence suggests that these carvings date back to anywhere
from nine thousand to five thousand BC. Many of them
show hunters working with hounds. The scenes, you know, which
are an incredible glimpse into one facet of life from
(02:54):
so long ago, show humans with dogs bow hunting for
a wild game. Some of them show dogs on leashes,
and many of them depict coordinated efforts between those hunters
and those dogs. What makes this even wilder is that
there is a clear difference between the carvings that show
(03:15):
hunting scenes and the carvings that show herding scenes. Dogs
are prevalent in both, but it's the hunting scenes that
are fascinating. One carving shows a hunter with tethered dogs
at his side while he draws a bow on a
game animal. Those ancient hunters didn't just draw stick figure
dogs either. They carved out specific shapes. Many of the
(03:38):
dogs have a short snout, pointy ears, a curled tail.
Some have a telltale shoulder stripe or spots. The detail
is wild, and we can fill in the blanks to
some extent on why that is. It must be because
they were an important part of life, and an important
part of that part of life, which was the means
(03:59):
to feed themselves. It also explains, or at least lays
the groundwork for why we are not only so emotionally
attached to our dogs to this day, but also why
we so naturally want to take a grip and grin
photo when we kill a deer, you know, and then
carve it into the digital cave wall that is social media.
(04:20):
It's hard to say what game animals those as desert
dwellers were bow hunting with dogs seven thousand years ago,
but it wasn't a whitetail. The dogs used in Europe
much later, they weren't hunting white tails either, although they
were closer to setting the stage for modern deer dogs
here in the States. Take the Scottish deerhound here, which
(04:41):
you know by its name, you can deduce an awful
lot about where it was bred and what it was
bred for. These tall, shaggy dogs are affectionate, friendly, and
pretty rare. Their roots date back to Scotland in the
sixteenth century, and they've gone by a few names, the
Highland deerhound, the rough greyhounds, Gottish greyhound. While it's easy
(05:02):
to forget since hunting is a sport mostly available to
anyone here, that wasn't the case in Europe, and still
kind of isn't the case, although it's not reserved solely
for nobility these days. The Scottish deerhound was bred to
hunt deer in two ways, by coursing and by stalking.
They could kick them up and allow someone else to
(05:23):
get a shot or catch them themselves, apparently, although information
from the sixteen hundreds is a little murky on that front.
Other breeds, many of which hail from Germany, were used
in a similar fashion for a long long time. This
style of hunting with dogs naturally followed people as they
left the Old Country and landed on the shores of
(05:44):
North America, where the white tail was waiting for them.
By then, firearms were popular enough that the dogs weren't
really tasked with catching fur as much as getting it
moving in front of the hunters. This type of deer
hunting was common, and it exists to this day in
some Southern states, although we kind of have a weird
view of it. In fact, I'll admit that I have
(06:05):
a very weird and not a very practical or logical
view of hound hunting, white tails and big game in general.
While there is nothing I love more and this is
the honest truth, than when my dog gets on the
scent of a rooster and finally forces him to fly
hopefully within shotgun range of me, I have a hard
time getting behind the hound hunting thing. It's stupid, it's
(06:27):
a personal hang up, and I don't really know where
it came from. I mean, part of it has come
from dealing with some hound hunters who chase bears in
Wisconsin where I hunt, where it seems like they view
property boundaries as a mild suggestion, especially on Monday morning
when most folks are at work. That's not the dog's fault, though,
And honestly, I don't know why it matters to me
so much, but maybe it's something that most of us
(06:48):
have been fed for a long time a certain narrative,
which is, you know that running deer with dogs is unethical.
How that has become the pervasive mindset in the white
tail hunting culture is weird, and it really doesn't make
much sense when you consider that baiting deer is widely
accepted in plenty of states. And to make it even weirder,
is it on that bait pile you can run a
(07:09):
cell camera and put up a box blind, which tips
the odds in favor of the hunter in a way
that might make someone question the ethics of the whole
thing if they thought about it too hard, especially when
compared to something like how hunting. But we just take
that as how modern hunting is, and we don't generally
like to think of folks releasing the hounds and then
posting up at the end of a swamp to shoot
a deer as they run by. Now, for people who
(07:31):
have never done it, that might seem unfair, a little
too easy for anyone who is still into it. They
know how much bullshit it takes to make that argument.
Deer have been avoiding canines for tens of thousands of years.
I doubt there is a place with wild whitetails to
this day where they don't face the threat of at
least coyotes on a pretty much daily basis. In many
(07:55):
places now they also face the threat of wolves. Somehow,
Despite this, there are new deer on the landscape every year.
Dogs are good, canines are good hunters, but deer are
often just a little bit better. It's common for hound
hunters to talk about deer doubling back, which is a
simple and effective way for them to avoid getting shot.
(08:16):
To those hunters, it's clear the deer learned the game
pretty quickly, and why wouldn't they. White tails live off
of their noses, just like canines. Sight and sound both
pretty important, but scent is the truth and there is
no denying it. While we don't know if deer can
reason things out, they must inherently know that canines can
(08:36):
follow their scent, just as they follow the scent of
one another. They must also know that running a certain
way or swimming or whatever allows them the chance to
leave the dogs behind, and in my opinion, that's cool
as hell. Now, while it might be hard to understand
the use of dogs when deer hunting, you to a
lot of us, A good way to get there is
(08:58):
to read Robert Ruark's book, Old Man and the Boy.
In fact, if you like the outdoors at all and
you can read, you should put that book at the
top of your list. Really, anything ruurk Road is there,
but if you want a gateway drug, that's the one.
In it, he describes the Southern hunting culture and how
he was introduced to deer hunting through that. It's a
(09:19):
reminder that we know what we know, and we accept
what we accept because we know it at a deeper level.
But deer and dogs aren't accepted at a deeper level
in many places. Although the tide is shifted somewhat in
that regard due to the undeniable fact that dogs are
much better at finding mortally wounded deer than we are tracking.
(09:49):
Dogs are all the rage lately, and for good reason.
There is no point in history where canines haven't been
pretty interested in deer, and they have a good nose
for following the scent deer laid down. They have a
really good nose for following the scent of a stressed
out wounded deer, which, if you think about it, makes
(10:09):
a hell of a lot of sense. If you're a
wild canine heading out to find a midnight snack and
you don't want to waste all of your hard earned
energy chasing healthy deer that can easily outrun you, then
the old factory signature of a wounded deer would get
your attention. Now the calculus changes, and the effort is
worth it because the advantage is real. Dogs are masters
(10:32):
at finding wounded deer, and we've slowly realized that while
not everyone approves of chasing deer with dogs, most everyone
with an ounce of common sense knows that using the
best tool available to recover mortally wounded deer is the
right thing to do. The cool thing about this is
that you can train your own dog to be a
(10:52):
tracking dog. Now, even if you have a bird dog
that is dedicated to feathers, you know ducks are upland
or both, you can train them to find orderly hit
deer and it won't take anything away from their bird skills.
It's just an additive thing. It's a cool addition to
a bird dog's toolkit, and there are a few options
out there to help you train. Jeremy Moore, who's one
(11:13):
hell of a dog trainer, has a line of dog
bone products out there, including a kit that is designed
to help you jump start the training process for tracking dogs.
It's not any harder than training a dog to do
some other type of pursuit, but it does take the
right stuff. You know, the right setting, and some reps
on actual blood trails. And if you've never seen a
good dog work a blood trail, you're in for a treat.
(11:34):
My first real experience with this came from a fellow
in northern Wisconsin who owned some draft hors and graciously
volunteered to use his dogs to help find a dough
my daughter shot in the north Woods a few years ago.
Those dogs did a great job, even though we didn't
get the deer. It wasn't their fault though. We just
randomly had a monster bear come through shortly after she
(11:57):
shot that deer, and while I don't exactly know what happened,
I do know that that bear took a ninety degree
turn right down the blood trail. Twenty minutes after the shot,
and the whole thing turned into a two day search
that left all involved wondering if Yogi just carried that
young dough off through the swamp to leave us scratching
our heads. Now, don't let that discourage you from exploring
(12:18):
this route if you are a white tail hunter who
might want some help on your next tracking job, or
maybe if you want to add a few new keepsakes
to your trophy room in the form of shed antlers.
This is a category that absolutely blew up about ten
years ago and is now kind of sort of leveled off.
I guess now, while not every dog is capable of
being a shed antler finding machine, any dog with some
(12:41):
level of retrieving desire it's definitely a possibility. Three dogs ago,
I owned a Golden Retriever that wasn't what you would
call a hunting machine. She hunted, and if the bird
scent was fresh, she'd go from boot liquor to all
about that flushing life. She was, by all accounts, a
sweetheart who could not hold a candle to the lab
(13:02):
that replaced her when she died at six years old.
But she did have one thing going for her that
really stood out she would bring me anything. Lux was
a pleaser, as goldens off and are, and she figured
out if she brought me something I wanted, she would
get some love and attention, which is the fuel that
keeps Golden's going. If I knocked down a rooster, or
(13:24):
a grouse, or a woodcock, or some ducks, or eventually
a cotton tail or a snowshoe hair a squirrel, she'd
bring it to me with her big golden butt swinging
just as wildly as her tail. She was a retriever
through and through, so I trained her to find shed antlers,
which honestly is kind of an awesome off season task.
I think sheds are easier to train for than a
(13:46):
lot of pursuits, but it's a matter of working their
eyesight as well as their noses, which is where some
folks get hung up. Now, Lux was good enough to
find some antlers where very few antlers existed, and the
crowning moment was when she found a giant shed on
some public land near my house in the Twin Cities.
That antler is one of my biggest ever, and I
have shed hunted a lot. It also led me down
(14:09):
the path of looking for that deer because you don't
get the chance to hunt a legitimate boone and crocket
buck on public land very often, let alone when you
have about four million people living within fifty miles of you.
I didn't kill that deer, but I did find him
and a couple of his buddies, and I did arrow
one of his buddies, and it was pretty awesome. It
was also, without a doubt, something that happened because months
(14:30):
before I took a walk with a somewhat well trained
dog and it found what it was supposed to find.
I'll probably do a deep dive episode on tracking dogs
and shed antler dogs at some point, maybe this coming winter,
But for now, the point that matters is that there
are different ways to mix dogs in with the deer
hunting life that so many of us live now. While
(14:52):
we might not use them the way Scottish nobility did
five hundred years ago, or how some good old boys
with deep roots in the southern swamps use them to
the this day. In the few states that still allow it,
we can still incorporate our modern dogs into deer hunting somehow,
and honestly, you don't even have to hunt deer to
do this. There's nothing that says you can't train a
tracking dog to use on other people's deer, although you're
(15:16):
going to need access to some hide, some blood, and
several fresh blood trails with actual dead deer at the
end of them. Eventually you know which is easier to
come by. If you're plugged into the world of deer hunting,
you can be a step or three removed from that
and still train a dog to find shed antlers, which
is the kind of hunt that anyone can come by
pretty much anywhere they live. Although it pays to keep
(15:37):
your expectations reasonable and to understand that the training part
is the fun part mostly well, I mean that's not
exactly true. The training is super fun, especially because you
get to watch your dog learn how to solve a
new problem and get very excited over it. But it
is also pretty sweet when they actually find an antler.
This is also something that can happen in the months
(15:58):
of you know, Anyuary through April, when life has a
tendency to slow to a boring crawl. For a lot
of us who not only love the outdoors but love
spending time in the outdoors with their four legged besties,
there's a lot to be said, and to learn about
how dogs have shaped us as deer hunters and how
their roles in that realm have changed over time. To
meet us where we are. It's pretty cool and I'll
(16:21):
bet that relationship isn't in any danger of dying off completely,
although it will undoubtedly keep morphing into something new. It's
fun to think about if nothing else. So do that
come back in two weeks because I'm going to talk
about something that is an unfortunate reality and working dogs,
especially hunting dogs as we settle into the heart of
hunting season, injuries in the field. That's it for this week.
(16:46):
I'm Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation's podcast as always.
I just want to thank you so much for listening
and for all your support everybody here at Mediatter We
truly appreciate it. We have nothing without you. Find men
and women out there listening to our podcast us or
watching our videos, reading the articles, doing whatever, So thank
you for that. If you want some more hunting information,
(17:06):
you want a recipe, maybe you want to read an
article on dog training, You want to maybe listen to
Wanna Clay's Bear Grease podcasts or several of them, because
you have a long drive out to your bird hunting spot.
Whatever the mediator dot com has you covered, so much
good content there, go check it out again. Thank you
so much for your support.
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