Here’s one I didn’t see coming… but hey, I’ll take a topic where I can find it.

Cruising around my blog roll, I had a chance to stop by Jim Braaten’s Sportsman’s Blog and read a pretty interesting entry.  Apparently the Minnesota Deer Hunters’ Association is considering asking the MN Department of Natural Resources to allow hunters to use dogs for recovering wounded deer.  The rationale, to quote the quote that was quoted by Braaten on his blog, “deer hunters are not as good at tracking as they used to be.” 

This is from Mark Johnson, the executive director of the MDHA.  It’s pretty telling, but how accurate is it?

First of all, how good has the average hunter ever been at trailing wounded game?  Did our forefathers really have the preternatural bloodtrailing senses of the Saharan bushmen?  Could they follow a deer for two days based solely on a cut hair and a scuffed hoof mark, across rocky ground and flowing creeks? 

Or is it more a matter that people today are a lot more concerned about losing an animal… about making sure they do everything possible to recover an animal?  Is it about a changing perspective about our responsibilities as hunters and our relationship to the game we pursue? 

It’s kind of a tough call for me to make.  On the one hand, I’m pretty sure we’ve seen our general hunting ethic swing across a pretty wide arc over the past few generations.  I know a lot of old-timers who, to be honest, wouldn’t give a second thought to an animal that ran off after the shot.  A few minutes in the brush looking for blood would be considered a reasonable effort, and after that there was a very commonly shared idea that “possums gotta eat too.”

Of course that’s a generalization, and there have always been the hunters out there who’d give it everything they had to recover a wounded animal. 

I’ve also hunted with a fair number of people, of all generations, who couldn’t follow a blood trail if it were spray-painted in neon.  Some of them were new to the sport, but others had been hunting all their lives.  I find it difficult to attribute this to any generational de-evolutionary trend… and I hesitate to blame it on any personal failing of the individuals either.  There are a handful of very good reasons that many hunters don’t have this skill, not the least of which is the rapid urbanization of our society, and the lack of mentors available to hunters who come to this sport late in life. 

Now I have a lot of respect for Jim Braaten’s opinions and experience, but he and I apparently don’t see this issue the same way.  Here’s part of what he had to say about modern tracking skills:

But has the typical hunter in today’s world become so lazy or lax in certain skill sets that we must change the long-standing rules of the hunt?   In my opinion it’s sort of a dumbing down of the hunter to think that the use of dogs is sometimes THE ONLY option for the recovery of game.   Honestly, Mark’s  [Johnson's] comment is sort of a sad commentary on our sport if indeed it happens to be true.

Besides laying the problem of poor tracking skills at the feet of the new generations of hunters, Braaten also feels that using dogs to locate wounded deer is wrong, and should not be permitted at all.  I couldn’t disagree more strongly.

First of all, I don’t care how good you are as a tracker, you’ll never be as good as a dog.  If you’re trying to find a wounded animal, particularly one that’s provided a challenging trail (or no trail), and you can use a dog… well, you’d be kind of silly not to do so.  In fact, I’d go so far as to challenge the ethics of anyone who didn’t take that extra measure if a tracking dog were available and legal. 

Need some real-time examples?  My little NC buck from September is a perfect illustration.  My brother and I trailed that deer from the point where I took the shot, and didn’t find first blood until almost 100 yards away.  After that, the trail was a matter of tiny droplets spaced as much as 50 yards apart.  Most of the trailing was a matter of picking out fresh tracks, and a little knowledge of deer behavior and movements through briar thickets, nearly impenetrable brush, and across a running creek.  Finally though, I had to catch a plane and my brother was left on his own to continue the trail.  A few hours later, he finally gave up. 

Those of you who read the story when I wrote it up know how this ends… It turns out he’d stopped less than 20 yards from where he later found my deer… three days old and mostly eaten by a bear.  A dog would have found that deer, probably in half the time it took us, and it would have been me eating fresh venison, not Smokey. 

Want one more example?  I’ll give you Braaten’s own story.

We were beat having walked through some of the gnarliest vegetation known to man.   Just as the sun was about to set, the deer came to a plowed field lacking any vegetation.   Blood on dirt just doesn’t work to your advantage, let me tell you.   We came to the conclusion that we had given it a full and proper effort.   Several times earlier in the day we thought we had reached a dead end…but our persistence eventually paid dividends in finding new blood trailing evidence.

A dog would have been able to follow that trail across that plowed field.  Sure, maybe they wouldn’t have caught up with that deer anyway, particularly if it wasn’t too badly wounded, but a dog would have let them keep on the trail even when their human faculties were stumped.

I’m not quite to the point of saying that every big game hunter should run out and buy a blood-tracking dog.  That’s not realistic for many of us (although you’d be surprised at the abilities of your current bird dog, or even a house pet).  And several states besides MN don’t permit it anyway.  But it should be permitted as one more tool in our bag of tricks.  I’m all for MN and any other state to allow hunters to utilize any realistic means to recover wounded game.

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