00:00:02 Speaker 1: 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation's podcast as always. 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