I have always said the best time to train is during deer season when there is fresh blood on the ground and a dead or wounded deer is somewhere nearby.
I understood many years ago, that deer season is when the rubber really meets the road when it comes to training a pup, started dog or fine-tuning a finished dog, because you will never create a man-made track as complicated, challenging and educational as a wounded buck. And it fascinates me how so many people believe a dog will forget how to track deer if they are not constantly 'worked' or re-trained in the offseason! Come on folks it is kind of like riding a bike, if you got it, you don't lose it!
But there is more to training a puppy or dog to track blood than putting their nose on the ground and hunt.
An often unknown and critically important element of tracking wounded or dead deer is your ability to verbally control your dog off-leash and call out or call off a dog from the track and possibly save its life.
Tracking wounded deer is especially dangerous because the deer may turn and attack the dog or may jump several times and cross a road or river and your dog may get run over or drown.
Now that we are in July and it is 90' in the shade I have to confess there is no time like the present if you want to work your dog, but you don't need to put blood on the ground, because it will dry up real fast and lose the scent, and why does it always have to be work, work, work?
Before you expect high-performance blood trail dog performance or scent track training exercises in the summertime, maybe it is the right time to consider that this is the best time for you to focus and to train for other things that are also equally important during deer season and, in my opinion, all year round and every day. In the offseason stay cool, don't push your dog, and focusing on developing a verbal handle on your dog and reinforce or train what we call checking back.
Below is Molly a few months later finding her first buck before she was a year old
Even though you may never plan to track off-leash during deer season, you never know when you may need to turn a dog loose or you accidentally drop the leash and have a great need to have a verbal command or verbal handle on your dog in the hunting season or the offseason. Reward your dog for checking back and for coming when called.
Our best training times may not involve blood or staying on the scent line, and may mostly be just having fun with the dog and just letting them be a pet. No pressure, no rush, almost nothing expected. Yes, I want to see progress. But not at the cost of my pups or I getting bored or frustrated. And like I always say, the real blood trail dog training happens when it is hunting season and there is a natural blood trail and a wounded or dead deer nearby.
Recall or checking back is something that a lot of trainers and trackers do not value, understand or like...
Too many people want the dog to be constantly getting ahead, but what if the dog is not on a leash and it gets so far ahead of you, you lose your dog?
I know what you are thinking... what about the tracking collar? True, but what happens if the dog loses the tracking collar, you lose the handheld, or the battery goes dead on either end?
Anyway, checking back may be the dog's way of making sure that you are still on track, happy and pleased with the progress. Or maybe to determine that you are keeping up with the dog and on track and following him or her especially if you track off-leash the way we do in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
I am fascinated by how people want to buy a trained dog and think it is finished when they get it and it will hunt for the new owner just like it did for the man who bonded with it as a puppy, hauled it around, fed it, trained it and hunted it. There is a big mistaken presumption of dog buyers wrongly believing it is a finished dog and it has nothing left to learn. Well Bubba, any dog at any age will get better and better, year after year from learning simply because every track is different. And if I trained it to hunt off-leash like we do in Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, you may need to make some adjustments when it gets to Kentucky where it is strictly on leash tracking!
By being able to call your dog out of a bay with a wild hog, a cow, a wounded buck so you can finish it off or calling them off a track if they are not on a leash could be a life or death situation especially if you are tracking early in the season when the rattlesnakes have not gone into hibernation OR the alligators are still hungry!
As you can see the dogs above are some very smart dogs. And may be actually smarter than me!
And don't you know alligators love to eat dogs?
We can work on calling a dog to come on command in the house, in a fenced backyard, on a 6 ft, 12 ft, and 20 ft lead and especially if it leads to the dog being rewarded by something like coming to the truck to be load up for a ride, because everyone knows dogs love to ride in cars and trucks!.
If I can get 30 call outs, or recalls in a day and reward heavily when there's little or no distraction. That's when I can really develop a verbal handle on the dog and know I can depend on the dog to come on command when I need for it to do a swift 180-degree turn before going into a highway with high-speed traffic and getting run over or crossing a river, lake or pond and drowning.
NALC reg. Diamond W Scudder
And worse what if she is maybe trespassing in a neighbour's cattle or horse pasture and some fool mule or donkey kicks them or the neighbor shoots the dog for mistaking it to be a wolf, coyote or stray dog?
In the offseason, develop rapport, relationship and a close personal bond with your dog as best friends. Just have fun. Engage your dog. Worry less about what 'you' want the dog to do come tracking season, and focus on what the dog is doing by just being a free wild dog, and capture that moment together.
I am Marcus de la Houssaye and I can be reached by email at catahoula1@gmail.com
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