Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Deer hunting with dogs

My god, if it had been 4 inches lower he'd a bled out right there.

I live for it. I run my hounds almost every day of our 58 day season. I kill as many deer still hunting probably 6-8 days a year as I do running dogs over 50 days a year. I get a lot out of watching and hearing the dogs work. Its easier to kill deer still hunting than it is in front of hounds. We don't have a lot of deer and its bucks only, not like some places where its brown its down.

There are lazy dog hunters. Some don't own or work dogs and just sit on crossings waiting for the dogs to run a deer to them. There are also dog hunters who work at it all year. We scout all summer, keep and mess with dogs all year. I personally get up early to track roads and check cams looking for a buck to run. I scout during season and by the end, I generally know where several bucks are laying. Some we kill and some we don't. I'm not big on walking dogs. I breed and train mine to take a track from the road and trail that deer till they jump him. I will about kill myself on foot or in the truck on a back road trying to get in front of him and kill him, but he usually gets away.

Keep in mind there are also lazy still hunters. Not knocking anybody for how they hunt. Lazy still hunters and lazy dog hunters usually aren't the ones who kill most of the deer.

I understand folks getting mad about dogs getting where they don't belong. I don't think it ruins still hunting, but a fella ought to be able to hunt how he wants on his land. I dog hunt 60 thousand acres of public land bordered by other public land that is usually closed. Garmin track and train collars make controlling a pack of dogs pretty easy with a little work. Whether they are bothering anybody or not, they aren't doing me any good on the other side of the fence.

If the Garmins had been around 40 years ago, there would be a lot more places still open for dog hunting and a lot more dog hunters.

Great comments FLDog - I’ve got a single beagle that I run for rabbits. Like you say, it’s a lot of effort and not so much payoff other than watching the dog work, which is awesome. I struggle to keep my pup from hunting my neighborhood - she’s always walking off with her nose to the ground and her ears shut right off. Thankfully my spot here, I’ve only got 3 neighbors and they all love her.

I get the complaints about dog hunting and sure would be frustrated if my hunt was blown by ranging dogs. It doesn’t need to be that way - it’s how a person trains them.

Does a kabar to the heart count?

Amen to that.

I’m in three clubs across NC and Virginia. Two of the clubs lease upwards of 10k acres. We run Garmin collars and that has really cut down on the time spent looking dogs, and the dogs getting off our property lines. It’s nowhere near the old days when you could possibly look dogs for hours or wait for them to come home.

I can't remember the last time I had a dog stay out overnight.

It is a fun way to hunt. Illegal here now. I wish we could still do it. Last year someone turned out 2 beagles on our place on the back line. They struck on the ridge in front of me. I was sitting in a ladder stand. They came by me 3 times with different bunches of deer all 3 times. 1st bunch came within 10 feet of my stand. 3rd time through a 6 point was in the bunch. He saw me and stopped to look at me. Put a 35 caliber bullet between his eyes. Have no idea whose dogs they were. I was the only one who shot. My son was in a stand a 1/2 mile from me and they were on 7 does when they crossed by him.
I miss the excitement of hearing the dogs coming to you and not knowing what or how many are about to cross.
When we did it it wasn't unusual to have 20 deer in front of the dogs.

I’ve kicked more deer dogs than soccer balls, and some further.

I haven’t done it in a few years just because it was getting very expensive and the group went their separate ways but we ran dogs here in the 580,000+ acre Apalachicola National Forest in north Florida for 20+ years and it was a lot of fun. Sure there are slobs but there are a lot of good guys and gals doing it. There is nothing like hearing the dogs on a hot track. The deer don’t just run flat out all the time. It is fun to watch the deer and the way they react. I have shot a lot of bucks in front of dogs and most of them were standing and some walking, very few were running shots. Depending on which crossing I was at I may use a shotgun, rifle or pistol. I have watched the seer stop and watch the dogs run by and then the deer would go in another direction. It is a hell of a thrill. We ran Beagles or Walkers depending on the block size and how hard you wanted to push the deer. Nothing like the sound of the hounds

Deer hunting with beagles is how we did it in the 60s and 70s. It was more of a social thing as more and better deer could be taken without dogs and climbing up in an elevated stand. I had beagles that kept a deer moving and a couple of little half breed blue tick/catahoula cross gyps that made one get up and run. We always killed more with the slow dogs because the deer would just do enough to outrun the beagles and would do a lot of pausing and stopping. Louisiana trespass laws changed and a lot of private ownership land was leased, gated, and posted so hunting with dogs created conflict and is pretty well going by the wayside.

Still alive in the South. When I started deer hunting in the mid seventies it was the way it was done in South Louisiana. I miss those times. There were hunting clubs , now there are leases. There are some major differences between them.

Most of my early hunting experiences were deer hunting with dogs. Twelve gauges with 00 buckshot were standard. Standers would all pile into the back of one guy's pickup and he would put them out at designated spots, stands that had names that everyone knew or learned. Shortly after that, the "drivers" turned the dogs loose and followed them through the woods towards the standers (might be a mile or so away). The idea, of course, was to get the deer moving. In the coastal plain one does not "still" hunt in the classic sense of slipping through the woods so slowly and silently so as to seem "still." The woods are too thick and noisy for this to have a prayer of working. Perhaps in some rare areas of limited underbrush (and even there it would have to be right after a rain) it might work. Does were off limits and anyone who thinks that bucks just ran panic-stricken through the woods and across the road begging to be shot is badly mistaken. It was an enjoyable way to hunt and a fine way for a boy to be brought into the company of men and learn how to behave, handle firearms, etc.

The game changed when CB radios entered the picture and the guys with the dogs just turned them loose and then started driving all over the place trying to get ahead of the dogs, even if that meant driving right up to or by a stander when the dogs were getting near. My dad and I combatted this by diving into the woods away from the traffic. This made things a lot tougher since visibility was limited once one got off the road; a deer had to practically come right up to you for you to have a chance to identify, much less shoot, it.

I finally gave it up when the d--n 4 wheelers started making inroads into the woods. Now I "still hunt", in the Southern sense of the term; which is to say, I get up off the ground and wait for a deer to come in range. I guess that would be stand hunting to most people. Dog hunts continue, mostly on timber company lands leased by clubs. I still enjoy the sound of a pack of hounds hot on the trail of a deer, although not if I'm in a good spot at duck or dawn, waiting one out.