Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Black Bear Handgun Bullets?

Between myself and the guys working the business we had around 30 dogs at any given time. I had the fewest at either 4 or 5. Keeping the same dogs functional for years was a challange to say the least. We all had more then normal "turnover" as dogs come and go over the seasons.

Many guys here with 9-5 jobs that had dogs would literally beg you to use their dogs to keep them tuned up and in shape for the weekends they wanted to hunt with them. Having the dogs to run bears or getting a friend to help with his dogs during the spring damage season was just a phone call away. No self respecting hound hunter would turn down the chance to hunt his dogs during the spring damage season! Even if he could not go himself he would want you to use his dogs!

We also baited the bears to start the dogs from baits. I did not have a good strike dog, because they were so expensive and had similiar mortality to any other dog. Just not worth the expensive risk for me. I'm not sure where you were hunting but here in the state of Washington it was never a real struggle to run a bear every single day, many times we could run and kill two per day.

When we hunted Idaho the dogs would be in a long race and get pretty tired over the weeks we hunted. However in the cascades the race was quite short due to the reprod thickets the bears would just bay on the ground. Getting a bear to tree was less then 50% of the time along the coast and the west side of the cascades in the tree farms. The race there might be an hour or two at most.

There were plenty of times you could walk 100's of yards from laying tree to laying tree never touching the ground. Sometimes 4-6 feet above the ground. The bears would bay up under this stack of 10-12" diameter "pick-up sticks" and fight in one direction facing the dogs without having to run.

I cannot even tell you how much easier it was to hunt in Idaho because the bears would nealry all tree. In western Washington we had hardly any of them tree for weeks at a time.

We also have a general spring and fall season in Idaho and a spring permit season in Washington with a general hunting season in the fall. So this was 4 seasons in two states. The fall season in Washingting was and still is from August first til Sometime in November. Four months of hunting, minus the dear and elk seasons when hound hunting was closed. This 120 days was just during the fall season! During that period we hunted the baits because we could not use the dogs.

One other thing to consider is the rules when hunting in the damage control program. Every bear had to die. We could not trophy hunt. This was not my choice but the policy of the landowners and the F&G to reduce the damage to the tree farms to an acceptable level.

Just for the record we had a lot of 2 bear days, and quite a few 3-4 bear days in the early to mid 80's.

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I answered this within the thread but it's not part of the original post. If you need more then this please PM EMail or start a new thread. I don't want to head this in another direction off topic any further.
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