Last fall was my first year bow hunting and I ended up putting an arrow through a nice buck in South Dakota. The problem was I shot it a little far back and hit its liver and maybe got a piece of its lung. Being inexperienced, i started to track the deer a half hour after I shot it. I found lots of blood at the start up until an area where he stopped, blood spilling out of both sides. I think I bumped him from that spot and after that the blood trail was very small and eventually stopped about 700 yards from where I had originally shot him from. I ended up looking for it for about a total of 20 hours. I have a 1.5 year old German short hair pointer that I have been training to hunt pheasants. My questions are has anybody had any luck training dogs to blood trail and if so how do you go about doing it? She has a decent nose on her and is young enough to still train and since it is legal here in South Dakota I thought I would give it a shot, especially since a dog would have been able to help find that deer. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated!
I'm in for tips and tricks. Strongly considering getting a dachshund this year for tracking. I have a friend with a mutt dog and he said it took very little training; the dog was more a of a natural at it.
Doesn't work with all dogs but if you get one that's got a desire to hunt, it really doesn't take much to get them to track a deer. I had three someone dumped, all lab crosses. One of the three was a heck of a tracking dog, the other two I never have tried. The one good one came up missing wouldn't ya know. I had never hunted her but I knew from being around her she was a hunter. I took her out to track a doe that ran about 60 yards into a thicket full of chest deep buck brush. I showed her the POI and blood and worked with her a tad so she knew what I wanted and she did the rest. It was that simple. They need to be trained to heal, and return when called, that's something they should be trained anyway. Everyone likes them trained differently, depends on exactly what you want them to do. Also be careful that you aren't training a dog that it should be running deer year around when it's loose. I never tried it because I really never had much need of a deer tracker but I would imagine the best training you could do would be to kill a deer already have it found and then use it as a training tool for your dog. Training with known variables is much easier in general than just taking a dog out on a cold search not knowing yourself where the deer is at or if it's even dead for certain. Really there's no reason why you couldn't use a piece of deer hide and/or scents. I used to get a dog training tool catalogue that had all sorts of fancy do-dads in it to train dogs to hunt anything you wanted but I don't recall the name of it now.
I haven't trained a dog yet but I would like to. There is some really great info on the subject in this thread. http://forums.bowhunting.com/bowhunting-talk/blood-tracking-help-those-lost-deer-dogs-28334/
Look into the VDD-GNA, all drahthaars do blood tracking during their utility test. We trained dogs with 8 ounces of blood, and used to make 6-8 hundred yard tracks with that much. Once the dogs get the idea you have to let the tracks age 10 or 12hours so the human scent can dissipate and they have to concentrate on the blood. I'm sure there are probably blood trailing clubs too, but the VDD is the only place I know of with a pool of knowledgeable trainers. Sent from my iPhone using Bowhunting.com Forums
The krauts are pretty demanding of their dogs. The drahthaar, Kurtzharr, jagdterrier, and probably 27 breeds I've never heard of are expected to blood trail on command in addition to whatever else they are trained for. Sent from my iPhone using Bowhunting.com Forums
