Shed Dogs
Posted By
Bill Winke
at
1/31/2009 12:00:00 AM
Filed under:
articlesshed hunting
Many whitetail addicts are devoted shed antler hunters. July may seem like a strange time to bring up shed antlers, but if you stick with me you will see why this is actually the very best time to discuss the type of antler hunting I’m going to present here. You have likely just spent a month or two looking for antlers. I hope you found a bunch of them, but likely it was tough. Those buggers are tough to find. I bet you have even thought, “There must be a better way.” Maybe you have wondered, “Where do they all go; does the ground swallow them up?”
A friend of mine opened my eyes to a fun way to find 60% more antlers each winter and spring. Allen Currin owns a yellow Labrador retriever named Roxie that sniffs out antlers and then sits down next to them until Allen arrives to pick them up.
EFFECTIVENESS OF SHED ANTLER DOGS
Allen brought Roxie over to my house to stage a demonstration. Being careful not to touch the antlers with my bare hands, I walked all through a CRP grass field and dropped the five antlers at random. In theory at least, the dog wouldn’t be scent-trailing me nor would she be homing in on human odor on the antlers. We started on the downwind edge of the field and within 30 minutes Roxie had found all five antlers despite the long grass that made it impossible to see the antlers and difficult to smell them.
During the spring of 2005, Roxie and Allen found 165 antlers. Allen found 100 of them and Roxie found the rest. “I wouldn’t have found those antlers without her,” Allen stated. “They were in spots where I couldn’t see them. She increased the number of antlers I found by 65%. To me, that’s a big deal.”
It is no secret that bucks tend to drop their antlers in grassy areas like field edges, sloughs, picked cornfields and CRP fields. They are often very hard to find in such places. Allen told me that he finds a lot of them at fence crossings, as well. These are all areas where visibility is tough and where a dog that finds antlers by scent is especially valuable.
HOW WELL DOGS CAN SMELL
Tracy Bowling trained Roxie. He runs Ventosa Kennel in North Carolina where he trains a few shed antler dogs each year as a sideline to his regular job spent training dogs for law enforcement.
“We don’t know exactly what a dog can smell,” Tracy said. “They can detect scents at levels that are too small for us to measure. Drug smugglers are constantly trying to find things they can wrap their stash in to keep dogs from smelling it. They will even shrink-wrap it, then wrap that package in a layer of rags soaked in diesel fuel and then shrink-wrap again. Yet within a short time, the dog can still pick up the odor of the drugs in the center of the package. They have an amazing ability to separate the signature odor that they are trained to detect from a wide range of very strong odors intended to confuse or cover up those odors. These abilities remain a mystery to everyone who has studied dogs.
“It is truly amazing. For example, we train a lot of tracking dogs for law enforcement; they’re trained to track people. These dogs have the ability to smell ground disturbance odors (freshly turned earth, crushed grass, broken twigs, overturned leaves, etc.) much longer than they can smell human scent. When we hear a story of a dog cold trailing a person several days or even weeks later, you can be sure the dog was trailing that person on ground disturbance odors not human scent.”
WHAT THIS TEACHES US ABOUT DEER
Experts agree that it is likely that deer have similar scenting ability to dogs. Therefore, it is likely that a deer can also trail a person across bare dirt using only ground disturbance odors. Since your feet are much larger than the feet of woodland animals, the large degree of ground disturbance that you create will likely raise a red flag to wary deer.
This could also explain why I have seen deer pay less attention to ground scent in areas with cattle than in areas without them. The cattle are constantly disturbing the ground at a huge level so the deer don’t notice a little disturbance from a human foot.
I remember Myles Keller one time told me that he made a set of stilt-like sandals that he strapped onto his boots to sneak into a certain area to hunt a certain buck that kept busting him. It was the only way to keep that buck from smelling where he walked. I can’t remember how that story turned out, but I’m guessing it worked otherwise he probably wouldn’t have been telling me about it.
CONCLUSION
Properly trained shed antler dogs are effective and a joy to watch. If you are considering one, you need to start now. The process of locating or training such a dog will take time. Not only will these animals help you find antlers, they are also wonderful companions in the woods.
Tip of the month: In researching this piece, I studied many different sources and the prevailing breed of choice for shed antler hunting is the Labrador. You can have the dog professionally trained by someone like Tracy Bowling or you can attempt to train it yourself. There is quite a bit of information available online if you do a search under “shed antler dog training”.
