Missouri Deer Tracking

5 months until deer season.

PURE JOY!

About a year ago, this boy and his family came to buy a tracking dog. The little boy burst through the house, straight to the puppy pen and gathered the entire litter.

We love our tracking dogs, our dogs love us, and hunters love it when we find their deer.

These are 3 week old European Wirehaired Dachshund puppies. When they are 4 months old they can recover a deer.

Tracking is fun! Our dogs help hunters recover their deer. We keep deer from going to waste, and make hunters happy.

This is probably the biggest buck that I'll ever recover. Several years ago I was contacted by a hunter in Kansas to track a buck that had been shot that morning with a .308... 300 miles across Missouri and into Kansas!

I arrived about an hour before dark, so I was quickly hurried to areas that the hunter thought the deer might have gone. When darkness fell, the hunter said that it looked like we weren't going to find it, to which I said, "Oh no, I just drove 300 miles, and I'm not leaving without finding this buck.

I started my dog at the hit site, and about 15 minites later I saw a lump on the ground at my feet. The brush was so thick that I could only see a patch of something that had hair. When we drug it into the open, it was still warm and limp. Jaws dropped, because it was the buck of a lifetime!

This is a track that I'll always remember. After a decade of tracking I knew that this buck was recoverable, and if I know that a buck is recoverable, I'm unrelenting.

The hunter shot the buck in the morning and I arrived on my 3rd track of the day late in the afternoon. The hunter told me that the buck had lost lots of blood. I tracked to a bloody bed and not far after that the hunter wanted to call the track. I could have collected my pay, but I'm unrelenting on recoverable deer, so I proded the hunter on.

We came to a couple more beds and the buck was still bleeding, and my dog was hot when the hunter called the track. The next morning the hunter called me and told me that he found the buck 50 yards from where we stopped the track. I wanted that recovery, but was glad that I put the hunter on his buck.

BUCK FEVER.

This buck was shot by a wife, who claimed she had shot her husband's target buck! Imagine her husband's shock, when, after a mile of tracking we revovered this 1.5 year old gut shot buck!

The wife doesn't need more target practice, she just got uncontrolable shakes, as adreniline, and a wild imagination took control. This hunter does not need more time on the range, or to quit hunting. To the contrary, she needs more time in the stand.

This is one reason why we track, and are not critical of the hunter.