So I'm training my new Kai pup Tsuki in tracking and blood tracking. There's not a whole lot of that in Japan to be honest. I've seen blood tracking wounded, or injured wild animals in Europe is the norm, with various breeds used for the process. We don't quite have the hunting culture here yet that says every injured animal needs to be found, or at least all effort needs to be made to do so. I saw last month that in Norway if you hit a wild animal while driving, you are required to call it in to the wildlife management authorities, and they will send someone out, and if necessary call in a tracking team.
Another type of tracking that I've been interested in for awhile is the use of pointing type dogs to find large game, and 'point' them. There are a growing number of hunters in Australia and New Zealand using this method to hunt deer and other large game, and I've discovered that it's also a thing in the Nordics. There are even hunters here in Chiba prefecture that use this method, and it came about through sheer necessity.
By the 1970's wild boar had been driven to extinction in the prefecture, and the last 200 deer were in the Katsuura area, and a protected area was set up for them. Fast forward 30 years, and hunters had brought wild boar back into the prefecture and released them, and the deer have flourished under protection. So we now have large numbers of wild game, but the hunters here have only been hunting birds like 'yamadori' and pheasant, so they have bird dogs. Hunters discovered that some of their bird dogs would point large game they accidentally came across, and preferred that the dogs were more biddable that traditional Nihon Ken hunting dogs. So in the Kyonan area specifically, there are a lot of deer, and a lot of hunters that use Pointers and Setters to hunt them.
In Australia they call them Big Game Pointing Dogs, or Big Game Indicating Dogs, and last month in Norway I actually interviewed a hunter who is successfully running a Shikoku in this style. I will be uploading a post about this here soon! The big game pointing dogs can run the track on leash or off leash, depending on the hunter's preference. Obviously it takes a lot of work to train a dog to hunt under these conditions, but if you can manage it, it is impressive.
The reason why I've been interested in this style of hunting is because I think it may be the future of hunting large game with dogs. Animal Rights based legislation has an agenda, and while their end game is generally the banning of all hunting, the low hanging fruit will be targeted first. One of those things is the type of hunting where dogs make contact with wild animals, biting them, stressing them severely, or killing them. I think these things will eventually be banned, or be legislated much more strictly.
So in pointing style big game hunting, the dog is in very little danger (unlike in a lot of boar hunting for example), the animal being hunted is generally unaware it is being hunted, so it is not stressed, and it will not be injured by the dog. If the shot taken by the hunter is not immediately fatal, he has a tracking dog on hand to find it right away. And finally, the hunter can be extremely selective in what he chooses to harvest. This can be massively useful when one has a specific species/sex tag, and your dog finds something else. Well, just call it off and continue the hunt.
There are some demerits to this style of hunting. It comes with some difficulty, requiring a high level of training, and a pretty decent level of fitness for the hunter. It also may be difficult in certain areas due to distances or terrain, but really all the things I've listed are just inconveniences. I've see the hunters in New Zealand hunting in this style under very heavy rainforest like conditions with low visibility, so that is possible as well. Anyway, the only way to truly test a thing is to do it yourself, so my pointing dog project is underway. And because only training a Kai to do this might not work, or might not be that difficult, I've also got a Pointer pup. Both pups are only 2 weeks apart in age, and I'll be training them to do the exact same things. More on this coming later in another post! Anyway, I've started Tsuki on her first track, a 50m Tanuki track that she did quite well on. She turned back on the track twice in true Kai fashion, realizing it was a very fresh wild animal, but with encouragement she moved forward again, never losing the track.
Comments
Post a Comment