Recovery Dog Logic

Damon Bungard uses his dog Jaeger to track all kinds of game that hunters may have shot but were not able to recover. He talked with me about the logic behind using tracking dogs to recover game animals that have been wounded or killed but are lost to the hunter.

“We have a lot of laws here where you can't run a deer with dogs legally. Some states obviously still can run mountain lion. You can run bear with special licenses, but there's a lot of red tape here that's educationally being crossed. And that's really where the leash side of it comes into play. Once the dog is on lead and fully under control, he's not randomly spooking game that's not involved. He's not going where he shouldn't go as far as property lines. A lot of states have started looking at the regs and people that have shown interest. And if you want to use recovery dogs like, well, you know, we want this. And when it’s on lead then most people say, Oh, that's a no brainer like that. Why wouldn't you want to use that resource? It's a huge resource to the public hunter. United Blood Trackers does a poll of just their registered members and there's plenty of trackers who aren’t registered members UBT. Last year it was, I think over 4000 animals recovered. You just think of how much meat that is that would've been lost. And this is an incredible resource. So another resource, of UnitedBloodTracker.org is they have a find a tracker function so you can go there, click on your state, click on your zip code, plug it in and trackers near you will pop up.