Hunting with recovery dogs

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 some of the laws and specifics of using recovery dogs during a hunt. “We just haven't placed the same premium on using dogs as part of the big game hunting culture. The biggest organization in the United States is UnitedBloodTrackers.org. If you go to the UnitedBloodTrackers Web site, they have resources. There are state regulations and a map of the USA and you can see all the green states and there's a few still red states where tracking is not allowed. A couple of the big ones that it's not allowed in. There's Iowa and in West Virginia, but there's legislation right now going through to legalize tracking in those states. The other kind of cluster where it's still not legal is the western audience. Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona. There's people there trying to change the regulations. A lot of it has just been ignorance and education. There's a lot of old laws in the hunting regulations regarding dogs that were put in because of something as simple as property lines, private property, a dog trailing game doesn't know where a property line is. He's going to go where he wants to go. In Europe, the way the laws are structured, especially in hunting zones, the land is common. They don't have the same kind of restrictions, uncontrolled and concerns over private land that we do and is the way they culturally have always use the dogs. There's no conflict. We have a lot of laws here where you can't run a deer with dogs legally.