Deer-Trailing Dogs I grew up on hounds running foxes and squirrels in the creek bottoms and deer along the rivers. There were coarse-mouthed blue ticks, black and tans, yippy beagles and weird mixes. That was a fun time, especially for a kid and later a teenager. On good days, you could sit against a giant white oak and listen to a chase come boiling up out of the thickets down below. If you were lucky, they’d be chasing a deer, and the deer would hold a line that would carry the chase right past you. And then, if you were really lucky, that deer would be a buck, and you would get a clean 40-yard shot with a 12 gauge load of Double Aught buck shot, 9 pellets per load.
That’s pretty much the play for the first deer I ever killed. It was Friday, Nov. 25, 1966, at about 8:30 in the morning.
My friends got there a little while after that, along with a pickup load of guys I didn’t know who were claiming their dogs were running the deer, and they therefore were entitled to half the meat.
I couldn’t have cared less but my friends’ dad, Clenton LaGrone, arrived and shooed them away. He wasn’t going to let anyone take a kid’s first buck.
As the years passed, I moved on to rifles and tree stands, and Texas moved on from dogs. In the late-1980s, the state banned the use of dogs to chase deer in 35 East Texas counties. Changing times and smaller landholdings, fencing disputes and sometimes drunken silliness left the parks and wildlife commission no choice but to make that change.
Dog guys came from all over the Pineywoods to complain about losing the last rights to hunt deer with dogs. And there was no Faulknerian refinement about their arguments either. Many were drunk and belligerent, even at a 9 a.m. meeting.
I remember their basic argument in these terms: “What am I supposed to do with my dogs? Kill ‘em? I love them dogs more’n I do my wife.”
The commission held firm, even through some rough times that followed. There was a series of mysterious timber and house fires, nails in sand roads and game warden confrontations over in East Texas. Slowly, the use of dogs diminished.
Today it seems illegal dog hunting to chase and move deer around the big woods in East Texas has virtually disappeared to the point that department biologists and wardens have suggested to parks and wildlife commissioners that hunters be allowed to use trained trailing dogs under owner control to help track wounded deer in some of those counties. Read more….