Groundhog Teeth

Folks in Europe and elsewhere sometimes ask me to compare our quarry to fox. They seem especially curious about groundhog, our bread-and-butter quarry.

How do you compare apples and eggs?

Groundhog are simply different. For the dog, they can be tough to locate in a large sette with soft earth, as they can dig away quite rapidly.

If a larger dog tries to dig to a groundhog in tight pipe, the dog can easily bottle itself front and back with an earth plug behind and an earth plug in front. This does not happen too often, but suffocation can and, occassionally does, kill a dog.

Groundhogs have no necks and cannot be throttled underground and can only rarely be pulled by a dog -- and then only if they are very close to the entrance or you have broken away most of the pipe at the very end of a dig.

A groundhog's bites are mosly chisel-like rips, and they are very good at ripping through lips, and can easily slice up a nose or rip an eye. Again, most injuries are pretty superficial and will granulate on their own, but the injuries from a groundhog are a little different from those a dog might get from a fox.

A fox has canines and they tend to create puncture wounds top and bottom, and relatively light rips, as a general rule. Infection and eye damage are the main worry.

Groundhogs have chisels for teeth, and can remove a kerf of flesh from the face. They have shorter jaws than a fox, but they are more powerful and can crush if they get a dog right. Infection is less of a concern (though it occurs, of course). Eye injuries to a dog are about as common as from a fox -- rare, but a worry despite the shorter jaw.

I consider groundhogs tough for the totality of the package, racoons tough only if and when they want to stand and scrap, and fox third in line, with possum a distant fourth. Other folks would rank them differently (possum would always be fourth), and I would not argue.

Fox are most people's favorite animals because they are so wonderful to look at and because the season is pretty short -- about two months for the heart of it. The deal with groundhogs is that we dig so many of them that they are the animal most likely to get a dog wrecked.  Again, serioous damage to the dog is rare, but it can be serious on rare occassions.

Over here in the United States, the simple truth cannot horse everything you find in the hole and expect to dig weekend after weekend, which is the name of the game. In the States you have to have a dog that works different quarry in different ways. What works for a fox will not work for a groundhog, and what works for a possum will not work for a raccoon. The dog has to know what it's up against and change tactics, and above all it has to know butt from breath.
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