Gorring's Raccoons

A repost from January 2006

The Monterey Herald reports on Germany's "Unwanted Raccoon Harvest":

California has had its revenge on Germany, the source of wild boars that were stocked to provide game for hunters and have since overrun the state, plowing up fields, gobbling plants and animals, and endangering endangered species.

Germany has raccoons. Lots of them, according to the Times of London. Some studies put the estimate at a million.

Times reporter Roger Boyes reported last week that "Vineyard owners across Germany are hiring bounty hunters to kill furry animals with a taste for grapes.

"Hunters are being hired to prevent a plague of raccoons with Nazi-era ancestry from munching their way through the German wine harvest."

The German wine-growing region of Kassel has become "the raccoon capital of Europe ever since Baron Sittich Von Berlerpsch released two of the animals into the wild in February 1934.

"The move was encouraged by Hermann Goering," he wrote, "the Nazi leader who, apart from being the head of Hitler's air force, was the chief forester of the Third Reich."

The first raccoons were brought from North America in the 19th century, Boyes reported, and their population grew by leaps and bounds when an Allied bomb hit a raccoon farm in 1945, scattering the animals.

Measurement Informs, Exaggeration Deforms

Because I have measured and weighed a lot of American terrier quarry over the years, I am not swayed in the slightest by the opinions of show ring matrons who have never cut five feet into a den pipe, nor do I place much value on the opinions of "one and done experts" or those who dig on their dogs only once or twice a year.

Similarly, I do not pay too much attention to those who barn hunt and shoot 20 raccoons in a day. Each to his own, I suppose, but by definition true terrier work involves moving earth and rock. I have done a lot of that over the years, and 20 raccoons was never part of the equation. Shooting 20 raccoons in a barn or silo is closer to shooting fish in a barrel than it is to terrier work. I am not trying to be critical, but I am trying to draw a distinction. True terrier work, by definition, involves dirt and a shovel.

As for those Americans who breed dogs for fantasy hunts in England, Scotland and Wales, I will leave them to their fantasy digging. I live in a reality-based world, and I do my digging on real quarry in real soil within 100 miles of my house. Terrier work is, by definition, not fantasy work. It looks suspiciously like digging on real dogs in real earth in the country in which you actually live.

As to "the standard" for any breed of working terrier, it was never written by a human, but always by the quarry being pursued. Because my terriers hunt, and because I value success in the field, I want a small terrier with a chest of around 14 inches or less -- the chest size of a red fox, adult groundhog or raccoon.

If you really want to understand what is needed in a working terrier, invest in a $5 fish scale from K-Mart, and a simple cloth tape measure available from any crafts store. Measure the chest size and weigh the quarry you are actually digging on in your area.

Measurement of quarry informs about the dogs, while exaggeration and fantasy is what deforms and results in the bully-headed, big-chested non-working dogs we find in the Kennel Club ring.

Before scales and tape measures.
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Scales Stop Exaggeration

Raccoons are often claimed to be giants, but a trapper that has put away quite a lot of fox and raccoon says:

"Lots of people say they have caught 40+ pound coons. Well I want to see a picture of this coon weighed on a accurate scale! I've caught hundreds upon hundreds of coons and have yet to see one top 35 pounds."

This is not to say that very large raccoons have not been documented.

According to "Raccoons: A Natural History," by Samuel I. Zeveloff, the average weight for an adult raccoon is 8 to 20 pounds, but occasionally a very old, very well fed boar raccoon will top 30 pounds.

The heaviest raccoon ever recorded was a monster Wisconsin raccoon that weighed an amazing 62 pounds and 6 ounces! Zeveloff also notes an old and quite rotund Texas raccoon that tipped the scales at 56 pounds.

Another odd bit from the same book: a raccoon holding onto the inside of a tree once supported a 200-pound man hanging from its tail.

• Related Post:
  ** Measurement Informs, Exaggeration Deforms

German Raccoon-Dog, Badger and Raccoon Hunting

Frank, badger and dachshunds.

Frank Joisten, from Germany, sent in some terrific pictures of his dachshunds working everything from badger and raccoon-dog (Tankuki) to American raccoon and fox. One of my favorite pictures is below, showing not only his take this eventful day, but also some very well-disciplined dogs!


Dog, dog, badger, dog, badger, dog, dog.


Frank lives in the northeast corner of Germany, near the Polish border, and is blessed with both badger and red fox, but also raccoon-dog, which were imported to the Ukraine from Korea and Japan, and which have now migrated into Finland, Poland and parts of Germany.


An amazing take of raccoon-dog!



American raccoon have also been imported to Germany.

Frank also has some American raccoon in his area -- a legacy of animals brought to Germany in the 1930s in the hope of expanding the domestic fur industry.



Digging to raccoon-dog (aka Tanuki)

Frank reports that his dachshunds have a chest of 35 cm (13.78 inches). The Germans are very precise about chest measurements, as they understand that for a dog to be a "gebrauchshund" (i.e. a "useful" hunting dog), it cannot be too big to fit into a tight den, nor can it be so nose-dead as to be unable to find in the field. Along with size and nose and gameness, a German working dachshund has to show that it is also not gun shy.

For those interested in the various chest size standards for the teckel or hunting dachshund, see >> http://www.taksid.ee/index.php/en/bstandard  As the FCI standard makes clear, the ideal chest size of a the largest working dachshund is just under 14 inches in circumference (35 cm). This 14 inch chest measurement is the same size cited as ideal for working terriers by Barry Jones in the UK (see http://www.terrierman.com/barryjones.htm and Ken James in the U.S. (see http://www.terrierman.com/hunting.htm ), and is about the size of the average red fox chest found the world over (see http://www.terrierman.com/foxsize.htm).

For those interested in working dachshunds in North America, see: http://www.teckelclub.org/hunting-with-dachs.htm



One of the great things about terrier work all over the world is that while it is a bit different all over, it is also quite a bit the same. The picture, above, could have been taken in the U.S., Germany, Finland, England, Canada or France -- the hunched over walk of a man with a locator box is the same all over!

Repost from 2006.

A Season That Never Ends

For those loading tools and dogs early in the morning and driving out over fog-shrouded or even snow-covered fields, pause for a moment to reflect on how very short the fox season really is -- a few weeks really.

Short fox seasons are the same all over. In warm weather (anything over 30 degrees) the fox will generally choose to lay out above ground rather than find refuge in a den. An exception is if a fox is being chased, but who has 200 horses and 50 hounds to do that with? And what kind of hunting is that -- more like a traveling circus with a large number of personality disorders in attendance.

If all we had to hunt in the U.S. was red fox, terrier work would not account for too much.

We are extremely lucky, here in the Eastern U.S. and Midwest, to be able to legally hunt with terriers all year long and to be welcomed by farmers anxious to get rid of nuisance groundhogs, raccoons and possums.

We are fortunate to be free of the social and class-conscious baggage that surrounds working terriers in the UK, and we are blessed not only with a wide array of suitable quarry, but with rapidly rising and record-density populations of quarry as well.

No country in the world is better for terrier work than the U.S., and no place in the U.S. has more opportunities to work terriers than the Eastern U.S. and MidWest.



To read more on the geography of American working terriers >> click here.
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Raccoons, Rabies & Decapitation

Raccoon head being tested for rabies in Richmond, Virginia.   Original post from 2005.
 

The definitive test for rabies in a wild animal is done by decapitation, and there is even a tool made for the job, as unbelievable as that sounds. The tool is called the "decapitation guillotine" and it looks just like it sounds. The really hard-to-believe part is that it is made by an outfit called --wait for it -- "Animal Care." A guillotine! The sales pitch is as follows:

"When it is necessary to remove the head of a rabies-suspect cadaver, our decapitation Guillotine does the job safely, cleanly, and easily. Features a screw-type mechanism that slowly lowers a cutting blade. Opening is 10"Wx14"H. Heavy steel construction then powder-coated. This is the only guillotine we know of that assures complete operator safety and gets the job done right."

One of the things animal control officers are warned about rabid raccoons is that "Regardless of who does the shooting, it is critical NOT TO SHOOT THE ANIMAL IN THE HEAD, as the rabies virus is concentrated in the brain tissue."

Uh, OK, but if the damn thing is charging can we shoot it in the head anyway?

If you are ever bitten by a raccoon, fox, skunk or any other wild animal, the first thing to do is thoroughly wash the wound or area of exposure with soap and water. This is one of the most effective methods to decrease the chance of infection.

Some people -- animal control officers and trappers, mostly -- get a preventive rabies vaccination. This vaccination -- called pre-exposure prophylaxis -- involves three injections over 3 or 4 weeks. A booster shot every 2 years maintains the vaccination's effectiveness, but it does not prevent you from having to get more shots if you are actually bitten -- it's just reduces the number of shots required from five to three.  A full panel of 5 shots costs between $1,500 and $2,000, with the shot being given over a one-month period.

Each year, an estimated 40,000 people in the United States receive treatment for suspected rabies exposure.
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Why Anti-Hunt Vegans Should Get Sterilized

A repost from December of 2004.

Most animal rights activists do not spend much time thinking about how animals die in the woods.

Here are the options: starvation, disease, poison, ripped apart while living by a predator, and vehicle impact.

The harsh reality of the wild is that no wild animal dies quickly without human help.

In the wild animals starve due to food shortages, or they die with broken bones in ditches and pipes, or they expire curled up under bushes, their insides riddled by fever, parasites and sickness.

Cars already kill far more fox than all the mounted hunts, lurchers, and terriers combined, yet there are no major national campaigns to fund millions of wide and brushy culverts for fox to use while traversing from stream to field.

The fox "saved" from the hunt will likely die from a vehicle impact.

By the same token, the people that pale at the idea of fox hunting, seem to have no compunction about ripping up ocean ocean bottoms in order to put a few more flounder and shrimp on their already groaning plates.

"I'm a vegetarian" they say, "except for fish."

These are the folks who own free-roaming cats and think nothing of the carnage these animals inflict on baby birds, rabbits, and chipmunks.

These are the folks who give to organizations that run massive direct mail campaigns decrying hunting, oblivious to the fact that the bright-white paper used in all those mailings is derived from clearcut old-growth forests being chainsawn with abandon.

You really want to help nature?

Great!

Here's how to do that: Get yourself sterilized.

Nothing you can do will do more to save the enviroment this generation, and for a hundred years to come. Nothing you will ever do will prevent more misery to animals.

Nothing.

Raccoon Nation

Watch Raccoon Nation on PBS. See more from Nature.

I saw this last night (very good!) and Paul H. sent me a link (thank you!).

I had no idea Japan had an American raccoon population as well as a Tanuki population.  Germany has an American raccoon population too, of course, as I have noted in the past. 
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The Nonsense of "Pull Dogs"

In The Working Jack Russell Terrier Eddie Chapman writes:

"Something that makes my blood boil is when I hear terrier men talk about dogs they call Caesar dogs. They will show you a Russell type that has been bred too big and say, 'I use him as a Caesar dog'. If I ask what a Caesar dog is, they say it is a dog which will hold the badger, he won't let go,' they say. I have never heard such rubbish in my life. Besides being unnecessary, it is invariably cruel to the dog and more often than not he will be badly bitten for his pains. Besides that, it is unnecessarily cruel to the badger and the sort of behavior that got badger digging banned. I have tried to explain how to remove badgers from a sett without injury to dog or badger. There is nothing clever about getting a hard dog smashed up by a badger. On the contrary, it shows ignorance and a lack of responsibility and feeling. Bravery in a terrier should never be exploited."

I found it quite refreshing to read this passage, as I have often noted that there is little reason to own a "pull dog" if you actually know how to handle things at the end of a dig. The use of "pull dogs" damages dogs and quarry alike and is wasteful as it often necessitates time out of the field and expensive veterinary work.

In the U.S., the use of pull dogs (what Chapman and some others call "Caesar" dogs) is due to the prevalence of too many over-large terriers that cannot go to ground in a real earth. To say you have a "good pull dog," is to say you do not have a dog capable of actually going to ground.

If you have followed the Kennel Club dictates, and embraced a 14 inch tall dog with a 17" or 18" chest (or larger!), you are forced to rationalize a job for it. No matter that it is a stupid job forged in pain. Most people would rather see their dog injured than swallow their pride and admit they have drunk the Koolaid offered up by the Kennel Club know-nothings who think a fox den is as big around as a go-to-ground tunnel.

Another factor is that many people simply have no idea of how to handle quarry and so use the dog to to do the job. Having gotten to the end of a dig, they do not know how to get the animal out of the pipe, nor do they know how to dispatch it. In such a situation, the use of a "pull dog" is ignorance in motion.

The simplest way for a novice to handle quarry is with a snare. You can make your own for about $5, or else buy a pig snare from a feedstore.

Groundhogs can also be tailed out alive -- it is not hard if the groundhog's tail is presented, as it so often is. If very much of the pipe is remaining, however, you may find yourself in a tug-of-war with the groundhog who can jamb up inside a pipe so tightly that even a large man can have difficulty pulling one free.

Always use a snare for raccoons -- they can twist all the way around on their short fat bodies. They can grab you with their hands and have crushing bites. Rabies is not uncommon in raccoons, especially on the East Coast.

If you have entangled a fox in a net, be carefully when extricating the fox. The best advice is to pin the animal to the ground under your boot while removing the net. Work the net off the fox in sections, and then release it to hunt another day.
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Predator Fear, Alone, Results in Fewer Birds

Fear of meso-predators, and fear alone, results in fewer successful clutches according to a paper by Liana Zanette entitled "Perceived Predation Risk Reduces the Number of Offspring Songbirds Produce per Year" that appears in the December 8th edition of Science. 
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Raccoon Coat

Some people are nuts. 

This woman duct-taped a bunch of food to her body in order to attract raccoons.  No, I am not making this up. 

Oh, and did I mention that raccoon carry rabies?  Yep.  There's a lot of that with raccoons.
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How to Train a Scent Hound

Gone to Earth by Thomas Woodward.

Over at Field & Stream's excellent Field Notes blog, Chad Love put up a post about South Carolina "fox pens" which are large multi-acre enclosures where fox and coyote are released in order to (supposedly) train hounds.

Chad is a little uneasy about fox pens, but he readily admits he is not a houndsman, and he wonders where to draw the line on using live critters for training purposes.

Where I’m stuck is this: Is it inherently more "cruel" to use live coyotes to train a coyote dog than it is to use live birds to train bird dogs? Rabbits for beagles? Coons for coon hounds? Where do you draw the line?

There was some palaver from people who do not hunt fox or coyotes with dogs, and who were trying to fit the fox pen question into some sort of "us versus them" hunters-versus-animal-rights-lunatics frame.

Then I weighed in, noting that while I hunted fox with dogs:

Surely we can say no to canned hunts of a predator in a fenced enclosure? Surely American sportsmen have not come down to this.

Has it ever been easier to hunt in the last 100 years? We have better cars and trucks, more free time, better weapons, and more game than our fathers, grandfathers or great grandfathers did. More public lands too, thanks to Pittman- Robertson.

And yet we still have folks who think we need PENS to "teach" a hound to hunt? We do not! They do not use such nonsense in the crowded U.K. or in France or anywhere else in the world where they hunt with hounds, and that includes most of America. And NO we do not need them here in Virginia, North Carolina or South Carolina.

Of course there was a bit more palaver.

Some folks did not seem to know that most of these "training" facilities operate as canned hunts at least some of the time.

Some folks too quickly embraced the notion that "a-pigeon is-a-rabbit-is-a-fox-is-a-coyote," seemingly unaware that this is the same "a chicken-is-a-pig-is-a-dog-is-a-child" line warmly embraced by Ingrid Newkirk of PeTA.

Mostly, however, folks seemed flummoxed. If you did not have a fox or a coyote in a pen, how would you train a dog?

And then it occurred to me: No one reading this fox pen story actually knew how to train a scent hound! They think this is how it is done.

No problem. I do know how to train a scent hound. And this is NOT how it's done. So let me set it right.

To start with, let me point out that working terriers operate as diminutive scent hounds.

In fact, the work of a terrier is indistinguishable in the field from that of a dachshund (a true scent hound).

Both dogs find their quarry by sniffing the air and the ground until they happen to cut across a "hot" trail leading to a hot hole.

Most folks who work terriers find they do not have to do too much to actually get their dogs operational.

The same is true for most scent hound hunters. Scent is a powerful stimulus for dogs, and they will naturally follow a "sweet" scent out of curiosity, or some small hope of food, sex, or excitement.

So how do you amplify and channel this natural trait?

For starters, get a bottle of fox, raccoon or coyote pee from a mail-order vendor like Bill Boatman Supply or Mark Junes' Lures & Trapping Supplies. Most hunting stores also carry fox, raccoon and coyote pee -- ask a salesman.

Next you need to make a drag out of an 18" inch square piece of heavy cloth or leather chamois (available at any auto-supply store).

Tie a 15-foot piece of cord to your scent drag, and slide a small stack of metal washers or fishing weights down the cord so the drag now has a small amount of weight attached to it.

Now load some of your store-bought critter pee into a cheap spray bottle, being sure not to get any on your hands.

Finally, obtain a package of hot dogs.

Got it all?

Good. Now we are almost ready to go train the dog!

Before we do that, however we want to get your dog well-motivated, and the secret here is to not feed the dog for a full 24 hours. You want that dog sharp! A hungry dog is a brilliant dog.

Now load everything into your truck or car and go out to a farm area where a grassy field or meadows borders a forest.

Leave your dog crated up in the car or truck while you walk down the edge. You should have the leather drag with you, along with the hot dogs, and the spray bottle with the critter pee in it.

About 200 feet from the vehicle, stop and spray the leather drag with critter pee, coating it well, but not getting any on yourself.

Now drop the drag in the middle of the trail (you can spritz the trail itself if you want) and walk perpendicular to the edge habitat, heading up into the grassy field.

As much as possible, you want to make an obvious trail in the grass, dragging the pee-scented leather or cloth behind you.

At the end of a straight 30-foot drag, stop and leave half a hot dog right in the middle, where it is quite clearly visible.

Pick up the drag and walk back the way you came to the exact spot where you took off perpendicular to the path.

From this spot, continue down the edge another 150 feet and then drop the drag and cut across the trail again, this time going 40 feet going into the woods side, dragging the pee-scented leather or cloth behind you as before.

Scuff logs and break a little brush as you go. An easily visible trail with a lot of scent is not a bad thing to have early on in the training process.

At the end of this straight 40-foot drag, leave the other half of the hot dog in plain site.

Continue down this math, making scent trails this way until you have run out of hot dogs, each time making the distance to the hot dog a little longer, curving the trail, and perhaps making the trail a little less obvious.

Now take the dog out on a leash and walk down the path you started. You can slow down a little at the spot where the first "trail" goes off into the grass. Give the dog a chance to succeed, but do not shove the dog or make suggestions. Be calm and mellow. The scent is supposed to do the work, not you.

Once the dog starts down the path (you will wait at this spot until it does), quietly encourage the dog. When the hot dog has been found, and after it has been gobbled up, make a big happy production out of it with a little play and a scratch behind the ears. Good dog!

Now let's see if we can do that again another 150 feet down the hedge.

Repeat this process a dozen times an outing over the next few weeks, extending the trail, curving the trail and even cutting off at sharp angles.

Instead of a hot dog, you can also use a favorite toy, such as a ball, or even a piece of fur.

In only a few outings, your dog will quickly "get it." The smell of a critter means hot dogs and play! Critter smells are FUN to follow.

Now you have a dog that follows scent trails. Be aware, however, that your dog may not be too discerning and may end up following any type of animal scent they find in the woods. In fact that is not a problem for a working terrier, and most fox hounds are not trained beyond this point either. But they can be.

To do that you need to get the dog to follow fox and never follow raccoon. The instruction here is simple: one type of smell is "good" and the other type of smell is "bad".

How do you do that?

With several kinds of pee. After your dog is following fox pee well, start making some "false trails" with raccon pee. Make sure your dog never finds food when it follows a raccoon scent, but always finds food at the end of a fox scent.

Do that often enough, and your dog may stop responding to raccoon scent at all, choosing instead to only follow fox. This is what is called "extinguishing" a behavior in operant conditioning.

A note of caution here, however. Is a few rounds of extinguishing going to stop a dog from having all interest in the smell of raccoons?

No, probably not.

The reason for this is that animal scent reaches deep into the hidden recesses of the canine brain. Scent is one of the most powerful of canine stimuli.

Because scents are such a powerful stimulus for a dog, there is a very real chance that even if there is no known "payoff" at the end, your dog will still want to follow a raccoon scent at least some of the time. If your dog does that often enough, he or she will eventually find a live raccoon at the other end of the trail, and a live raccoon is a massive "jackpot" reward for any dog. It is the very definition of FUN on four legs. Big problem.

So what can you do, right at the start, to make sure your dog never follows raccoon scent?

The answer is that you get the dog to associate raccoon smell with a negative consequence -- a hard "whoa" on a check cord, or a small tap on an e-collar.

If either correction is used on a dog that has previously learned that raccoon scent never means food at the end of the trail, the dog is very likely to stay on the straight and narrow rather quickly, and you will end up with a dedicated fox hound.

Now, are you looking for a simple summary of what I have presented here?

If so, the good news is that the 2010 Bill Boatman catalogue has a nice short training summary, which I have clipped out just for you. Enjoy!

Of course, none of this will stop the lazy and incompetent from wanting their fox pens. These are the guys with one or two dogs, who have no horse, and who have no access to land because they have never gone out and gone door to door at farms.

They have not trained their dogs at all -- they keep them in a kennel behind the house and pretty much ignore them 50 weeks out of the year.

In short these folks are just like the pay-and-shoot bird gunners who take their shotgun and barely trained birds dog out to some place where a fellow releases a few chickens pheasant out into a field to be blasted by the pay-to-shoot guy an hour or two later. We're hunting now! Look at my excellent bird dog.

Of course this is how they hunt birds in England, isn't it? If you are going to import a non-native tropical bird to hunt, like a pheasant, then you are going to have to stock them. You cannot release them into the wild to thrive on their own, any more than you can let a chicken "return to the wild".

But a fox? No, not even in England would they think to put a fox in a big pen with a hound and call it hunting. Or training. Or anything but a fat slob, without the proper tools, trying to do a job on the cheap that he should not have started to begin with.


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Raccoon Tracks

Lots of nice tracks coming down a muddy creek wash headed to the main river. Of course, walking on this stuff today was a bit like skating on oil!
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The Mummified Raccoon Hunting Dog

This post is recycled from June 2005.

Back in January I recounted the story of my dog, Mountain, climbing up inside a standing hollow tree (picture above) chasing after the scent of a raccoon.

Now comes the story of another dog that did the same thing -- and did not live to hunt again (though it did achieve a bizarre kind of immortality).

This story begins along the Cleburne-Haralson County line between Georgia and Alabama sometime in the 1960s. It seems a raccoon-hunting dog, accompanying its owner on a hunt, ran off and followed the critter up into a hollow chestnut oak tree.

The hound got stuck inside the tree and died. Rather than decaying as it would if buried underground, the dog simply dried out inside its natural wood "chimney". The rotting scent of the dead dog went up the "flue" of the trunk, and so predators and insects never got wind of the dog. Nor did the corpse get rained on.

Excellent ventillation inside the trunk eventually left the dog desicated (perhaps "freeze dried" during the winter) and mummified.





Sometime in the 1980s, loggers cut down the tree with the dog still inside it. The tree was actually loaded on to the logging truck before the loggers looked up into the hollow and saw the mummified dog inside.

Rather than send the tree and mummified dog off to the sawmill, the loggers donated the dog and its tree coffin to the Southern Forest World Museum in Waycross, Georgia, where it can be seen to this day.

The dog has been x-rayed and is believed to have been about four years old when it died.

The Southern Forest World Museum is located at 1440 N. Augusta Ave. in Waycross, Georgia, and is open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The "mummy dog" is their chief attraction, from what I gather.

The dog, by the way, has been named "Stuckie" by its fans.

Only in America.

Fox and Raccoon in the Yard Last Night

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Gentle on Dogs and Quarry

If you work your dogs regularly, you learn to value both the dogs and the quarry.

A smart digger learns to slip a spade between the dog and the quarry if it is at a stop end -- especially if it is a raccoon or a fox that cannot dig away. Why let the dog get injured when it has done its job, which is to locate, bolt, or bottle the animal in a stop end? The dog is valuable, and so too is the quarry.

Any fool can terminate quarry. There is no skill in killing. If it must be done (it is often a requirement for farm permissions when it comes to groundhogs), it should be done quickly with a gun or blow to the head.

Better yet is to let the animal go, especially if it is a fox or raccoon. If you hunt every weekend, it is too easy to bleed a farm white by killing off all the fox and raccoon in a matter of weeks.

If you must have a fox or raccoon on the mantle, buy a finished taxidermy piece -- it will be no more expensive, and you are guaranteed a good mount of a large specimen in prime coat.

Best of all, let your trophy be a picture. A shot down the hole is proof and memory enough of a dog that has done its job.

For those that prefer a picture of the complete animal in the full light of day, make a light-weight pole snare and learn how to use it. The design at the link is my own invention, and it works like new money.

In the picture at top, the snare is set, with the digging bar placed vertically in the pipe to slow the fox down a bit and steer it into the snare.

A fox or raccoon can be snared around the neck, but a groundhog has no neck, and so at least one leg has to pass all the way through the loop before it is pulled tight. And, for the record, the little fellow at right was released unharmed.

. . . . .

This post is recycled from this blog circa Jan, 2005. And yes, I am still using the same snare and the same bar!

Digging on the Dogs

Yesterday was a nice day in the field with perfect weather, and three kinds of quarry dug to -- raccoon, groundhog and possum.



Mountain located a raccoon in a dirt den underneath a massive brush pile. I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say I managed to burrow down into the brush pile and sink a bore hole between mountain and the raccoon. I then twisted the post hole diggers so they blocked Mountain from reaching the raccoon, and she got the idea and finally came out. Good thing too, as there was no digging her out, and she was not coming off that raccoon any other way!

I leashed up Mountain and we drove to another farm a short way up the road, where we quickly located a groundhog and dispatched it at the farm manager's request.



I estimate I have taken 200 groundhog off of this particular farm, and there are not many left, though the farm manager says he has lost a few turkeys to a coyote, and the farm across the road took an enormous coyote last month -- the largest in the County so far.



The dogs checked a few more holes, and Mountain located a pretty tough-acting possum, which I pulled before Mountain decided to teach it respect. Possums are pretty harmless creatures, and though Dave the farm manager has chickens this fellow was toward the back of the farm, so I released him with nothing more than a stern warning.


This possum was released unharmed.

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Largest Raccoons

A young raccoon exits a dirt den.

According to "Raccoons: A Natural History," by Samuel I. Zeveloff, the average weight for an adult raccoon is 8 to 20 pounds, but occasionally a very old, very well fed boar raccoon will top 30 pounds.

Dirt-dwelling raccoons rarely go over 15 pounds because a larger animal cannot fit down a groundhog hole. Raccoons cannot dig their own dens and have to take what they can find. Appropriately sized dirt holes of any kind are so rare in the American West that raccoons did not exist there at all until the 1950s when barns and other out structures provided denning habitat.

The heaviest raccoon ever recorded was a monster Wisconsin raccoon that weighed an amazing 62 pounds and 6 ounces! Zeveloff also notes an old and quite rotund Texas raccoon that tipped the scales at 56 pounds.
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Lie Down With Dogs, Get Up With Fleas

 

Some 17 months ago, I wrote a piece entitled Honey Pots and Trolls in the Land of Eire in which I noted that some gas bag in Ireland had gotten on the boards to bash a piece I had written two years earlier about the old Irish "strong dog" tests and the potted histories that you commonly find for all Kennel Club dogs, including the Glen of Imaal terrier. 

This guy wanted to talk about badgers, and badger-bating trials, and what great badger dogs they had in Ireland. 

Eh? I was a bit confused, as this fellow seemed detached from any logical mooring. 

He had, of course, not so much as dropped me a line. 

I suspected he did not want to provide a real name and a real email address. 

As I wrote at the time:

A two-year old post? Did someone just get their first dog, or did they just get their first computer? No mind. Now here's the funny thing about this kerfuffle -- the "strong dog" tests once given by the Irish Kennel Club have not been done since 1968! And when they were given, they weren't much of a test of a working dog were they? The Teastas Mor lasted for all of 5-minutes. Five minutes? Five minutes. In this Kennel Club test the dog was not required to find the quarry at all, and if the terrier bayed it was summarily disqualified. Since the Kennel Club rules for this "test" were knitted up prior to the invention of locator collars, one has to wonder how the dog was supposed to be found underground. Telepathy? Dowsing rod? But of course the dog did not need to be located, did it? The Teastas Mor was nothing more than a timed badger-baiting trial in a short artificial earth made to look "natural."

So what was this poster on about, I wondered? 

I had an idea.

Well, it could be a simple matter of another Internet Troll on the boards. Such people are common enough, and I have written about them before. But perhaps in this case it is something else. Think about it -- a person with an anonymous name shows up less than a year ago on a working terrier board, and now he wants to talk about badger baiting in a country where that practice is quite illegal? Hmmmm. Sounds like a honey pot operation to me. What's a honey pot? A honey pot is an old trick. You put down bait (preferably under cover of dark) and then stand back and shoot anything that comes in to feed on it. I have written before about how these Internet bulletin boards might be a problem in this regard, and more people should probably be aware of how these honey pot schemes work if they want to stand clear of real trouble themselves, especially in the U.K. In the old days, law enforcement "honey pots" were store-front fencing operations manned by the police, or a buy-and-bust drug corners where undercover cops replaced the local dealers which had been rounded up a half hour before. Nowdays, thanks to the Internet, cops never have to leave their chair to make a bust -- they just go online to find the folks they want to arrest. Whether they are looking for wildlife poachers or illegal aliens, terrorists or pedophiles, neo-Nazis or stolen property, the Internet is the new hunting ground for law enforcement. Are wildlife officials and animal rights lunatics using the Internet this way? Believe it. It has been tried on me (though I do nothing illegal with my dogs), and it has been tried on others. Right now the Roller Pigeon community is in a bit of a pinch and a bulletin board had to be closed down for a week so that it could be scrubbed of all mention of hawk and falcon killing. Falconers have similarly been nailed for illegal bird sales overseas. Heads up and fair warning. Those in the U.K. who ignore this caution can go to page 30 of the June issue of Earth Dog-Running Dog magazine to find the telephone number of the Hunting Lawyer they may soon need. Those who want to see what the working terriers of Ireland actually look like, however, can go to page 29 of that same magazine. A little irony there, eh?

Well, of course, it turned out I was as right as rain. 

Just six weeks later, a major bust went down in Ireland -- a fact I noted in a post entitled As Predicted: Fools Get Stung at Irish Honey Pot. And behind this bust was some bald-headed poseur showing up at the dog shows, and even trading dogs.  

Of course, anyone with a brain and a sense of smell could have sensed this was coming. 

You did not need to be a dyed-in-the-wool backwoodsman to see the sign. As I wrote:

The spoor was obvious to me, and so too was the scent. When you see such things, just sit down and keep quiet -- the game will reveal itself in time. The funny thing is that genuine digging folks know the score, and have nothing to fear. We aren't going out to bait animals, we are going out to hunt. And we sure as hell aren't using turnspit dogs or fighting dogs to get the job done, are we? We are using terriers, yes, but the terriers used in Ireland to hunt are the same as those used all over -- Jack Russells, Patterdales, Fells and (perhaps) a few Borders. There is no shame or artifice in the world of true working terriers who are being worked by folks who actually know what they are doing. And the job being done is not complex, is it? It's to locate and terminate the quarry, as quickly and painlessly as possible, and to shepherd the safety of the terrier so it can be used again next week.

So what's the latest news? 

Well, it comes to me via way of an email which directed me back to the same before-mentioned bulletin-board where the folks there are all atwitter again because there have been more raids in Ireland. More are supposedly in the works for "known blood sports enthusiasts in Ireland, and as far afield as France and the USA." 

Eh? Come again? 

I am no expert on French law, but I am quit certain that hunting badger is legal in France, and I know for a fact that it is legal in most of the U.S.A. where badger are actually found. 

So there will no arrests, as no laws have been broken -- that is just fanciful bunk cocked up by an ignorant press corps trying to sensationalize things as much as possible. 

As for "baiting," I know no one who does that. Not a one. 

But then, I do not claim to know everyone lurking on the margins of the world of working terriers, even in this country. 

I have noted in the past that there are a few wanna-be pit-dog fighters about, but I will have nothing to do with them, and neither will anyone else with an ounce of brain or a real interest in working terriers. 

These knuckle-draggers are to true working terriers what jack-lighting deer poachers are to real hunters -- an outrage and an embarrassment. 

That said, I have always suspected that most of these loud mouths are nothing more than wannabe tough-guys who do not hunt very much, and who simply talk big to get attention. 

I have written about these fools and fantasy diggers before, and I have noted that their rich fantasy life is every bit as detrimental to real terrier work as the nonsense spouted by Kennel Club matrons.

Does fantasy do any real harm? Generally, no, but at times yes. The fantasy digger who thinks a go-to-ground tunnel is the size of a real den pipe is spreading a lie forged in ignorance that allows the "big wink" of over-large dogs to continue unabated. The preening pretender who prattles on about the glories of brain-dead "hard dogs" in order to compensate for his own male shortcomings glorifies a canine characteristic which, in excess, is too often a serious liability in the field. The show ring breeder whose fantasy fox is as large as a coyote is what led to the Kennel Club fox terrier -- a dog whose chest is as deep as the keel of a war ship. The young enthusiast who thinks a mute dog is a fine thing glorifies a serious nuisance and a potentially fatal liability in a working dog, while the "blue-blazer rosette chaser" who cares more about the color of a dog's nose than it's ability to scent does no better. When push comes to shove, the thing that has killed working terriers over the course of the last 50 years is the creep of fantasy, and the slow but steady erosion of real diggers in the hedgerow. The simple truth is that you cannot protect working dogs without working them. And working a dog is not easy -- it is suspiciously like work for the human as well as the dog. There is equipment to be gotten -- spades, bars, posthole diggers, tie-outs, locator collars, machete, yo-ho, veterinary first aid equipment, and a decent pack in which to carry it all. There are farm permissions to get, and there are the dogs which have to be raised up and given the experience -- experience which can only be gotten by driving out to the country and walking hedgerows and fields for many, many weekends. This is to say nothing of the reality of digging in freezing cold, howling winds, sucking mud, pounding sun, and swarming bugs.

And so, I was not too surprised when I turned on the computer this morning to find someone had sent me another news article from The Sunday Times of London about the badger-baiting arrests in Ireland. Only in this article, two Americans were named -- the owner of Deadgame Kennels in West Virginia, and the owner of Barnburner Patterdales in Iowa. It seems these two gentlemen had imported dogs from Robert Booth, formerly of Ireland and now living in France. 

Booth is a dog-dealer, and part of his business plan has been selling dogs to wanna-be tough guys in America who then go on Internet Bulletin Boards, list-servs, and web sites like "Bay Dogs Online" to claim that their dogs are descended from "Booth's So-and-So" and will "hunt anything." 

 Right. Hunted nothing is more likely. 

As for badger baiting by either of the two named Americans, I seriously doubt it.

You see, neither of these gentlemen live in an area known for badger, and in fact it seems one of them even has to go out of state to hunt groundhog! 

The other fellow seems to "hunt" only a few times a year, and this is generally done by shooting large numbers of raccoon that flee the treeless fields of Iowa in winter only to jungle up in barns and silos where their feces damage vast loads of hay and feed. 

I do not consider this hunting; it is extermination. 

And, let the record show, it is perfectly legal, even if it is not genuine terrier work in my book. 

The United States, thank God, is not the U.K. Not only are guns legal here, but so too are steep-jawed traps. In fact, there are more than 100,000 active trappers in the U.S., and these trappers are trapping (and mostly exporting) over 2,500,000 raccoons a year, along with many hundreds of thousands of wild fox and coyote pelts. 

This trapping does no harm to wildlife numbers; raccoon, red fox, groundhog, and coyote numbers are at historical records. 

As for North American badgers, which are not related to their European counter-parts in any way, they are not protected in most of the states where they occur in any appreciable number. 

If you want to hunt badger in Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, or North Dakota, for example, go right ahead; it is an unprotected nongame species. The states of Nebraska, Wyoming and Missouri, very helpfully suggests using #3 traps. Kansas has a season that stretches from Nov. 12th to Feb. 15th, while Iowa's stretches from Nov. 3rd to Jan. 31st. 

And so it goes. . . . . 

Which is not to say that there is any excuse for stupidity or brutality. 

The oldest adage in the world is both true and poignant: "Lie down with dogs, and get up with fleas." 

If you rub up against dog dealers, dog-fighters, badger-baiters, and wanna-be-tough guys, do not be surprised if their mud ends up being splattered on you, whether it is deserved or nor. 

And if, by chance, you are the kind of person who does not respect both the wildlife and the dogs, please get the hell out of terrier work all together. 

Terrier work does not need thugs and numbskulls. And, if you want my opinion, it does not need any of these Internet bulletin boards at all. As I wrote on this blog back in 2005:

When was the last time you read something useful or interesting or new about fox, raccoon, weasel, groundhog, badger or even ducks on one of these boards? When was the last time you got a bit of practical advice about shifting rocks, closing a wound, or finding permission? When was the last time someone even wrote a well-written story about their day in the field with the dogs? Instead, what you find on the Boards are a great number of very young or immature people who seem to get most of their attention in this world by being combative, or otherwise wanting to work out their manhood issues (and yes there are some women doing that too!). Most of these people seem to know very little about wildlife and not too much about dogs, either. It is ironic, but true, that in the dog world the most common animal is the parrot -- people quick to repeat what others have said or scratched out. The parrot offers no new information or expanded point of view. They have little experience of their own. Think for themselves? Go their own way? Dig their own dog? Parrots don't do that -- they are bird-brained and can only mimic. They do not own a library card and cannot hold a shovel. Starting a bulletin board is certainly easy nowdays, isn't it? These things are now offered up as free services, the code is easy and can be set up in an hour or two, and the only trick is to get people to keep coming back. No committment or investment is needed. Just erect an electronic wall and let the graffitti spraying begin. And graffitti spraying is exactly what you get about 95 percent of the time. In fact, this is the chief product of the bulletin boards -- not information but fighting, not shared experience, but name-calling. It is like a Drunken Night at O'Malleys, except that the drunks are a thousand miles apart and hiding behind fake names. The folks that run bulletin boards are big on "free speech," but it is pure posture to hide true poverty. The sad truth is that if civility were maintained on these bulletin boards, the real truth would come out pretty quickly -- no one has very much to say. In the end, bulletin boards have not created a working terrier community so much as destroyed it. The pictures on "anti" web sites are all culled from bulletin boards. Educated people who might educate, motivate and represent the best of working terriers soon turn away from these boards, leaving the loud, stupid, very young, and unemployed to dominate the boards and represent us all. It is reverse Darwinism -- a devolution to the unfit and the unsound. I think history has shown that nothing has harmed the world of working terriers more than weakly moderated bulletin boards. Mud and slander has been slung on established breeders, 30-year diggers, working judges, and respected authors. At times I have wondered if these things were Animal Rights honey pots -- bait stations set out to poison the working dog community. Whether intended or not, that is what most of them have become. What a sad thing the internet has done to working terriers!

Was I right? I think time has proven it so! .

The Epidemiology of Rabies in the U.S.

In any given year about 7,500 cases of rabies in nonhuman animals are reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wild animals account for approximately 93% of all cases of rabies reported -- most of the rest are in domestic/feral cats, dogs and farm animals.

The average human in the U.S. is FAR more likely to be struck dead by lightning than to come down with rabies, much less die from it. That said, most Americans are not encountering (much less handling) raccoons, fox, skunks, groundhogs, possum and feral cats on a regular basis.

Raccoons continued to be the most frequently reported rabid wildlife species (37.2% of all animal cases during 2001), followed by skunks (30.7%), bats (17.2%), foxes (5.9%), and other wild animals, including rodents and rabbits (2.3%).

Raccoons have been recognized as a reservoir for rabies in the southeastern states since the 1950s. An outbreak that began during the late 1970s in the mid-Atlantic states has been attributed to the translocation by hunters of infected raccoons from Florida.

Raccoon rabies is now found in all of the eastern coastal states as well as Alabama, Pennsylvania, Vermont, West Virginia, and Ohio.

Foxes (mainly Vulpes vulpes) accounted for 5.9% of all cases of rabies in animals reported in 2001. The majority of cases of rabies in foxes (360 out of 437 cases) were reported by states affected by the raccoon-associated variant of the rabies virus. In 2001 Alaska reported 45 cases of rabies in fox, Maryland reported 38 cases, and North Carolina reported 56 cases.

During the past 2 decades, more than 100 million doses of vaccine-laden bait have been distributed over 6 million square kilometers in Europe, with promising results for controlling the disease in red foxes. The use of oral vaccination in Switzerland during the past 20 years resulted in a declaration of rabies-free status in 1998, and a similar declaration was made by France as of the end of 2000.

Air-dropped rabies-vaccine baits are now being dropped in many parts of the Eastern and mid-Western United States, and good-to-excellent results are being observed.

To see a larger view of the CDC incidence map of rabies in fox (2001) >> click here