Via Community News Service, a UVM internship program
Despite improvements in weapons and the best intentions, sometimes hunters wound, but don’t kill, their prey.
That’s where Vermont’s Leashed Dog Tracking Service comes in. Founded in 1996, it provides free and voluntary assistance to help hunters locate wounded game.
As the cost of everything increases, one volunteer has asked whether trackers could charge for the services, at least enough to cover gas and expenses.
On Wednesday, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board will debate rules for tracker reimbursement, as well as regarding off-season recovery of animals.
“We spend a great deal of money out of pocket willingly to provide this service to hunters,” tracker Mandi Harbec wrote to the board. “(H)owever each year we lose time from our full time jobs and money as well as time with our families to help hunters who don’t even offer to cover the gas that it costs to get to them.”
Finding wounded game
With advancing technology, modern hunting weapons are increasingly accurate. Bows are typically made of laminated wood, as well as synthetic materials, and can fire an arrow downrange at several hundred feet per second.
Modern muzzle-loaders fire bullets that are far more accurate than muskets of antiquity. Today’s hunting rifles are even more precise.
Despite these innovations, kills are often messy. Oftentimes, a hunter will land a wound that is eventually fatal — like a hit to the neck or a gutshot — and the animal will run away, leaving scant evidence behind.
Other injuries, like a back whack — a paralyzing arrow wound to the spine — can give a hunter the impression that the deer is dead. This allows it to escape when the hunter is preparing to gather it.
It’s first up to the hunter to try and find the animal, said leashed dog handler Jeremiah Gracie. If they can’t, they call him or any of the approximately 40 certified recovery dog handlers across the state.
Dogs pick up scents on the ground and in the air, the most obvious being the blood trail left behind by a wounded animal. But tracking dogs can also smell substances like pheromones and adrenaline, said licensed handler Don Morgan.
When there is no blood to track, dogs can smell the odor given off by a deer’s interdigital gland, which is located in the slit between their hooves.
The interdigital gland produces a waxy substance. It’s essentially a deer’s fingerprint: each gland leaves a different smell on the ground, allowing a dog to pick up an individual deer among a slew of different scents, Morgan said.
But that doesn’t mean finding a wounded deer is easy, said Tim Nichols, one of the founders of the tracking dog service.
When the effort began, he worked full-time at Green Mountain Power. Now retired, he still leads the service, commuting from Granville, New York to parts of rural Vermont. He’s fortunate, he said – most trackers still work full-time jobs.
One obstacle to tracking dogs are the hunters themselves, Nichols said. When a deer is wounded, some hunters search the area en masse, adding more scents that make tracking harder. Other challenges are coyotes, bears and dogs.
“Every year it’s getting worse. And now they’re cutting us off a lot of times, or we’re tracking the deer, and then, you know, we come on in some snow, and it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, right next to the blood. There’s a coyote track,’” Nichols said.
Nichols often has to stave off coyotes from wounded deer too. When they reach a wounded deer, people nearby can usually hear it from a distance, Nichols said.
Bears are mauling and eating wounded deer, as well as cannibalizing wounded bears, Nichols said. Even domesticated dogs are capable of catching up to deer and killing them. If a dog has harassed too many deer, the Fish and Wildlife Department tells its owner they will shoot it if it chases another deer, Nichols said.
Regulations and reality
Another challenge for these volunteers is current regulations may not match current reality.
In 2024, licensed leash dog tracker Mandi Harbec wrote the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board with her concerns. They fall into two categories: covering expenses for trackers, and allowing trackers to work outside traditional big game seasons.
Limiting their work to deer and bear seasons doesn’t take into account the increasing number of calls to find animals outside those dates, Harbec said. For example, nuisance bears may be wounded at any time of the year, and deer shot on the last day of the season cannot be recovered the day after.
And then, there’s the increasing cost of doing this for volunteers.
“We are asking that the board reconsider the limitations regarding charging for our services to at least allowing us to charge for our gas money so that we are able to continue this amazing service and service a larger area,” she wrote.
At the time, officials from the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department recommended against allowing reimbursement, citing “potential abuse of reimbursing for travel expenses and/or charging for services to create a business instead of being volunteer work.”
The recommendation continues, “Trackers should still be allowed to accept gifts and donations under their permits.”
Officials agreed with the recommendation to expand the times the leashed dog trackers could volunteer, as long as they notify local wildlife officials.
On Wednesday, Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board members will discuss and potentially have a first vote on tracking issues, according to its agenda.
This is just the beginning of a potentially longer process, said Joshua Morse, Public Information Officer for the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.
