One thing I still cannot adjust to about country life is how people treat hunting dogs. They spend hundreds of dollars to buy these dogs then let them run wild or abandon them. Deer hunting with dog packs is like the national sport here in the country.
This weekend, I was in my office working on Saturday morning when I spied two hounds trotting down my driveway. They were lovely liver and white mid sized hounds, an old female and a young male. Both had collars and radio tracking collars, a sure sign a hunter was near. Trouble is, it’s not deer hunting season, and we don’t allow hunting on our land. We guessed someone was exercising or training his dogs nearby.
John went out to see if the dogs had any identification on them. The female was so friendly that she came over wagging her tail and whining for pats and attention. The male was shy and would not come over. We were able to get the name and a telephone number off of the collar.
We decided to let the dogs alone and hope they would leave of their own accord. Because they had identification, we assumed they were not wild or abandoned. If someone was exercising his hunting dogs on the neighbor’s property (which is a huge several hundred acre parcel, and we know that the locals love to hunt it and have permission to hunt it) chances are his dogs just wandered over. We don’t mind if they leave of their own accord and in the fall it is not uncommon for a small pack of dog to trot through the yard, nose to the ground, as they follow a scent. We just leave them alone. They’re dogs. They can’t read No Trespassing signs.
Yet this weekend, the hounds showed up and decided to move in.
The female plunked herself down on our front porch and took a snooze. Did I mention that Shadow hates other dogs? Shadow barked, whined, slammed herself against the windows, and generally went ballistic. I spent Monday cleaning dog nose prints off my dining room and kitchen windows where she spent Saturday shivering, whining and slobbering on the panes of glass, trying to kill the hounds peacefully sleeping a few feet away.
Those two hounds drank water from a dirty flower pot on my front porch, slept on the front porch, back deck, and my driveway, and refused to leave. By 9 pm when it started to rain and they were still hanging about, I called the phone number on the collar to ask the owner to come and get his dogs, but got an answering machine.
The next morning the dogs were spotted by a neighbor who said they had crept away to the property across the road from us. I finally got a return phone call from the dogs’ owner around 3pm on Sunday afternoon, a good 36 hours after the animals first appeared. He said he would activate their radio collars and pick them up and apologized that they were a nuisance. I assumed the owner picked up his dogs. He said he had seven, which he let out on Friday. I talked to him on Sunday and he seemed totally unconcerned that his dogs were running loose across busy roads.
I just don’t understand any of this. These were valuable, purebred hounds of some sort. The female had been injured while she was running around. She was limping badly the last time I saw her. This isn’t the first time we have seen packs of hounds roaming our land, running down the street, or crossing the highway. We had a wild hound living in the cattle field for several months. He limped on three legs. The fourth appeared to have been broken, perhaps by a car, and set badly. Animal control finally had to euthanize the poor creature. Is that any kind of life for a dog?
Our neighbors who have a large farm say that several times a year they pick up abandoned hunting hounds on their property or have to call animal control to come and get them. Many times the dogs are starved, frightened, or so unsocialized that they won’t come near humans. The dogs can be dangerous too, for they form packs to survive and can then hunt down livestock.
Call me sentimental, but I don’t think it is right to allow dogs – the kindest, best natured, most giving creatures on the planet – to roam free where they can be hit by cars and get into all sorts of trouble just for the sake of exercising them for a sport. I don’t understand why people pay hundreds of dollars for these purebred animals only to abandon them or treat them so casually. It makes no sense to me.
This is one area where I retain my city sensibilities…I still don’t understand this mindset when it comes to the hunting dogs.
