Editor’s note: This commentary is by Alana Stevenson, a professional animal behavior specialist who has a masters in biology education and is the author of “The Right Way the First Time” and “Training Your Dog the Humane Way.”
I recently heard about the couple who were attacked, along with their 7-month-old puppy, by a pack of bear hound hunting dogs this past October on public land. I hope that the Legislature will take up the hounding issue this coming session and define more clearly what “control” of hunting dogs means. I personally believe that hounding should be banned outright — for human safety, safety of wildlife, and safety for the dogs themselves. Hounds are run all year long in Vermont between the open season on coyotes and the unjustifiably long hound training season on bears, raccoons, bobcats and other wildlife. The training season occurs when bears are tending to cubs and when other animals, like bobcats, are nursing their young.
For those happily unaware about hounding and what the activity involves – it’s where a hunter or hunters allow a pack of hounds to run, chase (and more often than not, repeatedly bite and rip apart), take down or tree wild animals. In Vermont, hounding bears, including cubs, is legal. Often, hounders sit in their trucks and wait while their dogs, who are on GPS collars, run miles until the GPS shows the dogs are staying in one spot on a target. The hounders then drive (as far as they can) and then walk to where the dogs are. This could be an hour or more later. Beyond the abhorrent cruelty to wildlife and horror for the animals (bears, raccoons, coyotes) who fall victim to hounding, and the poor treatment and neglect of the hounds themselves, hounding poses a serious safety risk for people.
Supposedly, Vermont statutes stipulate that a hound hunter must be “in control” of their dogs. Under the current law, GPS collars meet the criteria for “in control.” The dogs are on GPS collars and they have free rein to chase and target wildlife unsupervised.
To be clear, a GPS tracking collar is not a control mechanism. These are simply locator collars. “Knowing” the approximate location of where your dogs are is not “maintaining control” over them.
Furthermore, no one has control of a pack of dogs unless those dogs are on leash, and, even then, control can be ambiguous. No one — regardless of how brilliant they may be — has control of any dog when that dog is visually out of sight.
The type of training hound dogs endure is not safe for the public or for dogs. Dogs used for hounding are tools and put at risk. They are punishment or corrective-based trained and trained very much like how dogs are trained to dog-fight. Hound dogs are often killed when they are no longer useful and most spend their lives, year-round, when not hunting, in outside kennels and cages.
In addition, if dogs are being trained during a training season, then they are not yet skilled. This means wild animals are not just cornered, but are attacked and ripped apart. There is no doubt that fawns, bear cubs, dogs and other animals have been victims of maulings by hound dogs. There were bear hounds seen in Fairlee last September chasing a moose. There have been a number of situations in the U.S. over the years where people and their dogs have been attacked by packs of hound dogs.
Nearly everyone knows that when taking dog training classes at a remedial level, in order for a dog to make a connection regarding behavior, timing is everything. A behavior must be reinforced or punished within two or three seconds for a dog to make any training connection whatsoever (and three seconds is sloppy training). Most of us agree for a dog to be skilled, it needs to be trained. But there is no training if the trainer, hunter or handler is not present or within visual sight of their dogs. I don’t know one skilled, legitimate trainer, veterinary behaviorist, or animal behaviorist who trains dogs outdoors while they remain in their trucks and cars.
Furthermore, using packs of dogs to haze bears is not what hounding is about. If packs of dogs run into neighborhoods, unsupervised, to frighten bears, then these dogs are a risk to the public and other animals. If bears are in the woods, away from towns or suburban neighborhoods, there is no reason for hounds to chase them. Hazing bears and the recreational “sport” of hounding are two very different things.
It may not be an everyday occurrence that a pack of hounds attack individuals on a walk or hike, but hunting hounds violating landowner rights, and attacking or harassing pets, livestock, and nontarget species is not at all rare.
It is a double standard and completely unfair to tell the public, pet owners, and landowners that they are unable to protect their property or themselves from loose dogs, intentionally released to chase, corner and attack wildlife, without any supervision. This is vastly different from a wandering cow or loose or lost dog on someone’s property, which was a comparison made by the Vermont Fish and Wildlife commissioner. Neither pet dogs, nor cows, are trained or conditioned to run miles to chase, corner and attack, as are dogs used for hounding.
The ideal objective of hounding, of course, is that the dogs or hounds chase, corner and attack the right target/s. But this is unreliable, and actually quite impossible, since the hounds are unsupervised and not anywhere near their owners.
At a very minimum, there should be legislation that specifically states that if hounding is to occur or be legal, the hounds must be within verbal command and eyesight of their owner. If Fish and Wildlife cannot figure out a way to do this, then the activity should be banned entirely. This only seems intelligent, reasonable, logical and fair.
