re: It's time to ban dog deer hunting

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Moral of the story, there are groups who still enjoy hunting with dogs while doing it in a very responsible manner that has noticeable effect on deer behavior.

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True. But the vast majority of dog hunters really have ruined it for you and dog hunters in general have ruined it for themselves for banding together as one and fighting any possible regulation that might stop the 90% who don't have enough land to dog hunt without trespassing.

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However, we only run dogs two days a week, only turn loose 4-6 dogs per hunt

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That's the way we did it in Pike County, too. Each stand hunter always carried some baling twine or nylon string. If the deer got by you, and sometimes that happened, your obligation and job then was to catch up as many dogs as you could and put a string leash on em. I've had as many as six dogs caught up with three Walkers in each hand. My Uncle had one particular Walker that didn't like to be caught up. He'd dodge the stand hunter and keep after the deer. One time that I remember he got by the stander and was GONE. A week later after I got back home here in Virginia, my uncle got a call from a feller in Montgomery and he told him his dog was layin up in his woodshed. Yellow Boy had covered the 50 miles to Montgomery til his feet were raw and he was finally give plum out. Sometimes the dogs get by you and that's just part of it. We only ran the dogs where we had plenty of room for the dogs. The landowners in that area owned a LOT of land and by mutual agreement, everybody got to run on each other's land. Probably had about 10,000 acres with all of it together. But everywhere else, there was no dog hunting. Plenty of land, but a few of the landowners were against deer dogging, so...no deer dogging there. Some of my family were some of those landowners, too, and believe me, I saw family arguments and hard feelings for years over deer dogging. To me, deer dogging and deer hunting is never worth the cost of dividing your family. FWIW, deer dogging is against the law in this end of Virginia. People up here will shoot any dog they catch running a deer. Our problem is with the unethical "hunters" who go out and release a pack of strays right before deer season. These dogs pack up, run deer, cattle, sheep, or anything they can catch and eat. They're starving and just doing what any hungry dog would do. And then we have to shoot em.