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Mouse, GREAT post and super pictures. A really great topic all the way around. Your posts of hunting in your country are quite fascinating. Some of your pictures looks so much like home here in the mountains in Idaho, also!

I do not own any hunting hounds, but I have hunted black bear with hounds here in Idaho many times. This is hound hunting of the bear, not followup of wounded game. All with ground trailing hounds; Walkers, Plotts, a couple Black and Tans, Blueticks, Redbones, Redticks, a couple Gastognes. I have also been in on a successful cougar race but never shot one. There are large numbers of hounds in our area. Our bear are small, weighing on average around 150-200 pounds but a few are much larger. Only black bear may be hunted/shot. We have grizzly, but they cannot be legally shot. Black bear are amazing runners and I have seen many a race won by the bear, some starting in the early morning and going all day and into the late night, with fresh dogs placed on the track, the bear even sighted briefly, but the bear outrunning the dogs anyway. Cougar are sprinters, have weak lungs and cannot run far, but bear have powerful hearts and lungs and incredible stamina.

I have had long discussions with officials in the Idaho Fish and Game Department about allowing the use of hounds for tracking wounded deer and elk, even on an experimental basis. They are totally opposed to any use of dogs for tracking such game for cultural reasons but someday, who knows? Maybe they will come to their senses. Many, many animals are wounded and lost each year, a large number of which I am certain would be found with hounds. Another use of the tracking dogs would be for followup of animals struck and only wounded by motor vehicles, which is a common occurence also.

Maybe ErikD or another Scandinavian could weigh in here, as the Norwegians and I believe Swedes, too have a law that requires hunters to maintain a contract with a dog handler/tracker. The tracker can be called if necessary to follow up rådyr, hjort and elg and I suspect such activity saves many an otherwise lost animal.

As for epilepsy, I had a beagle with the disorder and currently have a mutt {of partial hound blood} with the disorder also. I have been told by veterinarians here that epilepsy is not uncommon among some hound breeds.

Anyway, here we must track on our own, with no dogs allowed. In fact, just a couple weeks ago I spent four long hours on the trail of a wounded buck whitetail. Bullet struck brush {we found the contact} and deflected some and the animal was hit hard but not dead. This animal left a long blood trail, but when the blood stopped and the tracks mixed with many, many other fresh ones, the trail went cold for us. Good news is that the track ended with the animal hiding on the south face of a mountain in thick dense brush, exploding from its bed and running hard uphill when we walked by at about 10 meters distance. It was stopped while running with a shot from behind with a 6.5x55 carbine that broke its femur and plowed through the chest cavity, broke a rib and was found under the hide. Yes, I wish we were allowed the use of dogs!!!

What rifle and caliber do you use when tracking?

Again, thanks for a great post!!

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