I recently heard about a couple and their puppy who were attacked by bear-hound hunting dogs this past October on public land. I hope that the Legislature will take up the hounding issue this coming session.
Sadly, hounds can be run all year and training seasons occur when bears, raccoons, bobcats, and other animals are tending to and nursing their young.
For those happily unaware about what hounding involves, it's where a hunter allows a pack of hounds to run, chase, take down, or tree (and more often than not, repeatedly bite and rip apart) wild animals.
Hounders sit in their trucks, while their dogs, 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 may be hours later.
Beyond the abhorrent cruelty to wildlife, the horror for the animals who fall victims to hounding, and the poor treatment and neglect of the hounds, hounding poses a serious safety risk for people.
Vermont statutes stipulate that a hound hunter must be “in control” of their dogs. Under current law, GPS collars meet the criterion.
A GPS collar is a locator collar, not a “control” mechanism. Knowing the approximate location of your dogs is not maintaining control over them. No one - regardless of how brilliant they may be - has control of any dog, no less a pack of them, once such dogs disappear from sight.
The type of training that hunting hounds 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, very much like how dogs are trained to dog-fight. They are often killed when they are no longer useful and, when not hunting, live year-round in outside kennels and cages.
The ideal objective of hounding is that the hounds chase, corner, and attack the right target or targets. But this is unreliable, and actually quite impossible, since the dogs are unsupervised and not anywhere near their owners.
Minimally, there should be legislation that specifically requires hounds to be within verbal command and eyesight of their owner. If the state cannot figure out how to make such a law happen, then the activity should be banned entirely.