One of the beagles killed by wolves. Source for image.
From the Charleston (WV) Gazette:
Hunters who use hounds know full well that sometimes dogs get lost or, worse yet, killed.
It’s a nightmare scenario, one that can cause even the most pragmatic dog owner to wake up shaking and drenched in sweat.
Few nightmares, however, could be as harrowing as the real-life ordeal Larry Harrison and Scottie Derrick went through during an August dog-training trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The two Charleston-area men sent 10 beagles into a jack pine forest to run snowshoe hares. Eight of the dogs ended up dead, torn apart by wolves.
“It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in 30 years of running dogs,” said Harrison. “I wouldn’t want anyone to see what we saw.”
Harrison, Derrick and friend Jim McGuire of Jackson, Ohio, had taken their dogs to the Upper Peninsula to get them in shape for West Virginia’s upcoming rabbit season.
“Snowshoe hares are bigger than our cottontails, and you can more easily train dogs to their scent,” Derrick said. “The first three days we were there, we had a great time. But that last morning it all went bad.”
Just 15 minutes after the men released their dogs, the pack went strangely quiet.
“We could see from the GPS that one of Larry’s dogs was out of the pack, so we went looking for it,” Derrick recalled. “We got within 40 feet of it, but we still couldn’t see it. The GPS kept varying. We thought she was just shy and staying away from us.”
After a few minutes’ more searching, the men found the dog’s body.
“I couldn’t believe what I was looking at,” Harrison said. “There wasn’t much left but the rib cage. We thought from the GPS that she was alive, but as it turned out the wolf must have been carrying her around while we were searching.”
With one dog known to be dead, the men looked for the rest of the beagles.
“We found the one, and then another, and then another, and then another, all dead,” Harrison said.
Shortly after finding the fourth dog’s body, the men caught a fleeting glimpse of one of the wolves.
“I looked up and saw a wolf pop out of the brush, about 40 yards away from us,” Derrick said. “McGuire yelled at it, and it was gone in a blink.”
Derrick estimated the wolf’s size at 120 to 150 pounds. “It was bigger than the biggest German shepherd you’ll ever see,” he said.
The wolves – Derrick and Harrison believe there were four to seven of them – killed eight beagles and injured another in what Derrick calls “the blink of an eye.”
“In 15 to 30 minutes, there was nothing left,” he added.
None of the men were aware that wolves might pose a threat.
“We knew there were coyotes in the area, but I hadn’t heard anything about wolves,” Harrison said. “I’d been going up there for 16 years, and the worst thing that had ever happened was the time a couple of our dogs got messed up by a porcupine.”
After the attack, the men started asking around about Upper Peninsula wolves. What they found left them determined never to return to the area.
“Michigan’s wolf management plan calls for a population of about 200 to 300,” Derrick said. “The population right now is estimated at 670 or so.”
Pressure from animal-rights groups has hindered Michigan wildlife officials’ efforts to reduce the population through hunting. A hunt will be held this fall, but will be halted after 43 wolves are killed.
“I don’t think any of us are going back,” Derrick said. “There’s too much risk to the dogs. If there’s a chance for something like that to happen again, we probably should just stay away.”
This story is certainly a tragedy, but I thought it was fairly common knowledge that there were a lot of wolves in the UP of Michigan. If you’re going to run hounds in wolf country, this is a risk that is always there– especially if they are little rabbit beagles.
I seriously doubt the wolf weighed as much as the hunter claims. The average weight of a Great Lakes wolf in the neighboring state of Wisconsin is 60-75 pounds, but a wolf is built differently from a dog. They have much longer legs than a dog of equivalent weight, which would be a golden retriever. One of these wolves might be 30 inches at the shoulder, but a 75-pound golden retriever would be only 24 inches at the shoulder. Add the thick wolf coat, and you can get the impression that a wolf is a lot larger than it actually is.
I also find it a bit strange that these beaglers didn’t know that there were snowshoe hares in the high Alleghenies of West Virginia. There aren’t as many as there used to be, but the state does have a snowshoe hare season.
So they can run their beagles after hares without ever having to worry about wolves.
I don’t think anything can be done to stop wolves from killing hounds. Hounds are run at a distance from their owners, and if you’re in wolf country, there is a chance they will run into a wolf pack. Wolves usually fear people, so if the dogs are ranged close in, there is less of a risk. But if you’re using hounds the way Americans like to, wolf and dog conflict may be impossible to mitigate.
It may mean that the only way to avoid a wolf attack on beagles is to run them in the Alleghenies and forget the Great White North of the UP.
When I was applying for admissions to US colleges back in 1984, I applied to Michigan Technological University (MTU) also for the reason I don’t remember. Even I, having no idea of US geography back then, knew there were wolves in Michigan’s UP.
More recently, I have taken to hiking with my dog from July 2011. Even I, an urban dweller, know what to do and how to protect my dog in bear and wolf territory of southern Ontario.
I firmly believe these hunters were another ploy of anti-wolf lobby.
My heartfelt condolences to the poor beagles used in this blame game and also to Michigan wolves who may now be subject to harsher reviews and treatment.
Its a damn shame, but I doubt even the anti-wolf guys are cold enough to purposely sacrifice a pack of beagles. This was ignorance and lack of doing one’s homework. As for the number of wolves in the UP, if the wild herbivores in the area couldn’t support 670 wolves, there wouldn’t be that many there–they would have dispersed.
Kind of weird to send ten of your dogs into a kamikaze.
There were reports of a rancher in northern Rockies of the USA who intentionally left dead lambs and afterbirth on the grazing land to attract wolves, who came in and also attacked a few sheep. This was then used by the rancher to call in USFWS officials to compile the report against wolves.
Here is another report, albeit possibly with a slight a bias I admit:
http://www.defendersblog.org/2013/05/wolf-weekly-wrap-up-124/
Men who are using dogs to kill hares are self-righteous because wolves kill dogs. This is absurd. Hunters think that only humans have the right to kill for meat–or for fun. The wolf, of course is killing to eat. Wolves can ;t go into a market and buy meat. Humans can, I fail to see why it is bad for a wolf to kill a meal, but it’s okay if humans to kill even if it’s not their source of food. Do these hunters think that God created wolves to be hunters of prey for their meals, but then decreed that humans should kill the wolves who interfere with human hunting, which is done only for “sport.” What hypocrisy!. Wolves are carnivores. So are humans If a wolf needs a meal, it has no choice but to kill it itself. Is the world only for human pastimes, including killing wolves who are just trying to exist. God created wolves. He also created humans. Wolves have as much a right to hunt for their food as humans have to kill for fun.
In this case I would say the wolves killed the beagles for territorial reasons more so than for food. The wolves saw the beagles as rival canids. The fact that the bodies were partly eaten is incidental.
Hunting hares or rabbits with a pack of dogs isn’t very sporting in my opinion. If hunters really want to test their skill they ought to try going after wild boar with only a spear. See how they do then.
People already do that in the States– hunt wild boars with spears. Same in Australia and New Zealand. And hunting with dogs is not about a challenge.
In Nordic countries and Russia, the mentality is: hunter cannot call himself a hunter unless he has a dog. They don’t view hunting as a challenge or anything like that– but rather an opportunity to reconnect with nature.
So why do you get to determine what how other people feel about hunting?
Let’s face it. The wolves did to the beagles what the beagles were supposed to do to the hares and we call it a tragedy. What goes around comes around.
Good for the guys who hunt boars with spears. It shows they have guts. A boar is a formidable animal that has a chance of coming out the winner. Using a pack of dogs with high tech equipment like GPS to go after small game doesn’t seem sporting. It’s different from a Nordic hunter with “a” dog.
Who says I was trying to determine what how other people feel about hunting? Since you brought it up….
The “reconnection with nature” argument in this case is a bunch of BS. It’s all about self gratification and a gory form of entertainment. I’m not opposed to hunting but have ethical standards about the way it is done.
Hunting with primitive tools is a controversial subject since they often incorporate still-hunting. The animal is left to bleed out. A boar would not be a formidable beast if someone shoved a javelin into its side from above .from a tree-stand.
If you have a bone to pick with a beagle pack using telemetry, then be prepared to take on the world. It is ethical when a far-ranging pointer freezes half a click from the handler then permitted to flush the birds? What about a moose-dog to bay an animal for hours sometimes days? Or when someone would pursue a bear with two to ten dogs for five hours or more? Or perhaps using dogs during a driven hunt and chases a boar or deer until it is shot? What about transversing difficult terrain for twenty hours to tree a cat? Sounds like the United States?
Well, they do happen; but also in Canada, Japan, Italy Slovenia,, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway and many more. All with tracking devices sanctioned by their respective governments. Oddly, these modern behaviors are only possible with those devices.
Yet the world is becoming more complicated as forests and grasslands are becoming fragmented with expanding networks of highways and growing cities.
Property laws are becoming more stringent. Tracking devices are becoming a necessity. It is very seldom to see a western hunter in their respective countries with a dog who doesn’t have a GPS collar.
Besides, fairness have gone out of the window for many centuries: scopes, magazines/tubes/clips, binoculars, pain medications, cars, motorized boats, VHF radio, electronic calls, trophy cameras and many others. At this point, it is more about the quotas wildlife biologists and ecologists implemented for that.
Hunting rabbits with ten beagles is a minute issue.
Hell, I am willing to bet those beagle-owners paid more into conservation plans and trust funds for public lands than the average individual non-hunter financially supported. Hunting is on the wane and so is environmental protection.
That even makes the question of ethics even more of a non-issue.
It seems like YOU are the one with the bone to pick because I don’t care for that style of hunting. Just because it is done in lots of countries by lots of people hunting different kinds of game doesn’t make high tech hunting sporting in my view.
Interesting you should say the devices you mentioned are sanctioned in various countries by their respective governments when about half of Americans don’t trust their own government.
And I am glad you admitted that fairness has gone out the window and that ethics are a non-issue when it comes to this type of hunting.
Nice to see one isn’t using critical thinking to figure out why someone might be compelled to use GPS.
The reason why I mentioned they are sanctioned because the hunting regulations and animal welfare laws in those countries are far more strict than America. Yet those activities are still permitted.
And the reason why they are sanctioned is because dogs get hit by cars all the time. They run onto people’s private property. They cross international borders. And sometimes dogs get lost for days wandering around the forest.
Telemetry is not about gaining an upper-hand on the game. It’s about complying with society’s wishes.
Unfortunately, GPS technology has the side effect of being used find a dog while hunting without having to follow them or keeping them ranging close. But as the wolf-population increases, people won’t be using GPS technology for that misused purpose.
100 years ago, accounts of hunters losing their dogs of all breeds and never finding them again was common-place. Chances of finding a lost dog improved after the radio-collar was invented in 1950, but the technology was and still is quite limited.
By today’s standards, it would be considered as animal-cruelty not to recover the dog if the person is able to invest in methods or means of doing so.
Of course people want their dogs back. In your grandfather’s day hunters may have had a .30-30 and a dog and people were satisfied. Today people want at least a 7mm Weatherby magnum and all kinds of electronic equipment. With a high powered scope they can shoot their target from at least twice the distance. Today’s high tech hunter is more like a sniper than a hunter.
Dave, it isn’t so much about the GPS. It’s about using a pack of dogs to hunt small game animals which don’t have that much meat on them and from my experience don’t taste all that good. Why would anyone bother if it were not for the thrill of the blood sport. At least a deer hunter is likely to eat what he shoots, or give the meat to friends.
I saw one program where a hunters with walkie talkies used a pack of hounds to chase and tree a small black bear. The terrified animal was then shot out of the tree. Where is the sport in it? You may as well go to your nearest cattle rancher, pay him for one of his steers and shoot that.
I would rather see Gladiatorial competitions brought back. They can put a bunch of death row inmates into an arena, give them all swords and the last one standing lives to fight another day.
And then there’s catch and release hunting with dogs. I can’t think of a more macho sort of hunting, but it’s easy on the prey. Can’t imagine this happening with rabbits, tough.
http://www.hogwrangler.com/
Hi Elaine; chances are good that these beagles weren’t even used to kill rabbits. There is a whole culture in the east of beagling rabbits, w/ no harm no foul as the watch phrase.
There are lots of hunters who train their dogs on raccoon, upland birds, cougars, bears, squirrels, rabbits and hares without ever shooting one.
The assumption people use dogs to kill animals is an erroneous one; especially since the training season is much longer than the actual hunting season itself.
I happen to know a few houndsmen who chased cougars with dogs for two decades, but never once shot a cougar– even though they buy tags every year.
“Michigan’s wolf management plan calls for a population of about 200 to 300,” Derrick said. “The population right now is estimated at 670 or so.”
This standard propaganda in favor of wolf hunting makes me particularly suspicious, it is part of their usual rhetoric and no one elses, certainly not the DNR’s. What scientific estimates exist of a territorial and natural limit on wolf numbers range from 1100-1300.
Before the spring 2013 wolf population count of 658, they were generally expected to have increased from the 678 counted in 2011 to something around 850, at historical ~15% growth rates from when there were very few. This was not considered a crisis, and told by the NRC to create a wolf hunt plan, the DNR on this basis created a wolf hunt quota of 47 wolves. When the count came up short about 200 of that expected they reduced the quota to 43.
The hunt areas are apparently based on past years when single or a few hunting dogs had been killed. The previous wolf-hunting dog incident, with all the hunting going on the UP, was a year before.
Meanwhile after wolf-hunting dog conflicts had been reduced to minimal historic levels in 2012 in Wisconsin, a hunt of 100 or so wolves there is followed by a multiplying of the incidents to record numbers, with record level dogs killed by more territorial wolves.
If you read the link under the photo, the beagle owners think that Michigan introduced wolves instead of wolves wandering in from Wisconsin.
In West Virginia, people are even paranoid about coyotes, claiming that they were introduced by the insurance companies to reduce deer numbers and thus deer/car collisions.
My response to the insurance coyote claim
It doesn’t help that Beagles are among the friendliest & least cagey of dogs. They would probably have no idea that wolves are even a threat & would happily blunder right up into their midst. As good as their noses are, they can easily learn to avoid them by scent, but it probably never occurred to the poor little guys that there was anything to worry about. 8-( There is definitely a risk in using dogs with little sense of self preservation as distance hunters.
It’s very sad for the dogs, but it’s part of the risk one takes when hunting with dogs at a distance in big predatory country. There is a reason my dogs are required to stay within sight of me at all times when backpacking, & my dogs are significantly larger, more powerful, & more wise than any Beagle.
That’s a horrible picture though no worse than many published on this blog. Hunting with dogs is now illegal in the UK, says he smugly!
And because of that, Britain is wasting its tax-dollars on culling foxes, badgers and deer just because the general public feels more comfortable with government-hired game-keepers than letting the gentry or citizens take matters into their own hand.
Landowners can shoot foxes. It’s the badgers that developed all the controversy.
You can still perfectly legally CHASE animals with dogs, just as long as the quarry is shot or killed by a bird of prey before the dogs rip it to bits in seconds. Hence the big hunt kennels are still thriving. But hey ho, the general public mostly don’t know or turn a blind eye if they do.
Wish Albertans had that common-sense law instead of banning coyote-chasing altogether when an idiot let his hounds tear a ‘yote apart 10-12 years ago.
“None of the men were aware that wolves might pose a threat.”
Sounds like they didn’t do their homework..
The wolves saw the beagles more of a threat than food. They’d do same to coyotes and a wandering wolf that isn’t in it’s pack.
Chervilmeadows no dogs for hunting? Not even to retrieve?
If my state have wolves that wandered from Michigan I wouldn’t mind though I’m sure many would want it dead though.. :\
Is there any dog breed that could take out a wolf in a one on one fight?
Many of the livestock breeds were developed to do exactly that. Central Asian Shepherds & Anatolian Shepherds are often referred to as “wolfhounds” & “volkadov” (“wolf crusher”) for this reason.
I like lupines, but “wolf crusher” is a damn cool name
I know, right! X-D
I love wolves, & other predators, VERY much, which is part of what attracted me to LGD breeds in general (I have Central Asian Shepherds). LGDs are a valuable tool in allowing us to live in harmony with wild predators They provide a non-lethal form of control. They will kill a predator if they have to, but they’re such good deterrents lethal action is rarely needed.
A great video on LGDs and wildlife conservation from Saskatchewan.