Okay To Let Your Dogs Run On Others Property, Or Not?
Let me start this post by saying I was happy to close out my archery season yesterday with a nice yearling doe. The muzzy completely passed through the doe’s heart at about 20 yards from where I was standing on the ground. I was on the way to my blind and saw her snaking her way through the woods before she saw me and had time to duck behind an enormous maple to draw back. It was pretty exhilarating. This came after arrowing a nice mature doe in the shoulder a few weeks back and losing her and a missed shot due to an equipment malfunction a few weeks beforehand (sight was off, honestly). So it felt pretty good.
I was confident of my shot placement, but leery since I had rushed my recovery efforts a few weeks previously and had lost that deer. So I noted where she fell in the nearby slough and backed out and came back two hours later to find a neighbor dog chowing away. Luckily, I was on the scene shortly after he had got there. He clipped some of the ribs and nibbled on a bit of one hindquarter but was focusing most of his efforts on the innards, which left a mess for me. Could have been a lot worse and the joke is on the neighbor I guess since it is a pure white German shepherd and he was a mess too when he left. Hope he gave them a big kiss when he got home. Lol.
I would talk to the guy, but he is not doing so well, and a good guy overall. Just not the right time to talk to him about something so trivial in the scheme of things. He may not make it much longer, put it that way. And not much harm was done, so let’s not even worry about this specific case.
What I’d like to know, is how many of you feel its okay for people to let their dogs run your property, during deer season or any other time of the year? I have one friend who told me to put an arrow through the dog, which I would never do. Its not the dog’s fault, it’s the owner’s. And I have one on the opposite side of the spectrum who told me he let’s his dogs run loose and its just something you have to adapt to when living in the country, which I’ve done all my life. But he told me to get used to it and not stir up bad blood with my neighbors. Plus he told me, many people could argue it was my fault for leaving a deer by itself for a few hours in the woods. That I should have known something like this would have happened. I agree that its a lesson learned, that I should have stayed in the area, but not that it was my fault.
I’ve had dogs run deer past me while hunting, though not frequently, and now one chowing on my deer. My theory has always and I believe will always be that, human or canine, trespassing is trespassing if you don’t want that man or beast there. So telling someone to adapt to someone infringing upon your property rights, be it human or dog, it a little tough to take. What do you think?