I have a story that kinda touches on this........

When my wife and I first married, our first house was a caretaker' s house on a farm owned by a local businessman. We lived on the farm, took care of cattle, and basically watched over the place, in exchange for the rent. The farm had a small creek that ran through the middle of it. We saw deer so much, that after a while you just didn' t pay much attention to them unless they were sporting some nice headgear. Almost any time of day or evening there would be one or two in the pasture behind the house, or in the late summer, standing around the apple trees in the front yard. After a short amount of time, I finally got around to building a dog kennel off the side of the house for my coonhound and a pair of beagles that i had been keeping at my Dad' s place. The first week I brought the dogs in, they barked and carried on everytime a deer showed up near the house, or if they noticed some picking in the pasture out back. The funny thing was, after about a week, the deer learned that the dogs couldn' t get out, and they would TOTALLY ignore them. I laughed till tears came to my eyes the first time I saw a mature doe, calmly picking clover not 35 yards from the kennel full of yipping dogs!

Even on the few times the beagles would manage to get out, that one old doe would just run them in small circles out of the pasture and through the creek, until I' d finally head off the dogs and put them up.......she' d be back picking clover within an hour!

I' d say your dog will not bother the deer in the least if there is something that they want near your house. I' d be more apt to think they are taking advantage of food sources other than whatever it is you have near the house......Also temperature can cause them to shift to a more nocturnal pattern until cooler weather comes along...though that may already be there in your neck of the woods.



If you do notice that they start showing up again, and don' t seem perturbed by your pup, I wouldn' t worry about whether or not his scent will disturb them.


GH