“You can’t just put the dog down and wait on him to bring you a deer.
“It’s a lot more work than that,” Bennett said. But nothing could be further from the truth. Release the dogs, relax on your tailgate and wait on them to deliver a big buck right into your lap. “I think as much as it gets in your blood, it’s a social thing, too.”Īt first glance, it seems like running deer dogs is a lazy man’s way of hunting. We killed something like 22 bucks last year, and they all got divided equally. If we’ve got game, everybody gets together and cleans it, and we share the meat. “We meet up before daylight in the morning and again after the hunt is over. “And it’s a social thing to me,” he said. Shiyou said there was another aspect to the sport that is equally as important. By the time that deer hits the road, you see it’s a legal buck and get a shot off and kill it - that’s exciting.” “I just love hearing the dogs coming through the woods,” Bennett noted, “but it’s more than that. That leaves little extra room unless an individual has his own land.īoth hunters choose to withstand the public target that running deer dogs puts on their backs because of the entertainment value and excitement of it all. “It’s all been sold out, and you’ve got to be in a club to do any kind of hunting around there, not just dog hunting, because there is no open land.”Īccording to Shiyou, there are five hunting clubs in southwest Hancock County, with two of them being dog clubs and three being still-hunting clubs. “The paper companies don’t own a piece of land in Hancock County now,” Shiyou pointed out. The president of Devil’s Swamp, Waveland’s Kenny Shiyou, isn’t as steeped in the dog hunting tradition as completely as Bennett - but he is just as consumed. The club includes 70 members and encompasses over 7,400 acres. is a board member for Devil’s Swamp Hunting Club in southwest Hancock County. passing out instructions about where they were going to go and how the hunt was going to happen. A $5 permit allowed hunters to gather as a crew with their dogs and listen to Bennett Sr. The land was all open, and there were no hunting clubs. He can’t remember it on his own, but he’s been told that he used to ride on top of his dad’s shoulders when he was just 2 years old.Īdmittedly, life was different back then. We moved to another road, and not long after that I finally got the shot to kill it.”īut this wasn’t Bennett’s first foray into the forest to follow a bunch of deer dogs. “That erased all my doubt, and I knew for sure it was a buck. “That’s when I heard a few other people shooting at it,” he continued. Like an innocent suspect badgered into a false confession, Bennett was just about ready to admit to his father that it might not have been a buck. “I was sure it was, but a little doubt crept in the more he asked me.” “I shot at it one time, and my dad asked me if I was sure it was a buck,” Bennett told me as he recounted his earliest memory of deer hunting with dogs.
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