American Terrier Work: Just Do It

This post is recycled from 2005.

I started hunting alone, with a dog that was too big, and with a laughable set of tools. I didn’t own a pole snare, barely knew how to work a Deben collar, and had only the vaguest sense of what my options were once I dug down to the quarry.

Most of the terrier books were a wonder -- not one mentioned a bar, none described how to dig a hole deeper than two feet, dispatch was never described, and locating a fox sette was a topic missed entirely.

If nets were mentioned, they did not explain how to set them, nor was the slightest mention made of washing out a dog’s eyes at the end of a dig.

Veterinary advice, if given, seemed to have been gleaned from some 19th Century tome. For example, coal-tar was advised as a curative for mange, but basic antibiotics for lacerations were never suggested.

In the end I did what I had to do: I free-styled and made mistakes. I was pretty sure if I didn’t get it right, those mistakes would cost me the life of a dog, and so I started writing things down as a way of keeping my head focused on what seemed important to remember.

Along the way I got the right-sized dog and went through a half dozen shovels, was given a good bar, got permission on farms, made some equipment I needed, acquired the rest, and slowly learned how to use it all.

After a few hundred digs, I was passably competent and so were the dogs. We learned to trust each other and speak a little of each other’s language.

I mostly dig alone, or perhaps with one other person. There is no macho “hard dog” nonsense. My goal is to keep the dogs healthy and their job is to find the game and keep it bottled until I dig it out.

When the day is done, success is defined by what comes out of the hole, dog and quarry alike. I do not count a wrecked dog as a good day in the field.

It is an odd thing that people who work their dogs will talk a great deal about what is right or wrong with dogs, but they seldom talk about what is right or wrong at their end of the leash.

And yet, true terrier work is a partnership of dog and human.

The dog gains experience only if is taken out into the field.

It gains confidence only if it is brought along correctly and not too fast.

It stays healthy only if the human follows the rules and works to protect it from predictable problems.

In short, at some level, terrier work is about technique, and not just about dogs and tools.

In America, our techniques are different than those in Europe, for the simple reason that our quarry is somewhat different, and our land is sometimes different.

American terrier work is both easier and more difficult than it is in the U.K.

It’s easier because we can hunt all year long and there’s a lot of quarry if you are digging in the east.

It’s easier because our digs are generally fairly shallow, and because we don’t have the political nonsense that stalks fox hunting in Great Britain.

It’s harder because we live in a very big country and regular diggers often live a long way from each other.

We also have more kinds of quarry than they do in Europe, which is a good thing, but it also means we have to learn a few more tricks. If you work your dogs every weekend, year-round, you have to shepherd your dog’s health and know when to stick a shovel in. In the eastern U.S, if you dig just one day every weekend, you can easily dig on 100 critters a year or more — very few people in the world can say that.

No one in the U.K. has to worry about rabies, nor do they have as many tight pipes as we do, nor do those working fox (the only legal quarry left in the U.K.) have to worry about the fox digging away and bottling a dog from behind and suffocating it. Nor do they have the skunk issue — both a misery and a potential killer on this side of the Atlantic.

The point here is that American terrier work is its own bird, and it’s not a bad bird at all -- it’s just a little different, even if most of it is the same.
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