The use of dogs to hunt deer is legal in Ontario.
I'm told that many people do in fact use the dogs to run deer to exhaustion.
However, I discussed the question with a councillor of the Golden Lake Algonquin First Nation a few years ago. He told me that many of his people favour a small dog like a beagle (about the size of the Indians' traditonal dog breeds of pre-contact times) for hunting deer. It will
not run very fast in the woods, but it will keep the deer moving. The
idea is to move the deer through some kind of geographical choke point, like a neck of land between two lakes, where a few hunters can harvest
the deer from a considerable area of land and have a good chance of making kills.
My informant told me that an intelligent use of dogs greatly increases the productivity of deer hunting. I would guess that this kind of use of dogs goes a long way back, and not just among Amerindians.
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