Goodwood
Standard Smoothes
Here is a heroine of mine:
Teddy Moritz, falconer and dachshund woman
This is an artcle from Outdoor Life and can be seen here.
Varmints, Beware!
Most people don't associate hunting ferocity with dachshunds. But the rabbits
and woodchucks of suburban New Jersey can tell you different...
Article by
Tom Meade . Uploaded on September 18, 2007
Most people don't associate hunting ferocity with
dachshunds. But
the rabbits and woodchucks of suburban New Jersey can tell you different.
During
the falconry season in late autumn and winter, Teddy Moritz, a falconer from
Mahwah, N.J., and a leading authority on hunting dachshunds, flies her Harris's
hawk, Buckshot, over a team of three miniature long-haired dachshunds.
The
dachshunds flush pheasants, rabbits and hares, and the hawk joins in to make the
kill. But
in the off-season, Moritz's hounds, her dachshunds teamed with a larger hound
take down woodchucks for farmers in central New Jersey. Moritz feeds the quarry
to the dogs. Dachshunds bred for the field "standard-size" hounds as well as the
diminutive "miniatures," which weigh less than 11 pounds have no fear, owners
say. Their German name means "badger hound," and in Europe dachshunds were bred
to go to ground to root out and kill badgers (no easy task). Dachshunds will
also dive unhesitantly into the dirt to take on foxes, raccoons, rats, muskrats
and woodchucks.
"Dachshunds will not back down from anything. They are
fearless," says Larry Gohlke, a veteran dachshund hunter. He should know. Once
he hired a professional handler to take five of his dachshunds from Wisconsin to
a field trial in Oregon.
Gohlke told the handler to exercise the dogs when
she reached an empty stretch of the Oregon desert. As soon as the woman let the
dogs out, a coyote began howling nearby and all five dachshunds immediately gave
chase.
"This woman started screaming and hollering, and four of
the five dogs came back," Gohlke says.
"But
my wife's nine-pound mini kept going after the coyote."
When
the dog finally did come back, she had three bites on her backside.
"What made me mad," Gohlke continues, "was that the handler didn't go out there
to look for the dead coyote."
The tenacity and versatility of hunting dachshunds goes on
display often each year at various field trials around the country. The gallery
locates game by beating the bushes until a cottontail appears.
At
the call of "Tallyho!" a handler brings a brace of dachshunds to the line to
begin their pursuit as judges watch.
Experienced
dogs stay on the rabbit's scent, following a tight "line," while newcomers often
bounce back and forth through the brush.
Though the top two dachshunds on the field-trial circuit in early 2001 also
happened to be show dogs, some field-trial veterans worry that show breeders
have begun to breed dachshunds with legs that are too short, coats that are too
long and voices that are too weak. But somehow show-dog breeders have not ruined
the breed's nose.
And that nose is essential to the dachshund's
bread-and-butter work: running rabbits. When Moritz takes a team hunting (she
hunts her six hounds in twos and threes) she first releases Buckshot and the
hawk flies to a tree to watch the hounds make their first cast into the brush.
When
the dogs find scent, they "open," making the music hound owners love to hear.
When
the rabbit flushes, Buckshot takes wing and the dogs hear the hawk's bell tied
to its talon; they know that if they stay under him, they will stay on the
scent. If
the rabbit stops and the dachshunds lose the scent line, the hawk will swoop on
the covert, spooking the rabbit into running.
"Sometimes it's the dogs that keep the rabbit moving, and sometimes it's the
hawk that keeps the rabbit moving," Moritz says. "If the dogs can keep the
pressure on the rabbit, it eventually will make a mistake, and the hawk will
grab it."
Busting woodchucks is a different game. Moritz's hounds sniff out a woodchuck in
its burrow, dig their way inside and force the big rodent to bolt out another
hole or smash its way through them and into the open.
Teddy and her 2 mini longs, Tar and Fitz.
(According to my
falcon group, her dogs have a legendary status among falconers.)
"Once I was crouching behind my dogs as they went into a burrow when a woodchuck
shoved past them, came flying out the hole and ran right over me and down my
back," Moritz says of one of her more merry chases.
The dachshunds will run after a bolting woodchuck, but a "lurcher"
dog does the killing. Moritz's lurcher is a stolid greyhound/collie cross.
She
keeps her hounds back when her lurcher moves in.
"The lurcher needs
to make the dispatch quickly and he doesn't need a couple of dachshunds hanging
off the woodchuck," she says.
After such a hunt, all six dachshunds, the lurcher and Buckshot get to enjoy
their woodchuck dinner back at the house. "The bumper sticker on my truck says,
'Hunt hard, kill swiftly, waste nothing, offer no apologies,'" Moritz says.
"That's my motto. No game comes home that isn't used completely."
