A Short Rant on Coyote Hunting with GPS

For as long as I can remember I have been hunting coyotes with my grandfather. He had been hunting them with fox hounds since my mother was a young girl and that hadn’t changed by the time I came around. In the years that I can remember hunting we have owned at least seven different dogs. I have loved everyone and enjoyed listening to every dog run.

It’s not about killing the coyotes necessarily, at least not for me. It’s about listening to the dogs run and a good coyote giving chase.

When my grandfather started running dogs there was no such things as tracking collars and dogs ran free and were just expected to return home when they were done or return to where they had been set loose.

Those days were gone by the time I was hunting. Our trackers were (and still are) huge antenna trackers with heavy box bases. For most hunters, gone are those days too. New GPS trackers allow dog owners to track their dogs within the feet and signals don’t bounce of hills and hollers (a serious problem where I’m from) or allow telephone wires to interfere.

But when you are chasing dogs around the countryside and in pickup trucks it cuts out on how much you have to get out of your vehicle. It takes out the guessing game as well, when you have a constant update GPS that keeps telling you where your dogs are heading and exactly where they will come out, it makes hunting a little like cheating.

More than likely if you can tell where your dogs that are running are exactly heading it makes it easy to tell where the dogs prey is.

Perhaps considering that “cheating” is taken out by the fact that I don’t have the resources- a high enough Cabela’s credit card limit or just the ability to let go of close to a grand- it’s a good possibility that everyone who owns the latest technology enjoys it immensely.

GPS makes it easy to catch dogs when it’s time to round up and go home. It also helps to keep them off of main roads and off of properties they aren’t supposed to be on.

Like everything that modern technology is supposed to do, GPS makes things “easier” in life. However hunting isn’t supposed to be easy. If it was easy it wouldn’t be something that most people would enjoy. (Well hunting could just be a wee little bit easier or I could be a lot better!)