SINCE moving to the UK I’ve been impressed by the emphasis placed on the use of dogs for finding wounded and lost game. Used correctly, they’re a vital part of the hunt experience, and often a key factor between success and failure. Dogs are used in parts of Africa, and more particularly so in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. To South Africa’s north in the British colonies of old, hunting with dogs was illegal. The reason for this was to try and thwart the tribal poaching scourge where dogs were used to good effect.
After independence most of those countries continued to outlaw the use of dogs for any form of hunting on state land. Things are changing though, and several Zimbabwean PHs who hunt private land, and the big conservancies, now use dogs on blood spoor. Illegalities aside, another limitation to using dogs across vast swaths of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia, is the tsetse fly. Considered by many to be nature’s most efficient custodian of wildlife in Africa, tsetse fly are vectors of which is lethal to dogs.
