Published: February 03, 2010 11:32 am      

Antlers — deer lose them, dogs find them

Here’s something for the “He’s got too much time on his hands” department. Roger Sigler, a retired Rural Electric employee living in Smithville, Mo., trains dogs to find deer antlers.

Apparently, looking for shed antlers is a growing pursuit in some areas. According to an article in Rural Missouri magazine, looking for sheds is popular just about everywhere there are deer. And to hear Sigler tell it, it’s going gangbusters in Missouri.

Even though I lived a lot of years in Missouri, was an outdoor editor for a daily newspaper there, and probably spent more time in the woods than I did walking on sidewalks; I never heard of hunting for antlers.

As a matter of fact, in all the time I prowled the woods hunting and exploring, I don’t recall ever seeing antlers. Which is strange considering that bucks shed their antlers every year in late winter or early spring. I used to see deer, of course, but nary an antler.

Anyway, Sigler says deer hunters in his area love the idea of having trophy antlers as much as they enjoy having venison in the freezer. And to many of them, it doesn’t matter if the antlers don’t have a deer attached.

He says antler hunters routinely search the areas where deer have been seen. They check out their browsing areas, where they sleep and look along fence rows where deer may have jumped over the fence. When the antlers begin to loosen, catching them on a limb or even landing after a jump can make them fall off.

Antlers remain hard to find, however, and even the most avid hunter often comes up empty handed. After all, antlers are part of the deer’s camouflage system and lying on the ground would look just like tree branches. Plus, antlers apparently are a delicacy for mice. In a matter of days, a shed antler will literally disappear.

That’s when Sigler got the idea about training dogs to sniff out the fallen antlers. He had already worked as a volunteer in a prison program which allows inmates to train dogs for various tasks, and figured it would be a natural next step to train his own dogs to fetch antlers.

Not only did it work, it caught on big time, according to Sigler, and demand for antler-sniffing dogs is growing. He says the dogs can follow the scent of antlers the same way they can sniff out birds. A well-trained antler dog can double a hunter’s success.

I have seen antlers mounted on plaques many times, but I have to wonder what a guy does with a garage full of them. Apparently, there is a market for antlers. Sigler says many of the hunters he knows do it for the money.

Sounds like a win-win situation. Antler “season” doesn’t interfere with any other hunting season as far as I know, it gives the dogs something to do, and it sounds like a good cure for cabin fever.

All of this seems like good news for everyone. Except for the poor mice, of course, which now have to work faster to get to the antlers before the dogs find them.

Ward Degler is a Zionsville writer and artist. E-mail him at wdegler@comcast.net.