Mini Longhaired Dachshunds for Blood Tracking

by John Jeanneney for Full Cry June 2011

Mini-longhair dachshunds are making a name for themselves as tracking dogs, and as a “BIG” dachshund (20-23 lbs.) man, I have to admit that I’m surprised. I don’t think that they are going to entirely replace the standard dachshund, wire and smooth, as a tracking dog, but they certainly have some things going for them.

For one thing the mini dachshund has escaped the ravages of American show/pet breeding much better than the standard size, which in the North American show ring can range up to 35 pounds. The American show judges decided, in their wisdom, that if the original dachshund from Germany was a comparatively short-legged, long dog, then the ideal “improvement” would be to exaggerate these characteristics. Check out the big show winners in dog magazines to observe what passes for the most desirable show dachshund today. The exaggerations are most extreme in the smooth-coated dachshunds. Perhaps they are fine lawn cruisers, but with less than two inches of ground clearance, they would be in big trouble if they had to hoist their long heavy body over a 12 inch fallen long.

Fortunately these exaggerations do not occur very frequently in minis in any of the coat varieties. Of course some American mini breeders are working hard to make them a proportionately smaller version of the standards. In any case the lighter body weight of the mini (11 lbs or less) allows for greater agility. It’s somewhat like comparing a grey squirrel and a ground hog. They both have pretty short legs, but the squirrel jumps a whole lot better than the ground hog five times his weight.

Speaking in broad generalities the American minis have an agility advantage over the American standards, but this is just the beginning. For some reason that I can’t explain, the American minis have retained their hunting desire through 15 plus generations of show/pet breeding much more successfully than their American standard counterparts. In dachshund field trials across the country they are a small minority, but they are ranked much higher than their numbers would suggest.

Teddy Moritz, who writes the Working Dachshunds column in Full Cry, uses primarily American-bred, mini-longs in her falconry and ground hog work; they are excellent. She began with mini-wires but shifted to mini-longs because it is difficult to get decent percentage of good hard coats in the wires. A hard wire coat is excellent in briars, burrs and snow, but the soft, fluffy “wires”, which frequently occur, are a nightmare. A moderate longhair coat is a practical compromise.

Quite independently of the dachshund field trialers, falconers and groundhog diggers, a number of wounded deer trackers have arrived at similar conclusions about the value of mini-dachshunds as tracking dogs. I’ve met or corresponded with a number of them around the country over the past several years.

A representative example of this is Dave Seeley in Campbell, NY. Dave and his wife Veronica, put me up at their house last month when I judged the Deer Search Blood Tracking Competition described below. They had both been active competitive coon hunters, a very good background for trackers, but then they had eased out of this as the hills warped more steeply upward as the years passed. Dave kept up his deer hunting, and when he couldn’t find a nice 12 pointer he called his good friend Chester Swierk who had some sort of a tracking dog. Chester showed up with Moby, a mini-longhair dachshund, who calmly and methodically found his deer. Dave was hooked. When I arrived at the Seeley place there were three little mini trackers to greet me.

Most of the mini-trackers I’ve met didn’t seem to know one another. At this point there doesn’t seem to be an information network such as my wife Jolanta has established for standard wires. People like Charlette Curtis in New York and Rob Miller in Michigan simply had the eye to recognize the natural tracking desire in these little dogs. The rest came naturally.

Today I worked with a color-blind bowhunter who, at my advice, just bought a mini-long hair for his own personal use and to help out a few friends. He lives in the City of Albany and a small dog make a lot of sense for him. We started the puppy on a 50 foot blood line with piece of deer skin and bit of deer liver at the end. Puppy Shyla said, “I like this.”

For someone who wants a dog as a family companion and for personal tracking use, the mini is a good choice. If you are tracking almost every day, as I do in season, the mini will obviously wear out faster than the European standard wires that I use.

In wet, cold conditions, as in a freezing beaver swamp, the reduced body mass of the mini will chill faster. Sometimes, we track a line under four or five inches of wet snow and that’s not good either. These conditions don’t occur every day. For the moderate, normal hunter/tracker, who is not a fanatic, a mini-longhair makes a lot of sense.

Charlette Curtis and her mini Jenna