You dang right. I’m spending more money to own tracking dogs and track than I did hunting. It kills me to hear guys carry on that some of us are trying to make a living doing it or something. Most folks are just trying to cover enough of the expense to keep from getting kicked out of the house.


Weeding out the bad calls is a great reason for charging a set fee. If you get your name out there enough, then “free” will get every Tom, Dick, and Harry calling you with every scenario under the sun. That puts you in the position then of almost having to interrogate the person to decide on whether or not you should take the track. It’s exactly like you said…..folks say all kinds of things on the phone to get you out there to look. Having a reasonable fee for coming out will in itself take care of much of that. It will be on the hunter then to decide if the track is worth them paying you to come out. The guy that cut two hairs and knows it won’t call you out on a goose chase that never had a chance from the git go……and even if he still does want you to come out knowing he only cut two hairs…then everyone is all good with it because he is compensating you for looking the same as if the deer were dead. The tracker shouldn’t have to goose chase for free and eat the cost of every Hailmary someone slings out there.

Anyways, I’ll stop before I write the War and Peace of tracking. I just think these things should be considered when folks start blasting that stuff out again from other states telling us how tracking is supposed to be and what bad people we are for charging them. The 40 folks in that group and the guys who attend these tracking events are the ones who decide how tracking will be in Alabama. I was caught off guard by those responses that day when I asked the forbidden question about "free". I had no idea that folks were about to come out of the shadows and start flaming my arse with a blowtorch.