To start with, I never said anything about bringing a gun onto private property to confront someone for shooting a dog. I'm smart enough to know that is a felony , and I'm not sure I could control myself if I walked up on someone standing over my dog. And I do cherish my freedom. I am also smart enough to know that if you shoot an unarmed person, you will have a hard time claiming self defense.

Blowing Fido in two is a little more extreme than having a dog on your property "ruining your hunt". So yes, if dogs on your property bother you, you should let the GW handle it. If I ever have to go to a shot to look for my dead dog, I will involve law enforcement. They can write me a ticket for whatever I've done, and write the shooter a ticket for felony animal cruelty. But you can bet I'm going to do my dangdest to make sure my collar doesn't end up in the bottom of a pond and my dog doesn't get hauled off and dumped.

If you catch people looking for their dogs on your property while toting a gun, you should call the game warden. If you catch people deliberately casting dogs onto your property, you should call the game warden. Those people aren't called dog hunters, they are called poachers. IMO, that's a whole lot different than a dog happening across your place every now and then. Shooting the dog that is only doing what it's been trained to do is never the right thing to do. It is the owners fault, not the dogs.

I promise You, I keep my dogs on land I can hunt 99.9% of the time. I run an Alpha which has tone and correction ability. However, things happen, equipment fails, just as Goodman Hunter said. A couple examples; I have a young dog that I am getting collar broke. we ran a deer out of where I hunt. I toned her to try to stop her and she went on. I then shocked her on a low setting, and she stopped for a second then continued on again. So I cranked it up a bit and hit her again. When I did that she stopped. No amount of beeping or calling could get her to come back. She didn't know what bit her or where it was now, but she wasn't moving. She was only 60 yards across the fence when I walked in and got her. Another time this season, We were running a buck when it crossed on an older fella that couldn't shoot him for whatever reason. We got all the dogs stopped at the road, except for a young male I call Jasper. As soon as he crossed, his dog symbol on the handheld went to a (?). He went on in and ran the deer a mile or so into the neighboring property. He turned and ran the deer back in and we caught him. You could see where he hung his collar on a vine or a limb or something and broke the wire on the GPS antenna. Without connection, I couldn't beep him or shock him. The only way to know where he was was with good old fashioned hearing. Now, I hunt on a 60,000 acre WMA. The part we hunt butts up to another 13,000 acre WMA that is still hunt only. That piece is only open a few weekends a year and only opened one weekend that coincides with our deer season. That WMA is phenomenal deer hunting for the area. We are allowed to walk in there to get our dogs all we want as long as we don't have a gun. One WMA that borders us to the south, probably has more big deer per hunt days killed than any other WMA in the state, Including the 200 and something inch state record. All while the WMA we are on next door gets pounded daily by dogs.