Welcome back to the Kaffiru cast today. I have Heath and Lindsay with on track and you guys are here in the studio to talk about your role in

finding or recovering game using tracking dogs. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. So we we track for mainly anybody who's

wounded an animal, whether it be elk, moose, deer, we tracked around last year. We can track everything in this state legally except a bear.

Okay, yeah. And so where are you guys based out of? We're based out of Bailey, Colorado. Okay. Now up under the Rocky Mountain big game recovery. We have a lot of

trackers up under that 501c and they're spread out throughout the state and even up into Wyoming and Utah as well. Okay. And so when you're talking about Rocky Mountain tracking, is that what it was called Rocky Mountain big game recovery? Rocky Mountain big game recovery.

Yeah, you are one of the founding members or you on the board or I'm the vice president vice president. And does it have? Let's see if I'm phrasing this right. Does it have a like a governing body or is it something that you guys have kind of created to get the word out there about it?

We've created the 501c and then we've been asked to be a part of the Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project. So it's there's some heavy hitters involved with that, you know, SCI Rocky Mountain elk foundation and a few other ones as well. So hopefully we get

a bunch of them in the back as well. So it's just a big conservation effort. And if you were to take somebody who had no idea what you guys did, what would be your kind of elevator pitch to get them in the door?

The elevator pitch would be, hey, you shot an animal, you've done everything you could define it, you can't find and you can't find the animal. You call us and we're going to come out and we're going to put our dogs on to see if it's recoverable. And when you were talking about, I guess this is we were kind of chatting before the podcast started that, you know, this is everyone's questions about like the reality of that being somebody who's hunted in Colorado for the, you know, better part of like a decade.

I had no idea that was legal at all. Right. So can you go into a little bit more detail about that explain that? Yeah, absolutely. So the the law was passed back in June of 2016.

And the law is basically this. So we can track and it has to be on the leash. The dog has to be on the leash. It's one handler per dog.

We have to we have to get a track impairment through Colorado parts of wildlife. It's $40 a year. So when we receive that call, we're going to be asking specific questions from the hunter.

We're going to need the Hunters full name, the CID number. What is hunting, what unit he's in because we're having a report before we take a track, we got to report all that information to CPW.

And then after the track, we got to report back to CPW if if we recovered the animal. Okay. And is this for all lands in Colorado or private lands, public lands.

This is all lands. Yeah. Okay. And so I mean, yeah, I guess since it's such a recent law, a lot of people don't realize that that's actually something you can do. Right. Right.

So last year, I think Rocky Mett McGame recovery had over 100 calls and maybe two or three were somebody from here in Colorado. So it was everybody out east where they're used to tracking dogs.

They immediately get on United Blood Trackers go to find a tracker in the state. And then there's a whole list of us here in Colorado. And they just start calling everybody.

So it's interesting. So is it something you guys saw a need for after the 2016 bill? Have you been in dog tracking for a long time back out east or is like, how did you guys get into this?

No. So how I got into it is we can back up a little bit. So I grew up in the South and we would go deer hunting and Illinois Southern Illinois public land during the rut.

And I had a buddy who was starting a tracking business. He was out of Kentucky. He's in the Lance. He started on track. K nine deer recovery.

And I try to I tried to good buck that year back in 2017 and made a bad hit. So I called him out. I got to watch his dog work. That's kind of what got me excited about it.

So when I moved out here, I moved to Colorado in 2019 in the South, you can hunt all the time. You got lots of tags from Texas. So when I moved here, there was as much opportunity.

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