Interview with Meat Eater’s Janis Putelis

Family Man, Hunter, and Big Game Houndsman

Well Folks, the day has finally arrived! Full Cry Magazine, under new ownership and restored to its former glory, is in your hands and if you are like me, the allure of a magazine that caters to your passions and lifestyles is thrilling. Magazines in themselves have become rare. Digital media, and social media have to a large degree taken over, and in some ways have connected us all to a degree that our parents and grandparents could never dream of. Still, there is something about a real magazine, and the gathering of ideas and opinions, that is just exciting. On that note, it is my pleasure to introduce a man who is on the cutting edge of social media, and digital media. He is a producer of the Meat Eater media company as well as star of his own show under the Meat Eater umbrella. He is an avid hunter and fisherman and recently became a big game hound hunter with his young bluetick Mingus. Janis Putelis is my guest today. Janis will share with the readers of the new Full Cry Magazine his motivation for becoming a houndsman as a grown ass man!

BY BARRY “BEAR” SIRAGUSA

Bear Siragusa (B): Janis Putelis! Thanks for agreeing to this. I have wanted to talk to you for a while about you and your hound Mingus.

Janis Putelis (JP): Yeah, it’s always weird that I get requests to talk about me, hound hunting, and my hound, because I’m like the least experienced hound hunter out there (laughs), but I am more than happy to talk about it.

B: Well, that is part of what makes it interesting though right? Unless I am mistaken, you don’t have any family history of hound hunting do you?

JP: Nope, no hound hunting and no dog breeding or dog hunting in general.

B: You just had a great series of videos come out on Meat Eater about Latvia. Your whole family is Latvian. Is there any kind of tradition there for hunting with hounds?

JP: I don’t think they ever used hounds over there. I didn’t see them anyway. They do have something that they may have called a hound, that they use to hunt moose. I would really like to try that. The dog basically bays the moose up, and then you sneak in and try to get a shot at it while it is bayed. The interesting thing is that the moose doesn’t always just sit there and let you walk in. You actually have to sneak in there and get the wind right, otherwise the moose will know you are coming, and they will run, and moose are marathon athletes. They just keep going and going and going. Other than that, they only had dogs for the driven hunts. Oh, and obviously blood trailing, they had blood trailing dogs.

B: Is it a requirement that the hunting clubs have a stable of blood-trailing dogs like it is required here [the author lives in Norway]?

JP: I didn’t hear about any requirement, but the club I was at had about 45 members and most of them had dogs that could blood trial. I don’t know if it was a requirement or not.

B: So, no family history, no cultural history for it (hound hunting). Then how did this happen? What made you get a hound at the stage in your life and career that you are in?

JP: The whole family was looking for a dog. We decided it was time for a dog and I had been researching dogs and I was pretty stuck on having a small dog. I had fished with a Jack Russel. They are smart and can do a lot of different things. There is one on Instagram that retrieves waterfowl! So I wanted a small dog because small dogs take up less room, don’t eat a lot, less poop, easy to travel with, good personalities... So anyways, I was researching all kinds of dogs. I had a friend that was breeding wire-haired (pointers) at the time, and he offered me a puppy of his. So I was looking at those. I was all over the place! Eventually my kids got sick of me researching dogs and were like “look bro, as long as it has fur and at least three legs we are in” (laughs), so we started looking at shelters too. I wanted a dog I am into as well. That I can train. That I can do things with. Which will allow me to be a bit more into the dog.

B: That makes sense.

JP: Yeah, so I get a phone call one day, and my wife tells me that they are on their way to the Stafford Shelter over in Livingston, Montana, and there are three blue-ticked coonhound puppies and that if I want any part of picking the puppy that I should get down there. On the way, as I was driving, I called my buddy Jake, who has been my main mentor when it comes to hound hunting. I called him and told him about these pups and he was like “Yeah, probably! If it’s a hound it will hunt. I’ll help you with it.” We picked out the runt, and the chillest of the puppies. So, that’s how I became the owner of a bluetick coonhound.

B: There are a lot of coincidences involved in that story! Once you had a blue tick puppy, what made you decide to run with it and start training him on big game?

JP: Well, I am a big believer that dogs need to be wellexercised if you want them to be good dogs at home. You run in to so many misbehaved continued on pg 34 dogs and I feel like it’s because they are not getting enough exercise. So the stars aligned and I had a hound and a good friend who is a great hound hunter who would teach me. I like getting outside my own comfort zone and this seemed like a perfect way to do it.

B: What does your buddy hunt?

JP: Mostly lions and bobcats. It seems to me that a lot of people start on lions, then move towards the bobcats because there is value to the hides and you can kill multiple in a season. Whereas, with lions, it seems like they don’t see the need to kill multiple. With the bobcats, they are trickier to catch, Mingus and I still have not caught one on our own. We have been in on a couple with other packs, but never on our own.

B: How did you start training Mingus?

JP: We started on coons. I took him down to Arkansas and hunted him with colleague and friend Clay Newcomb, and Mingus had his first 3 or 4 real trees down there. I also did the thing where you trap a coon and drag the trap around and then put the trap with the coon in a tree so that he gets the idea to look up. What’s funny is that trailing is built into them (the hounds), but trailing up a tree is not always built in to them. It can take a little bit before they learn to put two and two together and figure out that when the track ends at a tree, then there is a cat up in it.

B: I wanted to ask you about that. You had a hunt with Mingus where you actually lifted his head and pointed it at the cat in a tree. Can you tell me about that?

JP: Yeah, that’s right. It was actually the first lion that he saw. Second or third tree he had been to. We had spent an hour the previous week at a tree under a lion and he just couldn’t figure it out. The lion was hard to see. There was another puppy there too that couldn’t figure it out either. So a week later we found ourselves in the same situation, except this time the cat is more in the open. After ten or fifteen minutes I was like “really?! Can it be that you still can’t see this thing right there in front of you?”

I put his feet on the tree and his nose on the tree, but I just wasn’t clicking. He wasn’t going to bark treed. So finally, I took his head and pointed it up, and I felt his head shake as he locked in on this cat and he let out a big location bawl, and let me know he had found it.” (laughs) will sometimes visually track, bark, and sometimes chase airplanes. We happen to live under a flightpath, and he will sit and watch the sky and run up the hill and bark at the planes. I don’t know what it means!

B: (laughing) The best part about that story is that method never ever works.

B: What is your everyday game at this point? Is it lion or bobcat or do you hunt coons as a daily- bread kind of game?

JP: The cat season goes from December to April here, so that is a good bit of time to spend doing it. If I had nothing else going on in life, no kids or wife or anything, I would do it more. We actually have a decent coon population here. I always say I am going to but then fall rolls around and it’s time to go big game hunting. During the summer we run and hike a lot together. The fall is the worst time of year for Mingus, because I am gone and he doesn’t get to come. So December is when we get after it again.

B: One thing that fascinates me is that you jumped in to this without any kind of experience with working dogs of any kind or even much experience with dogs in general, correct?

JP: 100 percent.

JP: I know! That’s what my buddy Jake said! When he saw me doing it, he said “Dude, I have tried it a hundred times and it doesn’t work.” What is interesting with Mingus is that he is visually oriented. Like he

B: That must have had its challenges. You had to learn every aspect of what you were doing basically from scratch.

JP: Yeah, I guess so. Being so new to this though, I wouldn’t recognize the challenges.

B: Do you hunt alone with Mingus or do you hunt mainly with a pack?

JP: I like both. With the right pack your chances go up to catch. The wrong pack, your chances will probably go down. The reason I have hunted him alone a lot this past year is that I wanted to make sure that Mingus was doing it on his own. Then I could watch him and get to know him. Then when he caught a lion I knew 100% that he did the work. I think that is a benefit of hunting him alone is that it forces him to do the work himself. There’s no just catching up to the rest of the pack. It’s a different adventure to do it solo, but it’s also fun to do it with friends. Now That I know he can do the work himself, I know I can trust him. Although, he still like’s to run fox and coyotes sometimes!

B: What are you plans now? Will you keep him just on cats or will you get him on some black bear as well?

JP: I am not that interested in running the bears. I like the spot and stalk hunting. I would love to take him on a coon hunting tour. Get down into some traditional coon country where a lot of people do it, and experience the culture around it.

B: I hope you do and I hope you film it!

JP: There are people from here that drive north a long ways to catch Lynx in Canada. We still haven’t caught a bob cat here in our back yard, so I want to do that before I drive 15-20 hours to go catch pretty much the same thing.

B: We hunt lynx here in Norway; they are the only cat we can hunt here.

JP: Are you allowed to chase? Are there training seasons?

B: There is no training season. You can run track them, but you can’t drop a hound without running the risk of being accused of wildlife harassment. We do some work with researchers, but they often use a large version of a have-a-heart trap to trap and collar them.

JP: Nice

B: So, are you planning on just Mingus as you move continued on pg 36 forward here? Will you eventually look to build a pack? Or will you stay at the single family member, versatile hunting companion level?

JP: I would like to bump it to two for sure. There is a little bit of safety in numbers. Two dogs are more intimidating, and if a cat stays on the ground, maybe two will be less likely to provoke an attack. We also have wolves, but we won’t drop the dogs if we know they are in the area. My wife is happy with just Mingus, so for the time being it will just be Mingus and myself.

B: How is the situation with wolves there? I have talked to guys in the UP of Michigan who have lost half of their packs, or even their entire packs, in the matter of a few days. Are you bumping into a lot of wolves with Mingus? Is that something you have experienced?

JP: We have not yet. We cut tracks, a lot of times it’s a single, which I don’t worry nearly as much about. Last winter I cut the tracks of a whole pack two times, and I just vacate the area. There I no reason to play with fire. It’s always in the back of my mind, and I think it is a risk you have to be willing to take. I haven’t heard many stories of a pack of hounds running into a pack of wolves and making it out. Those wolves seem to beat them up pretty good pretty fast.

B: Yeah, we have had some issue with that here in Norway. We have had a couple of instances where a pair of wolves have specifically targeted hunting dogs. There was a breeding pair that killed 15 dogs before they were themselves removed. Mingus is a big hound though.

JP: Yeah, he’s 80 pounds which is why I don’t think he is a true bluetick coonhound, because they seem to be a little bit shorter than he is. They can weigh 80-90 pounds but he has the height and very long legs. When he curls up he gets pretty compact.

B: There were ripples of excitement in the hound community when you got Mingus. It’s like Clay Newcomb says, we hound hunters are the low hanging fruit. When the anti’s come after us, it is real easy to go after the hound hunters. So, the excitement was real when you got Mingus because it gave us the feeling that it was becoming maybe more mainstream.

JP: Well, sometimes it is hard to promote this because, like any hunting, you don’t want more competition and finding lion tracks is what it takes to catch lions. The more people who get into it means more people at trail heads and checking canyons. So it’s a real catch 22.

B: That makes sense. You want to makes sure that the lifestyle lasts, so you want to do the recruitment stuff, but at the same time it means more competition. I have a question about the nuts and bolts of the hunting you do over there. Are you allowed to use trail cameras there?

JP: Yeah, we can.

B: Is that something you utilize as you’re hunting cats? Or is it mostly driving for tracks?

JP: Mostly tracks. This past season I decided to start carrying a camera or two with me because when you find a fresh kill, it’s great to throw up a camera and see what kind of activity you get. So I will do it for that. I don’t know if it would be legal to plan hunts based off of trail cam photos, especially the cell-cams. I would have to check what the rules are here in Montana.

B: That is interesting. We can hunt based off of trail cam pictures that are taken the same day. Our collared cats won’t give us information [after] a full 30 days has passed, to avoid people using the collars to track them down in a hunting situation.

JP: Yeah, unless you were capturing it for the research, I could see that. But if you were out there for the sport of it you would be taking a lot of the sport out.

B: Well, I know you are insanely busy. I appreciate you coming on and talking to me. It’s cool to see a mainstream