FORESTBURGH — Spencer Gonzalez of Forestburgh has been hunting for 20 years. Three years ago, that love for hunting turned into a side business. After he and his wife adopted their dog, Dixie, who was three at the time, Gonzalez figured out he needed to find her something to do. 

“She’s a Dutch Shepherd and she needed a job,” Gonzalez said. “She was very, very hyper and I kept seeing online, on Facebook and on big TV shows all about game recovery using dogs.”

From there, the idea grew into training Dixie to be a game recovery dog. He said that he learned how to train her by reading books and articles online. From there, he would go out looking for roadkill and get blood and pieces of deer and bear to train with. 

“I would just drag them out, put blood out and we would just constantly train,” he said. “We trained for about a year and the test is given out annually or bi-annually by the DEC. I took the test and I passed. Shortly after, they sent my license.”

Gonzalez said that by law, he can’t charge anyone, but that he can accept donations; he has gotten anywhere from $20 to $250 in donations. He said he had business cards created by Steingart Printing and also just created a Facebook page called Gonzo’s Game Recovery. He also said that he gave his number to the local Environmental Conservation officers for the DEC and had some of them contact him saying that they have a hunter in need of assistance in locating a wounded deer. 

“I’m not in it for the money,” Gonzalez said. “I’m in it to help people find their deer, whether it’s somebody’s first year or somebody’s 50th year. I aim to find that deer.”

Gonzalez has also tracked and located bears, which he said are pretty difficult to track. But he said that, contrary to popular belief, bears are a lot easier to track than deer. That’s due to the fact their head is down lower to the ground and they have a paw instead of a hoof, so they give off a lot more scent. 

He also said that environmental factors such as rain, snow or humidity help to amplify the scent more and make it easier for the dog to track. 

“If the animal is dead, any dog will find it,” he said, referencing the scent of the rotting carcass. 

Gonzalez said that his longest track by overall time was 26 hours. He said that coyotes ate most of the deer, but the head was able to be recovered. The longest track by distance Gonzalez has done was 2.2 miles, and he said that they were ultimately unable to find the animal. He said that the hunter believed it was still alive. 

There were also times that Gonzalez tracked deer straight up hills and he said that one time, he found a deer in a pond on a little island. 

“We ended up ultimately calling the track after a couple hours of searching,” he said, “and then about a week later, the guy said, ‘Hey, I found my deer’ and sent me a photo. The deer was sitting in the middle of this farm pond on an island.”