To a dog-hunter, nothing is sweeter than the song of his hound on the chase. The sound floats up from the swamp, ringing through the bright morning air like chimes from a steeple.

But to the landowner whose property the dogs cross, the same sound may be cause to get the shotgun. Property owners complain about animals and hunters trespassing, about dogs harassing domestic animals, and about the dogs running the deer out of the county.

In recent years, the sport of hunting deer with hounds has taken a controversial turn. Hunters are hanging onto their traditional ways of pursuing their sport. But increasing numbers of people in Florida, and urban encroachment onto historic hunting grounds, have set the stage for conflict.

Though no one has written a definitive history of the use of hounds to hunt deer, aficionados have traced the practice back almost 100 years. Robert Snyder, president of the South Florida Dog Hunters Association, says he's talked to hunters who remembered hunting with dogs early in this century.

"It goes back as far as we can talk to people," he says. "At least back into the 1930s. It's always been here in south Florida."

Frank Montalbano, Director of the Division of Wildlife for the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission, concurs. "It seems reasonable to me that as deer populations became depressed sometime after 1900 because of unregulated harvest, that the use of dogs would have become more popular. Using dogs very much increases the efficiency of hunters where deer populations are low." Though modern management and regulated hunting seasons have brought back deer populations to huntable--and even overabundant--levels, the use of deerhounds has remained popular.

Snyder describes the way he uses his hounds. "We'll go out early in the morning and take the dogs out of the pens and load them in the pickup truck," he says. "We go out to a section of the woods, say the J. W. Corbett Wildlife Management Area."

Snyder then puts the dogs into a swamp buggy and finds an area where he knows there are a lot of deer.

"One of the key things about using deer dogs is that you have to have a way of cutting the dogs off," he says. "If they start to run a doe--you can see the deer out there running and you know it doesn't have any antlers--you need to end the race as soon as possible. So we use an area that we know has a good road system in it."

One person drops the dogs off into the wind. Once the dogs begin to bark, Snyder and the other hunters drop "standers" off to try to intercept the deer, which is usually one-quarter mile or more ahead of the dogs.

In recent years, as Florida's population has increased, hunting lands have become harder to find. Areas that once were open to public access have become fragmented as new landowners have purchased small portions of them. This has greatly restricted the land open to hunting with dogs.

Too, still hunters have raised objections to sharing their hunting areas with dog-hunters. Nothing is more disheartening for a still hunter who has spent days scouting and planning for a hunting trip than to watch a pack of deerhounds working back and forth in front of his stand. Landowners and still-hunters alike accuse deerhounds of pulling down healthy deer and killing them, of running bucks and does indiscriminately, and of causing increased young-of-the-year mortality.

Snyder is sympathetic toward still hunters who have had run- ins with irresponsible dog-hunters.

"A lot of people like to stand hunt, and get involved with scents and tracking and scrapes and trails and feeding habits," he says. "A lot of times, deer dogs will disrupt that whole pattern if they cross onto that piece of property. It's pretty much ruined the still-hunter's whole hunt."

Even he has had still hunts spoiled by so-called hunters who just drop off dogs and let them run deer without making any effort to control where they go.

"People get upset when dogs cross onto their land, when their hunting style is entirely different," he says. "Hunters have got to have more control over their dogs than that."

The biggest problem, Snyder says, is the handlers of the dogs, not the dogs themselves.

"They may not be educated enough to their dogs, or not working them enough during the year," he says. "They don't know what the dogs are going to do. Then they lose the dogs and don't bother to go find them, and the dogs are just running around in the woods." Ideally, he says, handler and dogs should work so well together that if the dog gets too far away from the handler, it will break off the trail and come back.

Snyder says, too, that dog-hunters try to run hounds on tracts that simply are too small. He feels that a thousand contiguous acres is an absolute minimum, even for small dogs such as beagles.

Montalbano says that while the use of deerhounds in an area does seem to affect the deer population, the particular factors involved are not clear cut. And the supposed damage the animals cause does not appear to be as far-reaching as many still-hunters and landowners believe.

"There have been quite a number of studies done to assess the effects of dog-hunting on deer population," he says. "None of those have identified at all convincingly a biological mechanism by which dog-hunting depresses deer populations. But a fairly consistent thread running through these studies is that populations do tend to be lower where you have dog hunting."

The problem with this data, though, is that no one has been able to figure out why.

"Something that is associated with dog hunting is having the effect--that's very convincing," Montalbano says. "There are two possibilities. One is that there are biological effects such as increased fawn mortality, reduced pregnancy success and pregnancy rates, or higher adult mortality that don't occur at a high enough level to be detected by the studies that have been done. The other is that there is an associated activity that is not a function of dog hunting per se, such as noncompliance with the bucks-only rule, that might have an effect."

Among the studies that have been done, Montalbano says, was one in which biologists radio-collared deer and then allowed hounds to chase them. In most cases, the deer returned to their home ranges within 24 hours. That blew a hole in one of the still-hunters' objections to deerhounds, which is that hounds chase deer off an area for long periods of time.

Montalbano shakes his head at the notion that some dog-hunters put forth that a dog can discriminate between a doe and a buck.

"You hear all kinds of claims," he says. "But I'm not inclined to believe that. I think they're lucky if they have dogs that will consistently run deer instead of foxes or anything else they encounter."

Snyder disagrees. He says high-bred deerhounds can be trained to run only deer, and stay within a reasonable distance of the handler. Many hunters, however, use poorly bred, poorly trained dogs who don't understand what their handlers want them to do.

Montalbano also says deerhounds will indeed pull down a deer and kill it if they can. But he adds that this rarely happens with healthy deer.

"Studies have shown that this does happen," he says. "But it doesn't happen frequently."

Another side-effect of using deerhounds that is of more significance, he says, is that the chase itself may result in injury or death of an animal. "Deer are more likely to run out on a highway and get hit by a car, they're more likely to run into a fence and break a leg. And I think a good bit of what you'd describe as the taking down of deer occurs this way. The dogs catch a deer that is already injured."

All of these effects are minor, however, compared to the sociological problems involved with dog-hunting in Florida. By far the greatest challenges facing the sport are a result of trespass-type conflicts.

"The greatest problem is the ability of hunters to control their dogs," says Montalbano, "and to confine them to areas where they have the legitimate privilege of hunting. If anything ever brings an end to dog-hunting in the state, it will be the refusal of society to tolerate the trespass of hunting dogs on lands where landowners don't intend to allow that use."

Many hunters, eager to preserve their sport, are anxious to minimize this problem. In a move toward evaluating how to do this, they have pressured Commission biologists to help them find ways to reduce conflicts. At the request of many hunters, the South Florida Dog Hunters Association among them, the Commission has developed what it calls a "short-legged dogs" restriction on some of the Wildlife Management Areas. These dogs usually are beagles or beagle-crossbreed type dogs.

"One study done in Arkansas suggests that the radius of chase--the distance the deer will run--associated with these small dogs is less than that for traditional big dogs such as Walkers," says Montalbano. "It would seem to follow that you could accommodate dog hunting with these smaller dogs on smaller tracts of lands, and you could accommodate more hunters at the same time on a tract of land of any given size."

At this time, the program is in effect on the Tide Swamp WMA, and biologists are proposing regulations to hold a limited small-dog hunt on Three Lakes WMA. If the program reduces the problem of encroachment on private land, the Commission may look at expanding the program.

"One of our goals is to get dogs into Wildlife Management Areas where they haven't been allowed," Snyder says. "But we also want to assure the Commission that these dogs aren't going to be running off the management area onto someone else's property. We're trying to show them that when we come in to hunt an area we're not going to leave the woods until we leave with our dogs."

The problem with dog-hunting, then, seems to be less with the activity itself than with the behavior of some of the hunters involved. At a time when the very face of Florida is changing, dog-hunters will have to adapt their hunting style to the new situation. The failure to do so may put a great deal of the non- hunting public, and even many still hunters, squarely into the anti-hunting camp on this issue. That's not a scenario we can afford. The anti-hunters succeed by dividing and conquering; if dog-hunters who continue to engage in trespass activities don't clean up their act, the antis will stand a chance to make their first big inroad into hunting in Florida.

Snyder says the South Florida Dog Hunters Association tries, at every opportunity, to talk with hunters who fail to control their dogs adequately.

"We tell them that if we're going to continue to have free- running dogs in the state and create a better image for the dog- hunter, they have to work with their dogs," he says. "A lot of these guys just turn their dogs loose in the woods, and the people who are out there with them don't know the dogs. They don't try to get in front of them, or catch the dogs. It's a mess. You have to have an organized hunt when you're using dogs. You can't go out there with one or two people and expect to do anything."

So what does the future hold? Will the use of dogs to hunt deer be restricted or banned in the next 5 to 10 years?

Montalbano says the Commission is operating in a problem- solving mode where dog-hunting is concerned, not looking for a way to end it.

"The position that the Commission adopted a year ago would indicate that it's the Commission's intent to manage the activity for its perpetuation, rather than to eliminate it," he says. "And I think that's a clear and honest statement of what the five Commissioners who were sitting at the time intended. Whether or not dog-hunting survives in the state will be strictly a function of whether or not the agency can successfully manage the activity and persuade dog-hunters to manage their activities in a way that will minimize conflicts with the non-dog-hunting public. If they're not successful, I don't think if will be around very long. But I think if they'll regulate themselves and behave themselves, there's a good chance that dog-hunting will go on for a long time."