Shed Hunting

Four antlers are out on a course you have never walked, hidden well enough that your dog has to use their nose to find them. The clock starts when the dog crosses the gate. Bring all four back and the fastest team wins.

What we run

A shed event is four hunts — two a day. Each hunt is its own event with its own purse, and there is no overall weekend winner. Enter the hunts you want.

The course is roughly 50 yards square, marked with ribbon: one color along the boundaries, two colors at each corner. Every team hunts the same course and the same four hides. You have eight minutes to bring all four antlers back, delivered to hand. Time starts when your dog crosses the start gate and stops when you have the last antler and call time.

Delivered to hand means the dog gives it up on their own. No prying it loose, no using the antler as a handle, and hands off the dog until they release it. Antlers you have already found ride with you — in hand or in the shoulder bag we supply — and never get thrown or set back down on the course.

Your dog needs to be hunting already

This is a competition, not a clinic. Your dog should already be working a field on their own, hunting antler scent, and bringing back what they find. There is no intro hunt, no trainer on the course, and eight minutes on the clock is not a training session.

You walk, you do not run. If the judge decides your pace is too fast, you get one warning — after that you are excused without a refund, and you have to stay in the judge's view the whole hunt. Once your dog is working scent, handling is the sport: whistle stops, directional casts, and putting yourself where a recall pulls the dog through the cone of odor are all fair game.

E-collars can stay on the dog. Before you cross the gate the remote either goes to the hunt judge or stays at the start gate — your choice, and one left at the gate is not available once you are hunting, so make that call knowing it. Using the collar ends the hunt and is recorded DNF: no official time, no ranking, no share of that hunt's purse, entry fee stays in it, and your other hunts are untouched. Asking the judge for the remote is not a fault and nothing follows from it — it is you ending your turn to get your dog back under control, and we would rather you did that than not. Telling the judge you are done and going to collect your dog yourself is exactly the same outcome, so nobody needs to weigh up which one they are in. Nothing else with a battery comes on the course — no phone, no watch, no camera. Leave it at headquarters or in your vehicle, or hand it over at the line. Rewarding happens off the course, no closer than the staging area, and with your own antlers rather than competition ones. Praise on the course is free.

Five ways to win every hunt

Placements use a floating percentage group. Once every team has run, all dogs whose handlers brought back all four antlers are ranked fastest to slowest and split into five equal groups — the top 20%, the next 20%, and so on down. The fastest time inside each of those groups takes that group's share of the purse.

That means you are not chasing the one dog on the property who clears the course in three minutes. You are racing the dogs who hunt at your dog's speed, and there are five paydays on the table in every hunt. Half of the money a hunt takes in goes back out as prize money, and every group carries the same share — winning the slowest group pays exactly what winning the fastest group pays. From a field of eleven dogs up, that share is worth more than the entry fee that bought it.

Entering an event

Pre-registration is $38 per dog per hunt. Day-of entry is $43, cash or card, open until one hour before that hunt starts. One entry per dog per hunt, and no more than two dogs per handler in the same hunt.

There is a mandatory handler's briefing before each hunt covering course location, staging areas, and running order — briefing times go up on the event page. Running order comes out of a random draw. We will try to separate your dogs, but if they land back to back, lining up a second set of hands is on you.

Nobody walks the course ahead of time. At the gate the judge gives you the boundaries, the corners, the terrain, and anything to avoid, and that is what you take in with you.

The full rulebook below covers antler standards, scenting, scoring, tie breakers, and everything else that decides a close hunt.