It’s Hunting Time, and South Goes to the Dogs : Tradition: Suburbanites face invasions by deer hounds and their armed owners. Legislators refuse to curb hallowed custom.

Barks and yelps cut through the still autumn air as the hounds crash through the woods in furious pursuit of a deer. Following close behind is the hunter, high-powered rifle at the ready.

Suddenly, the deer, frantically seeking an escape route, and the dogs, invigorated by the chase, burst out of the woods, into a clearing--and onto the property of an angry, frightened homeowner.

On hearing the sharp crack of the rifle, the startled homeowner always has one hope--that a horse, cow or family member is not the accidental target.

This scene is played out countless times here and in neighboring states as the leaves turn and the dew gives way to frost. It is hunting time in the South.

In Mississippi and other Southern states, dogs have been used for decades to flush out deer. But now the traditional practice is literally running right over new suburban developments.

“I’ve sat on the porch and watched them chase deer onto my property,” said Don McNair, an insurance salesman who lives on the outskirts of Meridian. “There’s not much you can do. You can’t go and talk to the dog.” He said he hesitates to confront the deer-dog hunters because he is “afraid they’ll burn my house down.”

Ben Mattox, a retired telephone company worker who has lived in DeKalb for 20 years, bitterly gestured around his tree-lined lot. “I can’t even have my grandchildren out here on Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s too dangerous. It’s getting worse every year.”

Deer-dog hunting is already under way in Georgia and begins today in Alabama and Mississippi. In this state, a second season also starts on Christmas Eve, with a separate season in between for hunters without dogs, the so-called “still” hunters.

The passion that surrounds the debate over deer-dog hunting seems limitless. It includes numerous tales of gun-to-gun confrontations, charges of arson, physical attacks, maimed livestock and sideswiped vehicles and has resulted in heated legislative fights over whether the sport should be banned or curbed.

The battle is in many ways a clash of an old tradition and a new reality that includes shrinking public hunting space, increased residential development of wooded areas and a fledgling belief that hunting is not sacrosanct. And, although property owners say the dispute simply centers on the violation of their property rights, supporters of deer-dog hunters portray it as a case of new, landed gentry trying to oppress common folks upholding an old Southern tradition.

“The dog hunter in the state of Mississippi is the less affluent,” said state Rep. Dick Livingston, a deer-dog hunter who is chairman of the House Game and Fish Committee. “They are the factory workers and the carpenters and the bricklayers. They probably wouldn’t be as educated” as the still hunters, who are “the bank executives, the insurance executives, the lawyer, the doctor.”

Livingston said: “It’s in a sense the little guy versus the big guy.”

For years, property owners have complained about encroaching hunters and, last year, John Stack III, a business professor at the Meridian branch of Mississippi State University, started an organization called the Mississippi Property Rights Assn., which mounted a nonstop lobbying and educational effort to change laws and minds on the subject.

Because of his efforts, hunters throughout the South find themselves increasingly on the defensive, although experts say their numbers are so large and include so many powerful public officials that a total ban on deer-dog hunting is virtually impossible. About 250,000 people hunt deer in Mississippi, 200,000 in Alabama and 284,000 in Georgia.

Stack, an energetic man who can talk for hours about deer dogs, is a hunter himself, but he, like many others, makes distinctions between hunters who hunt in designated areas and the “outlaws” who trespass and endanger lives and property.

While driving his van over the red-dirt back roads of Lauderdale County here in eastern Mississippi, Stack contended that many deer-dog hunters not only trespass but also further violate the law by firing weapons across roads--a despised practice known as “road hunting.”

“They’re a public nuisance,” Stack said, “like cigarette smoke or noise or odors or anything else.” The hunt is so intoxicating, Stack said, that “they go into a trance when they see a deer. They get ‘buck fever.’ All they see is deer, nothing else.”

Stack is a bit more charitable toward the deer dogs, usually hounds but often strays or dogs adopted from the pound. He does not blame the animals for ignoring “No Hunting” signs and running onto people’s property.

“Dogs can’t read,” Stack said. “That’s one of the biggest education problems in Mississippi.”

According to experts, the dogs lead two lives: On the one hand, they are loved for their talent and pampered for the hunt. (“A guy might not care if you shoot his wife,” said Stack, only half jokingly, “but don’t mess with his deer dog.”) But often, say the experts, the animals are abandoned if they are caught on someone’s property. “Ain’t my dog,” goes the refrain.

Deer-dog club houses dot the woods in rural areas. At one in Moscow, Miss., a small gray frame building with a barbecue grill outside and long picnic tables and a television set inside, a dozen hounds behind a fence howled greetings at strangers.

Stan Rawson of the Mississippi Hunting Dog Assn. complained that “we’ve been portrayed as bloodthirsty,” but “I get more pleasure out of having my dogs run than I do pulling the trigger.”

Rawson, who at 36 has been hunting for 25 years, said he “wouldn’t do anything intentionally to be on anybody’s property that doesn’t want me to be on it. Neither would I intentionally do anything that would allow my dogs to get on somebody else’s property.” However, he added, there is “no way” anyone can exert complete control over dogs.

Besides, said Rawson, there are “a lot more problems with domestic house dogs” destroying livestock than there are with deer dogs. Similarly, he said, very few deer-dog hunters violate the law, and very few property owners complain. “Peaceful coexistence,” he said, should be the goal of both sides.

Not likely. Property owners tell myriad stories of invading deer dogs and of intimidation by their owners.

Lois Strebeck, a genealogist in Decatur who carries a clipboard to record license plates and document abuses, said her mailbox has been bashed and livestock killed, and drunk hunters have staggered onto the road in front of her car.

Once, when she confronted trespassers, she said, she was asked: “Ms. Strebeck, how would you like to have your place burned down?”

Law enforcement officials in several states said they face great difficulty in making cases against violators. The general procedure is for property owners to alert the local sheriff that violations are taking place.

But, usually by the time officials arrive on the scene, hunters listening to police radios have alerted one another and stopped the activity or left the scene. “They are tough to catch,” said Gib Johnston, a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, which has 250 law enforcement officers to patrol hunting areas. “There are so few of us and so many of them.”

Similarly, in Alabama, which has 130 officers under its Game and Fish Division, Keith Guyse, assistant chief of the wildlife section, said the mobility and technology of outlaw hunters make the laws “difficult to enforce.”

And, here in Mississippi, Dan Tullos, chief of enforcement for the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks, which has 200 officers in the field, said “we could clean up” the problems with stronger hunting laws.

But stronger laws seem unlikely. Stack has drawn up legislation that would restrict dog-hunting to hunting sites with at least 1,000 acres, an idea that Livingston said will never make it through his committee because all of his colleagues oppose it.

Moreover, said Livingston, placing restrictions on deer hunting would have a “devastating effect” on Mississippi’s economy, which derives $500 million from hunting of all kinds. “Spinoff” businesses that depend on hunters, such as sporting goods stores, dog food producers and gasoline stations, would suffer huge losses, he said.

But the frightened landowners say the price they pay in fear each year is far greater than any such losses.

Stack is threatening a class-action suit to stop deer-dog hunting and has mounted a spirited letter-writing campaign to lawmakers and newspapers around the state. Nevertheless, his allies seem resigned to defeat, for now, citing tragedy in the woods as their best hope for bringing change.

Over lunch in downtown Meridian, Gloria Smith Moran of Harrison County, down on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, said matter of factly: “There’ll have to be a death before something is done. And I don’t want to be it.”

Albert Jackson of Wiggins, Miss., who also was at the lunch, agreed, adding, “People living in rural Mississippi need combat training.” Then, after thinking a moment, he said: “Matter of fact, I’d prefer to be in a combat situation where I knew they were going to fire at me and I could fire back.”