biganimal, until you hear a pack of beagles or walkers (or blue-ticks, or black and tans, lol) howling and running something at you (or anywhere else for that matter) through the swamps or the Tunica hills, and hear the echos of those dogs, ona cold frosty foggy morning, you have missed a beautiful song.
Now to the nitty gritty...................the kill is FAR from ASSURED! In fact there are probably just as many if not more deer that hit the ground during still hunt only as during dog season. The kind of dogs depends on the terrain also. In the hills beagles seem to be better because you can catch them after they jump. In the swamps the other hounds seem better because they are bigger and can take shallow water and mud better than a beagle. Usually the ole buck slips off or rockets away and no one even sees him, after the dog jumps him. The dogs may then end up running a doe. Its some kind of feeling to hear dogs coming at you running a deer, the blood is pumping and it turns out to be a doe. Oh well next time.
Usually the dogs will jump a deer and it will light out at Mach one for a couple of hundred yards and slow, then stop, and listen and just move off slowly. I watched an old doe one day about 200 yards in front of the dogs slip down a creek bottom, stop look back and listen, then CIRCLE TWICE in a 20 yard radius, STOP and JUMP about 20 feet off to the side and then amble off. The dogs arrived a couple of minutes later, barking and hollering, noses to the ground, made the circle and headed back the way they came, cold trailing. Who says deer are not smart? She had probably used that trick dozens of times to outwit the dogs. I do not know how many states still allow dogging for deer, but Louisiana is one, and so is Mississippi. There is some terrain in both of these states that almost make it necessary to use dogs, if one hopes for any chance of success.