Dog Names Meaning Hunter

 Dogs that have names that mean hunter or huntress are frequently given to dogs whose primary job is going to involve tracking, hunting, or retrieving. That was the case for Winda, a German Shepherd that lived and worked in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness area in southern Montana, a vast area just north of Yellowstone National Park, full of jagged mountains and dense, dark forests with fewer trails than bears. Winda was trained as a search and rescue dog, with her handler Mark Polakoff, and she used her canine sense of smell to track and locate people who had gotten lost in these treacherous landscapes for over a decade before she passed away in 2014 at the age of fourteen. In one case, Winda and her handler were transported into the deep Absaroka wilderness by helicopter to find a man who had been missing for forty-eight hours. She was able to pick up a scent that was between twenty-four and forty-eight hours old. She worked the six and a half mile trail for over eight hours in the dark while light snow and freezing rain fell from the sky. Winda lead searchers far enough toward the missing hiker for the rescuers to find him and extract him from the woods, tired and hypothermic, but alive.

Yeager is another name that means hunter, this time in German, and it was the name given to the Labrador Retriever service dog that was paired with Sharon Yunker-Deatz, a woman with multiple sclerosis, whom Yeager helps with daily tasks. One summer day she took her dog to the beach so he could take advantage of the area designated for canine swimming, but when reports of an undertow had everyone calling their dogs in to shore, Yeager took off swimming in the other direction, uncharacteristically disobedient. Sharon began calling frantically to her dog, fearing for his safety, but he had seen something that nobody else had noticed: a young boy in danger of drowning, and he wasn’t going to let that happen. While Yeager did not actually drag the boy out of the water, his efforts alerted some of the adult men on the beach who were able to get the boy to shore, saving his life. For his immediate and self-sacrificing action toward an unknown person, Yeager was honored with the first annual Dog of Valor: Working dog group in 2008 by the American Humane Society.