When you think about it, for any dog a deer is a large amount of yumminess, and pretty much any dog once it knows what the smell of a dead deer signifies will want to find it. That’s a dogs natural instinct and most dogs once shown will follow a big blood trail if they know the reward at the end.
Pretty much most training comes down to managing and honing that instinct so that it recognises the smell of deer blood and can follow the track of a wounded deer, vs the track of an unwounded animal.
Where the real skills come in is teaching a dog to track a certain animal based on the shot site smell of principally its hooves with minimal blood trail over a twisty track of a few kilometres.
Typically a gutshot animal, or even an animal shot a bit far back with a bullet that goes through the liver and into the rumen and fails to exit, or if it does, the exit gets blocked by guts, will leave a minimal blood trail. It’s such animals that a well trained tracking dog will find.
And its taking a dog to that level where the time, skill, knowledge and breeding comes in.
In exactly the same way there is a huge difference between the average lab or spaniel that is primarily a much loved member of the family that goes out shooting and will flush or pick up birds, compared to the professionally trained and worked dogs of those who pickup professionally five days a week.
As I have said earlier I have a BMH / Lab and have been very pleased with her, but she is by no means perfect. Principal reason was that I had seen a BMH / Lab before and liked the end result, and when the prospect of a litter came up here SD I followed up. Both her parents belonged to the keeper who had the litter, and both parents are really good dogs. And it was the parents, not necessarily their breeding, that the deciding factor.