The Moingona Hunt club follows all of the traditional rules of the fox hunt — except for catching the foxes.

“It’s no longer a kill sport,” said Monte Antisdel, Master of the Foxhounds for the club. “If it was, we would lose a number of our riders.”

Antisdel said the Moingona Hunt is a horseback riding club that enjoys watching hounds work and enjoys riding on weekend mornings.

“It’s really a social club that likes horses and hounds,” said Camie Stockhausen, program assistant for the ISU Research Foundation and member of the club. “In the three years I’ve been hunting, we’ve never caught anything.”

The club owns 35 hounds, mostly crossbred foxhounds, Antisdel said. The hounds are housed in kennels south of Norwalk and are cared for by kennelman who lives nearby.

The job of the hounds is to catch the scents of coyotes and foxes and track them.

“We have a pack of hounds that follow a scent, mainly coyote,” Antisdel said. “Our hounds run 20-25 mph. Coyotes are clocked in the neighborhood of 35-40 mph. Usually the coyote runs out of country we have permission to hunt on.”

Sightings can be few and far between.

“We can go two to three hunts without spotting any game,” said Kevin Graham, an ISU alumnus from Marion. “Coyotes are very weary, wily animals.”

Typically, there are anywhere from 15 riders to the 57 riders that rode during the opening hunt on Sept. 20, Graham said.

People can join the Moingona Hunt as social or riding members. The riders own the horses they use, and social members do not have horses, Graham said.

“They also attend trail rides when we’re not hunting,” Antisdel said. “Often they hill-top in cars to watch the hunt.”

Antisdel said there are currently 103 different membership classifications in the club. Members can join as individuals or obtain a family membership classification.

“For a family membership there could be four people in the family who hunt,” he said. “That puts us at around 160 people with the families.”

Junior classifications are available for members who are under 22 or in college and members of other hunt clubs can obtain affiliate memberships to ride with the Moingona Hunt, Antisdel said.

There are several members of the club who have specific duties. The master of fox hounds is in charge of controlling the kennels where the hounds are kept when they aren’t hunting. Antisdel, his wife Melissa, and Roy Kipper, a veterinarian, are the three masters for the Moingona Hunt.

“Melissa and I are also huntsmen,” Antisdel said. “We hunt the hounds and are the ones carrying the horn and in control of the pack of hounds.”