Is there a reason ever given for why professional trackers are not utilized by these "research" groups?
I've wondered what people are talking about when they say "professional tracker".
There really isn't such a thing anywhere in bigfoot territory - a person who makes his living being paid to track animals. The closest occupation I can think of is big game guiding. But these people are paid by producing (real) dead animals and not tracking per se. Any decent hunter or trapper with a lot of years' experience can track various animals with the same skill so there isn't anything gained by specializing in tracking alone that makes someone marketable as a specialized "tracker". In the pacific northwest where bigfoot is alleged to be anyway.
So "tracker" is mythical lore, not reality, and one that was exploited by Roger Patterson in his filming of bigfoot at Bluff Creek in 1967. He had a part-Indian, Bob Gimlin, that by virtue of that partial blood alone was cast as his Indian Tracker. Bob lived in a subdivision of Yakima, and it is safe to say he never made a penny in the fabled "tracker" industry his entire life. But the publisher of the paper first reporting that most famous event was in on the hoax with a wink and a nod as a means of bringing notoriety to Eureka and the Times-Standard circulation.
Were 'footers to hire someone with bona fide tracking skills, now the problem is there aren't any bigfeet in existence and the only tracks for him to follow have been hoaxed. So they're going to be isolated runs, coincidentally in the best soil condition for tracks, starting nowhere and ending nowhere that a nonexistent animal of that immense size would be.
Someone who can follow tracks is going to bring with him a whole set of skills that matter to him in tracking. What do they eat, where do they sleep, where is their water, their minerals, and how they get from one to the other. Their traffic corridors.
So look at the Elbe Trackway for example where the 'footers tried to frame it as remote and sensible for the ecology of the place. Yet with google earth you can show the highway, the railroad yard running parallel with it, restaurant, hotel, gas station etc. a hundred feet away, the loooooong stretch of road from which all of the traffic would have seen an 800 lb animal strolling in plain view... a person with objective wildlife experience is going to say the tracks and story don't make sense. Even were he convinced, he is going to stay there and keep looking. Because if they are there, you will find them. But the first rule in bigfootery is that the instant you see one, run away and never come back to that spot again as long as you live.
So even if they existed in the sense of the "tracker" lore, he's about the last person you want on your team.
