Down South, when men call out their dogs, it’s usually to hunt man-sized prey: deer, bear, maybe wild boars, coons and possums. Even the pint-sized beagle chases after prey appropriate to its size — the prolific cottontail that tests a dog’s mettle through bramble and briars before the dog drags it into the kitchen to flavor up a stew.

Up in New York City, where huntable animals don’t exist outside of cages, they’re siccing dogs on a quarry you wouldn’t believe: the bedbug

Your granddaddy knows what a bedbug is, even though he might have called it a “cheench,” which is standard Southern pronunciation for “chinch.” When people of his generation piled their bedding and other furnishings on a stake-body truck to move to a new home, the vehicle was commonly called a “cheench wagon.”

I don’t know what ever happened to the bedbug, a pesky little bloodsucker that turned up even in the cleanest homes. I turned around one day and it was gone. Went North, I reckon, with a lot of other job-seeking Southerners. Maybe it figured the Southern hide was too tough for its choppers and went looking for tenderer meat.

Now the chinch has found a home in the Big Apple, and the Yankees there are trying to evict it through bedbug hunts.

We used to have bedbug hunts down South. It was a bedtime ritual every day to search under the rolls at the edges of mattresses and zap anything that moved. Sometimes we used bug sprays — smelly, petroleum-based liquids with names like Sinclair, Gulf and Flit. They smelled awful and were about as hard on the sleepers as they were on the bedbugs. So a lot of us relied on the wood-chip method. Directions: Go to the woodpile and bring back a couple of chips that are smooth on the barkless side. Place bedbug on Chip A. Place smooth side of Chip B on top of bedbug. Mash. The kill rate was something close to 100 percent, and we reserved our dogs for more honorable pursuits.

New York City doesn’t have many woodpiles, and the price of petroleum has gone through the roof since the lady in the radio commercial called, “Quick Henry; the Flit!” So New Yorkers started calling the city’s 311 hotline. Nearly 7,000 bedbug complaints were logged during the fiscal year that ended last June. At first the 311 folks followed the standard citified answer to social problems: They held seminars.

Then they discovered the wonders of the canine nose, and began organizing bedbug hunts. Maybe one of them heard the Bluegrass refrain about the Tennessee hound dog that flatlanders were prone to put down: “But he’s got more sense in the end of his nose than they’ve got in their heads.”

Anyhow, somebody down in Florida (that’s Long Island South) began training dogs to sniff out bedbugs.

Now Advanced K-9 Detectives has six dogs in the Big Apple engaged in the hunt for bedbugs. Among them are Radar — a beagle — and Taz, an Australian kelpie. Both were rescued from animal shelters just before their dates with the needle. .

The beagle is your standard rabbit dog. If the Southern black- mouthed cur is a full-sized hound, the beagle is a compact. The Australian kelpie is a mid-sized herding dog. Bedbug hunters don’t have to come with pedigrees. All they need is a good nose, high intelligence, and a friendly disposition. Such dogs have begun earning big bucks for their owners, which translates into longer and more comfortable life spans for themselves, with plenty of dog treats for them. Carl Massicott, the brains behind Advanced K-9 Detectives, says he prefers smaller dogs because they can get around in tighter spaces. A smart mutt can check out a hotel room in less than two minutes.

The training method is simple. You give the dog a variety of aromas to whiff, and when he comes to Eau de Bedbug, you give him a treat. Repeat this enough times and the dog will signal you every time he smells a bedbug.

Dogs have also been trained to sniff out drugs, explosives, mold and other contraband. There’s even hope that they will be able to sniff out cancer in human tissues, allowing doctors to make earlier, lifesaving diagnoses.

One of the more intriguing talents in the canine nose is the ability to sniff out cows in heat.

Lawrence J. Myers, professor of veterinary science at Auburn University, has said that the dogs are better at this task than bulls are. But the bulls owe the dogs no gratitude as matchmakers. The lovelorn cows so identified are artificially inseminated.

I’m certainly glad that Taz and Radar escaped with their lives and found lucrative careers as hunting dogs.

But I’m sure they would be happier hunting rabbits and deer among the fields and woodlands of the South than they are sniffing out bedbugs in New York tenements and penthouses. I’m sure, too, that the bulls would prefer to find their own cows and to sire their calves the old-fashioned way.

As for those bedbug-plagued New Yorkers, some entrepreneur from Dixie might start a profitable business selling them wood chips.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson, SC 29621, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.