Big Buck Canned Hunts

"Any one disagree?"

Yeah, somewhat; not totally. A helluva lot of the high-pay folks put in 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week. Lotta stress. Lotta fatigue that militates against "just getting outdoors" in country where you can see wild game.

All manner of different types of folks. For instance, think of some guy who's never been away from a city (I once had to teach a room mate how to drive a car; he was in Grad school, but being from Queens, NY, he'd always ridden the subway or a bus.). Never exposed to shooting. Now he's 25 or 30 and somehow gets inveigled into a hunting trip.

This guy, from the gitgo, is gonna deal with camping? Is gonna have a clue about still hunting or cross-country chousing about at 10,000 feet?

Be charitable. Nobody was born an expert anything.

Art
 
I gotta disagree with you Art. In my home state of Montana baiting game will draw you a healthy (and well deserved) penalty. I am an avid hunter. Avid enough to subsist mostly on venison. I am a meat hunter, sure, but have taken a number of very respectable bucks. But I have NEVER had my honor called into question as it invariably would be if I had shot deer in an enclosure or over bait.

If...and I mean IF, what these people are doing is okay by the standards of fair chase, why do so many people find it offensive? And don't tell me it's the money, because a similar amount can buy you a REAL hunt. A hunt with no bait. A hunt with a real chance for the animal to escape, not a high fence within which you can "pick up his trail" again, but a REAL chance of escape.

Don't get me wrong. It is OKAY to put down livestock (Even easily spooked livestock). That is what they were managed/raised for, but that is a "shoot" (like a pigeon shoot) not a hunt. Calling a shoot a hunt makes for a powerful taint. It is a taint that rubs off on us all.
 
rich mans sport

Last fall we were hunting a area we have hunted on and off a long tine. Everywhere on the fences we kept seeing signs posting that this was "Private" hunting areas.
This turned into a rather large area for miles spread out on any land that was in pasture or being farmed, and plenty of the sagebrush areas near. Up a draw on a hill was a monster new house we thought, but it turns out to be " the lodge".
Finally we ran into a couple of guys that were fixing fences so we ask if they know any info on all this. They hand us a brochure for a new hunting club.
I looked the web site up read the pamplet and it is a rich mans sport to hunt there. They have secured 29,000 acres, quite a bit I don't have the actuall numbers in front of me but it was about $4500 to join and a couple of hundred a day or more to hunt.
I don't know if they own the land or have a lease arrangment with the land owners either way and for several reasons I dont' care for this, and hope they go broke.
I am in SW Idaho with lots of open areas and public land to hunt but for how long and what about areas of the country with not much or no puplic land. Is this happening all over? My guess this is just the begining.
 
:) samsmix, I can show you places in the southeast where you absolutely cannot stalk. The undergrowth is just puredee too dense. Unless you're in old-growth forest, you can't see ten feet. I think of the riverbottom jungles along the lower Appalachicola River, and some timber-company land east of Tallahassee...

I can show you vast areas in the Texas brush country where, if you try to stalk, you'll wind up nekkid as a jaybird by day's end: Cactus, mesquite, catclaw, blackthorn acacia...I've killed deer in that country that had almost a total layer of thorns under the skin of their forelegs. You peel the skin back on the lower leg, and it's almost completely black from the mesquite and cactus thorns.

But I ain't in the bidness of rainin' on other folks' parades...

Art
 
But I have NEVER had my honor called into question as it invariably would be if I had shot deer in an enclosure or over bait.
Click to expand...
I see little moral difference between the guy who plants lots of red oak and apple trees and puts out deer forage seed in the clearings and the guy who uses a corn feeder. I may not hunt over a feeder but I'm not about to call anyone on using bait, since the line between using bait and not is very very fine indeed. Why is some bait (acorns and apples and forage) OK but corn feeders are not?

Secondly - at what point does a high fence enclosure cease to be considered fair chase? A hundred acres? Five hundred acres? A thousand acres? Two thousand acres? I'm certainly not going to look at a guy who still hunts on a thousand acre high fence ranch and tell him that he's really not hunting simply because he's chosen to manage his land in part via the use of high fences. I still hunt on a high fence ranch that's about 1600 acres in size. I can fully attest to the fact that it's most definitely 'fair chase', high fence or not.
 
Back, I dunno, maybe 40 years ago, the Michigan wildlife folks high-fenced a 100-acre tract that was heavily wooded and had a lot of understory. They stocked it to the limit of the land's carrying capacity for deer.

During the next deer season, they put a controlled number of hunters in the tract, carefully spaced.

As I recall from the article, the hunter success rate was around 3%. Yeah, three percent.

I hunted prairie dogs a couple of weeks back, about an hour or so east of Colorado Springs. Darned near like a pool table, and trees/brush were rare things. 2,000 acres would be easy pickings to see a deer. (Or antelope).

To me, then, the control for "fair chase" within high fencing is the terrain and the "growies" on the land. (Leaving out such ridiculous notions as some little 10-acre patch.)

Overall, for me, playing Sneaky Snake is the most fun for hunting Bambi.

:), Art
 
I hunt in the norther lower peninsula of Michigan, I have hunted the same area with my father and brother for the last four years. We hunt for three weeks of bow season and have yet to get even a doe, and we use bait! (its legal).

I know people that sit in blinds that have bait piles that are always there and they don't always get their deer.

Then I come on here and some guy from New York or Wisconsin that hunts in a corn field with a high powered rifle states that the way I hunt is cheap and unfair!

I use bait because I don't have 1000 acres of corn fields to "hunt" in. At best I can see 50 yards, without a bait pile to keep the deer busy I may not even see ONE deer (and a doe at that) for the whole season.
 
rbernie,
Just to get us on the same page, where I am from "bait" is determined to be any food crop not put there in the normal course of agriculture, as well as feed scattered or deposited by hand or machine. So a little patch of corn you never harvest, right next to the pond your duck blind is on...that's bait.
We grow litterally millions of acres of wheat and alfalfa in the course of normal agriculture here. These crops would not be considered bait, and shouldn't be, because there is just too much of it for it to act as a lure in any one place.

Art,
I'm sorry if I did not tread respectfully. While I am quite emphatic about the subject at hand, I was not trying to be offensive. I also am not saying that I would not take place in a "shoot". However, were I to bag a trophy animal this way, I would always end the tale with a "yeah...I sure wish I had been able to pursue such an animal on his terms." Or something to that effect.
When high nutrient feed is fed to animals in an enclosure, it has a predictable result: they get BIG. If one were to try to submit a pen-raised & pen-caught fish as a record book catch, he would be debunked as a fraud. Is it simply an attempt at falsifying glory. That does not mean that it is wrong to catch such fish, or indeed to shoot such animals, only that it is wrong to portray the act and the outcome as something it is not.
I am pretty new here, and thus far have been very much in agreeance with most of what you have to say, but I am afraid that here we muse agree to disagree. Of course since enlightened debate is one of the founding principals of our great nation, I intend to continuue enjoying your opinion, even if I do not agree with it.
 
Exotic animals are not native to North America. But they're thriving at game ranches across USA and parts of Canada. New Zealand, Australia, New Calodonia, South Africa, Argentina, and other nations also offer exotic hunts.

A trophy hunter can pursue European red stag, fallow deer or Indian axis deer + blackbuck. African sable, kudu, and gemsbok are available. Even endangered species such as addax, symitar-horned oryx, Eld's deer, and others are thriving at USA game ranches. There is a significant advantage hunting within USA as opposed to travelling overeseas.

Some of these game ranches offer shooting of fairly tame animals. This is controversial to say the least! Others (larger in size) have hunts which are challenging in terrain and getting close for a good shot.

I advise any hunter to take the time to research the game ranch thoroughly so it will match his expectations.

Good hunting to you.
Jack
 
I can understand the use of "bait" while hunting. I don't particularly care for nor approve what's going on with breeding programs and all the supplemental feeding in an effort to CREATE monster bucks.

Sure, build high fences to keep other deer out, in order to maintain a herd at the carrying capacity of the land. Sure, reintroduce native grasses, herbs and forbs which had been lost to farming or overgrazing. That, to me, is a rational interaction with ecosystems.

But that's not the limit of what's being done on "game ranches" which specialize in these multi-thousand-dollar hunts.

I suggest that in these discussions we keep stuff separate. Hunting over a feeder in a truly-wild-deer environment, I think, is different from being set out in in a stand on one of these game ranches. In the first, there's no guarantee that El Gigantico will ever show up; all you'll maybe see is a few does*. In the second, it's pretty well assured that big bucks will continue to show up at a place where they've been trained to expect Yummies.

Art

* Whitetail bucks generally don't eat much or often, once they're in rut. They subsist off the fat buildup that occurs in the late September and October "feeding frenzy". That's why a late-season buck's tallow is commonly a thin, yellow layer instead of thick and white. So, the does come to feeders and the larger bucks hang back in the brush, watching and waiting--and you might or might not see one. Little 4-point and 6-point bucks might show up, but they're generally too small to bother with.
 
Art,
I guess I never really looked at your profile. If I were from Texas instead of "Montucky" I might have been raised seeing things in a different light. I simply grew up with a different definition of free chase.

Now I do NOT mean this as a jibe, but up here we do refer to high fences, bait stations, food plots & high dollar pay for play as "Texas style" hunting, and it is usually spoken with disdain. I DO however see the need for fences in the case of exotics. It would not be the same as a real hunt in the real Africa, but I always wanted to plug a gemsbok, and TX might be on the list for that. Also, my wife and I might go on a Bison shoot next year, as the meat is wonderful. Also, we have no wild pork here in MT, soooo.....
 
Make sure when you sit down to the dinner table for some of that bison or gemsbok you say at the end of your prayer, and I quote you in saying, "yeah...I sure wish I had been able to pursue such an animal on his terms.".

Just to keep things on a level playing field.

God bless hunters of every kind!
 
samsmix, I'd bet a paycheck that all the high-fenced land in Texas wouldn't even come close to one percent of ranchland.

The O2 Ranch, for instance, south of Alpine, is low-fence. 200,000 acres on the west side of the highway, 100,000 acres on the east side. I know of NO high-fenced ranches anywhere in the Davis Mountains. IOW, none in the four million acres that is Brewster County, or in Jeff Davis County.

I can take off from my house and not even see the remains of an old fence until I'm twenty and more miles away.

Anybody judging Texas by the amount of high fence culls his women by a mole on her ankle...

:), Art
 
How you grew up...

I think it really comes down to whats the norm in your area and how many animals are in your area and overall enviroment in your area and each individual case. For instance:
If I worked for a company that sponsered a few Trophy game ranch hunts a year, for the Triple 7 ranch or something equal for people that wanted them (kinda like Tickets to the superbowl or something) I would have no problem going since it was on the companys bill. I personally would never pay out has much money as they want for one of those hunts, thats "Just Me"
though.
For putting out a Feeder or "Baiting" depending on the situation is ok for me unless you just have Deer running rampid but I don't like using a feeder on a timer unless your hunting a lease you paid alot of money for. I mean if your feeder goes off at 7am and 7pm then it's kind of a crap shoot, but if you got a bucket of Corn with a pole sticking out out of the bottom on a trail you are sure a bucks run on and you can't see more than 15 feet in front of you and you had to cut shooting lanes just to see 50 yards then you almost have to have something to stop them or get them to you.

Or

In my current situation, there is absolutlly no way I can keep tabs on the movement of animals on the lease i'm on. Since i'm in the Navy stationed in Washington and I'm on a lease with my dad and best friend in Texas that I pay 800 bucks for and get to use maybe twice a year if i'm lucky. I will hunt a feeder and I will hunt from a stand but after I bag at least on deer be it a spike, doe or Trophy buck... I will probally stop stand hunting and do more stalking/still hunting but I have to get at least one to justify the cost of the lease in some weird twisted way in my brain.
 
Like some others have mentioned, I am a still hunter. I prefer heavy cover, swamps and creekbeds. With scouting and observation, I know where the deer in my hunting area bed, water, feed, and play. I know what they eat, and when they are putting the feed bag on.
This is merely cutting down the odds.
Sometimes I climb up into a stand, particularly if hunting across a clear cut or hay field. Nothing wrong at all with stand hunting. Even in a stand though, you have to know your animal to know where to place the stand.
Now a 'canned hunt' is a different matter. There, the guide has done all the scouting, placed the hunter in the stand, and sometimes even drives the deer to the hunter. Some folks like that kind of action. I don't. However, I am not going to talk down to the guy who takes his deer that way. I might not have any respect for his woodscraft, or lack thereof, but he is still hunting the way that he likes to hunt.
 
Ever wonder why kids don't hunt anymore??? Hunting is to dang expensive. The price we put on Huge Racks, is ruining our sport, our reputation, and could eventually destroy our sport all together. :mad: Why? We're pricing kids out of the equation. Most guys can barely afford to hunt themselves, and w/ kill/trophy fees on top of lease fees, you do the math. I make it a point to take my son hunting with me. He's 3 now, and loves the outdoors. He went with me Turkey hunting this spring and did a great job. I'll take my daughter too when she turns 3. I won't shove it down their throat, but I'll introduce it. If they like it, they can come. If they don't, I'll support them in the hobbies they choose. Bottom line, they will go. I hunted through out Highschool, and it kept me out of trouble. My friends were partying, I was out at the lease. Hunting, enjoying God's creation. It wasn't all about shooting something. But back to the subject matter. If my kids aren't welcome, I'm not going. I won't support the ongoing greed of bigger and better. That is not hunting. That is just greed, and I won't stand for it. I hope sportsman as a group will realize this before it is too late and the sport dies. We are headed in that direction, and only we can change it. Will you do your part?:confused:
 
Art,
I'm glad to here you live in such open country, and I genuinly did not mean to offend. I never said it was an accurate description, but that's still what they call it up here. Now that you mention it though, that IS a rather unsightly mole she's got on her ankle! Hmmm....

DesertFox,
I don't mind eating or killing raised or even tame meat. I am still killing an animal weather I pull a trigger or pay someone to do my killing by buying meat at the supermarket.

CastNblast,
You may have a VERY good point about the future of our sport.
 
Products of our environment

What it really comes down to is we are all shaped by how we learned.

I grew up here in Washington, so my first introduction to deer and elk hunting was the classic 'Scope, spot and Stalk' in the sage brush around Ellensburg. Getting out and walking is one of the things I enjoy. After this experience, the thought of sitting in a stand for hours just doesn't sound like FUN to me.

Samsmix, I'll tell you...Montana's description of baiting sounds a little extreme to me. Dropping a big pile of corn and apples on the ground...that sounds like baiting to me. But...buying a 120 acres, planting a couple of apple trees and some alfalfa....and then seeing what kind of deer that attracts...that's my DREAM. I would love to get a chunk of Eastern Washington land and work it to make it more attractive to the deer.

I had a thread once where I threw the smack down on guys that run deer with dogs, because it was a totally foreign concept to me...it just sounded horriblem and lazy and...ick. But, after a couple of southern gentleman took me to task and told me about all the work that goes into training the dogs, and keeping up with the dogs...I conceeded that nope, it didn't sound lazy anymore. It still didn't sound like something I wanted to do....but it WAS hunting.

As far as the original point of this thread...I think everyone has to admit that there IS such a thing as canned hunts...where there is no pretext at a Fair Chase. To me, I've just got better things to spend money on than paying four-figures to go shoot some animal. In fact....the excuse I use for not getting a deer or an elk the last few eyars is because I couldn't afford to have it processed...had to get new windows for the house :(

greg
 
Texas

You would think with all this unfair bambi killing going on around here that there would be a negative effect on population. Like the whales or the little furry sea lions or the great herds of buffalo hunted to depletion. But this is not the case.

Overpopulation is the problem here, and I would bet that most rural counties in the state have more deer per acre than the land can accommodate. Ranchers now hire biologists to do expensive helicopter surveys to tell them how many deer to shoot. It is not uncommon for a 3000 acre ranch owner to be told that he needs to kill 60 deer this season and 50 next season. Plus the parks and wildlife office will issue this rancher 60 tags and open his season up for 6 months.

Now try still hunting 60 deer in one season.:eek:

I don't think Texas has lost it's desire for fair chase. Its just a unique situation.
 
For sure, king. From around Blanco up towrd Llano, Mason and Brady, there are many areas where there oughta be a bounty on does, year around, for a year or two. The habitat is so overloaded, the deer size is down toward Greyhound dog.

During the 1963-1964 deer season, the average buck weighed at the old Johnson Trading Post at the intersection of 2244 & 71 was around 125 pounds, with big ones at around 140 to 150. By 1980, the average was donw to around 85 pounds, with "big" bucks weighing 110.

Art
 
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