In Texas, the schnauzer-size deer that pass as “trophies” are directly the result of not permitting the Game Dept. to do the job of management correctly for many years; and this is the result of lease hunting. There are lot of deer in Texas, and hardly any of them are worth shooting. Landowners who sell deer to hunters aren’t interested in herd quality; all they care about is numbers. Abolish lease hunting, for the betterment of all hunting.
I stand by what I said, and as for “facts” they are based on five years’ residence in Texas and first-hand experience with lease hunting. Your arguments against my stand are based on the blind attitude that the game belongs to the landowner individually, not to all hunters collectively. This is so firmly ingrained into the Texas consciousness that nothing seems to eradicate it, but it’s completely untrue. You speak of “adding value” to the game, and of the landowner “losing income” which is exactly what I am talking about:
The concept that the landowner owns the game and is entitled to a) its value, and b) its use for his personal benefit. As for not buying the cow when the milk is free, there’s no such thing as a free deer; EVRYONE who buys a hunting license is entitled to a try at one, landowners included; but NOBODY, especially landowners has any more right than any other license holder to those deer. I don’t dispute the right of the landowner to control access to his property. That’s a given, and I absolutely would defend the concept to the death; the catch is that the deer and other native species AREN’T HIS PROPERTY, and by permitting him to charge people to hunt them, he’s stealing the value of those deer from them as really owns it, i.e., hunters collectively.
WRT the numbers of deer in Texas, yes, it’s at an all time high; so are deer here in Virginia. The problem is that this has, as you say, come about as a result of years of not shooting does. Do you know any landowners who tell lease hunters “Don’t shoot MY does” even if the game laws say they can? I bet you do; I sure did. The landowner thinks in terms of numbers of deer at so many dollars per head, just like cattle. The game departments (who are properly placed in charge of deer herds) are concerned with management for quality of the herd, maximum health, and improvement of the stock in general.
Videos and books can help teach the basics, but there’s nothing like actually doing it. The most important thing is to get them gutted so they cool down quickly. Don’t be afraid to give it a try – if you understand what’s needed and the basic procedures, its really hard to do anything “wrong” and it would be much worse to delay.
If you are going to learn from videos, I suggest you try to watch more than one on any subject. There is more than one way to skin a cat, and you want to find the way you like. Basic answer is that you have to hang out where the hunters are. All states will have some kind of hunting organization. Most will have a lot of them. For example, Minnesota has many hunting groups such as the MN Deers Hunters, The Ruffed Grouse Society, Ducks Unlimited, and on and on.
I have taken moose with 1 shot kills at distance across a large pond with both my .270 Wby. magnum and my .300 Wby. magnum. In the .270 I used 150gr and in the .300 I used 180gr. Never a problem. I even load them into my sons Mosin Nagant in 7.62X44R. and he has taken 3 deer, all with one shot hits. I’ve used the “regular” bullets in factory loads as well as various premium types. I think there is little benefit from premium bullets in deer hunting, although if they shoot well in your rifle, there is no harm either.
It’s the short term expedient behavior of politics and economics that have “always ended in human catastrophe” . Does it matter whether Siberia’s forests were raped by political commissars fufilling the “plan’s” quotas in soviet times, or today, by Japan’s market demand? If there was some exotic, introduced, mammal destroying the Russian taiga, and it required the use of hunters’ guns to eliminate them, would not the ARM oppose this?
I believe an important distinction needs to be made. Violence has a negative connotation, but hunting and predation can certainly be positive, in fact usually are in Nature. Otherwise, energy doesn’t flow. Again, the assumption killing is bad and destructive. Predation/hunting certainly serve a constructive role in nature. Let’s examine this from the Native Americans’ hunting perspective.
By this post I can see that you truely do care about the welfare of hunters. That is excellent advice that before hunting season, especially deer season, a hunter should get that annual physical and get in shape. It’s not just sighting that trophy deer, but also dragging out a couple hundred pounds of dead weight is tough.The researchers found that merely sighting a deer may cause a hunter’s heart rate to soar from 78 beats per minute to 168 bpm.
