shalackin said:
txags92 said:
shalackin said:
schmellba99 said:
shalackin said:
I think it is for two different reasons.... one is business, and those high fence ops have been around a long time. The other is people that are sick and tired of idiot hunters and poachers. I think if there weren't so many stupid hunters around, there wouldn't be as many small high fence placers. Just my opinion. It's probably both of those and more.
Disagree with this part. I'd bet that 75% or more of the high fence places, especially the smaller ones, are there because the landowner gets all buttsore about blinds on what they think is "their" fenceline or being pissed that a neighbor shot "their deer" that they feel is theirs because they fed protein and corn to it all year long (never mind that the neighbor probably did too).
Are there stupid hunters? 100% there are. But there have always been stupid hunters and always will be. It's the relatively modern concept that deer somehow belong to a landowner on one side of the fence or another that has created the high fence situation we see today, IMO.
its regional. in SE OK, the level of stupidity has no end. I think the frustration is warranted when people buy 10 acres and put a feeder and stand right on someone's fence row, knowing they don't have any timber or areas for deer to be at. I have been in that situation and it stinks. While frustrating, it is legal, and there is nothing you can do about it. Unless you have enough money to high fence it. I think every siatuion is different, and a lot of this convo is generalizations and is different for different areas and land sizes. It certainly is not a one size fits all discussion.
They talk about hunter numbers in great decline... but I don't see that in reality. seems there are more hunters with more gear than ever before. But again...... regional.... and in general.
Looking at 2015 to 2024 license sales in Texas, the overall number of licenses sold increased by just shy of 11%, but the population increased by just shy of 14% over that some time, meaning hunters as a percentage of the population declined. The decline of 79k in standalone resident hunting license sales was offset by an increase of 95.5k in super combo, senior super combo, and disable veteran super combo licenses.
However, the alarming part for me was that youth license sales dropped over that same period by 29.5k, a 20% decline in a 10 year period. At the same time, the Sr Super Combo sales went up by 56%. That tells me the demographics of the hunter population are getting older and we are doing a bad job getting more young hunters into the sport. The lack of available public land for hunting or low cost hunting opportunities is likely to play a big role in pricing families out of introducing their kids to the hunting.
If we make hunting a rich old white guy's game, it will go the way of fox hunting in England eventually. For that reason (among many others), allowing landowners to monetize individual deer is a terrible idea that will eventually lead to the end of the sport if we don't find ways to get more young people outdoors hunting.
I agree. just not sure the ship can change course at this point. Atleast not without over regulation, which isn't great either. Way too much money in it for those rich white guys to allow courses to be changed.
We used to see a 130+" deer and be in awe. Now we look for 180's, or even 200's to be happy. It's too bad, as the old culture of hunting was definitely more pure and rooted in tradition. But I get both sides. The race to the biggest and most inches is dumb to me. I have a 316" buck here in my office as well as a 145", along with others. I am much more happy about the 145 than I am about the 316. Even though both experiences were great fun. The 145 was at our place, free range, luck of the draw that morning. the 316 was a business trip and he was pre arranged for me as long as I wanted to hunt him. Both are beautiful mounts and part of my hunting journey. But they are completely different.
I took my first deer in 1983 at Hill Country Scout Ranch near Dripping Springs on the Pedernales near Hamilton Pool. They charged $15 per day to hunt there if you were a member of the boy scouts in the Bay Area Council. That property got sold by the council because some of the troops didn't like to have to drive through Houston to get to Camp. They promised to use the money to upgrade Camo Karankawa, which was a god-forsaken mosquito infested swamp compared to Hill Country Scout Ranch. Instead, the council got fancy new offices in Galveston and the scouts from the area SE of Houston no longer had a place to learn to hunt. The property they sold now has a bunch of 5-10 acre luxury ranchettes on it and I am sure some of the folks living there are probably paying thousands of dollars annually for deer leases somewhere else instead of hunting that land.
That kind of story is playing out all over the country, and the end result is that properties that were once available for very low cost hunting are now either leasing for thousands of dollars per gun or have been sold for development. There was a lot of hunting pressure at the scout ranch, understandably due to the price. And the deer being taken were not going to end up in any record books. Nobody was spending thousands of dollars on protein and there were no feeders at the blinds. My first deer was a doe taken at 200 yds from a tin-sided blind looking down a road toward ephemeral creek and my brother's was a spike buck. And nobody cared that they were not instagram worthy 150+ scoring deer. We got to go out in the woods, camp in a tent, wake up when it was bitterly cold and walk to a stand in the dark, and hope we saw a decent deer that was close enough to get a shot at it before we fell asleep in the blind or shivered so loud they could hear us.
Kids these days are rarely getting that experience. The ones that do get to hunt that don't have family land to hunt are mostly on a lease their dad paid a lot of money to join and they are being told "no you can't shoot that one" a lot because the Brad, Jerry, and Mitch haven't approved it. Yeah, the bucks are bigger and the herd is probably healthier overall because of the thousands of dollars of protein they eat each year, but I am not sure it is all worth it in the long run. In some ways I liked it better when I was just sitting in a blind placed where it was because deer liked to pass through the area and hoping to see a good deer to shoot.
You are probably right that there is too much money in it for politicians to want to see things change, but I won't give up trying.
