desidog
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- Nov 21, 2008
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Hunt, verb: to search for animals to capture or kill them; to seek; to try to find
In the UK, the term is used quite differently. When you shoot ducks or driven pheasants it's called "shooting". When you shoot deer from a stand it may be called "culling" or shooting.
It's only when you go out and spot and stalk game that it's "hunting".
I don't have any issue with shooting deer from a stand, baited or not, but it's not really hunting, it's just harvesting meat.
+1 There is a fundamental difference to these pursuits that the US commercial market and TV shows really choose to ignore. Similarly, I think that "hunting" in enclosures for captive animals is not the sporting event that hunting non-fenced areas with free-ranging game is, whatever the acreage, just based on the high fence.
But, I will say that I am not opposed to the idea of hunting non-trophy class animals. When a pack of wolves or a mountain lion culls a deer from the herd, they typically don't go after the strongest member of the herd. Instead, nature chooses the weak members for food, and eliminates these weaker genes from the reproductive pool. The stronger deer/elk is thereby afforded a greater opportunity to reproduce, and is less likely to be preyed upon by its natural enemies.
Well reasoned and well written.
Personally, I believe that bait might get the quarry to stay in your kill zone a bit longer, but mutant-antlered abnormalities won't just start materializing behind the stand like some bait commercials would have you believe. Setting up overlooking a feeder is like setting up overlooking a waterhole, how it got there is somewhat immaterial.
For someone who aspires to be a mouthpiece for hunting advocacy, Ted Nugent really royally shot himself and his cause in the foot. Since this type of article is likely to draw in many more readers of many more mindsets than a strictly pro-hunting article including Ted, this incident has probably hurt his cause much more than all the good stuff he's done to date has helped. That's a tough one to quantify though. Still, incredibly irresponsible and lazy of him (or his producers!) not to check the regs.