No one is, I think, advocating legal hunting as a means of supporting one’s own family or another’s. Rather, given that a successful hunter may, for any of a variety of reasons, end up with venison that she doesn’t want to eat herself, donating that meat to the poor is far better than to leave it to rot in the woods…or by the side of the road.
(The moral question of illegal pot-hunting will not be dealt with here.)
Sorry I’ve been absent from this thread… I wanted a chance to go look at the deer more closely, and I couldn’t do it in my “going to a job interview” clothes. 
Plus I wanted to bring Mr. Kitty with me, who is much more experienced with identification of gunshot wounds than I am (I’m a crack at identifying animal predation, though- give me a newly dead body and I can tell you what type of animal caused the damage).
The deer is still there, although the local cleanup crew has begun their job… I scared off at least four buzzards when I pulled over. The lower half is significantly stripped of meat at this point, which made it a bit easier for us to move the body around. At first I couldn’t see any kind of damage to the upper part of the body/head area (with the exception of the missing antlers, which were indeed sawed off, unless the rodent population is capable of chewing in an extremely precise manner), but upon closer investigation (we moved the head all the way back) we found a gunshot wound in the throat. Mr. Kitty went so far as to say it was a really good shot. :dubious:
I ran into one of our neighbors, who happens to be the county clerk, and was told 1) this sort of thing is common, and 2) they were on the lookout for who may be doing it, precisely because it gives the other hunters a bad rep. He also gave me the name and number of who to call to have the body removed.
He went on to say that up until a few years ago it was extremely common for the “lazy” hunters to run the deer down with dogs, which apparently had the side effect of completely shifting the deer’s natural schedule (they’re only active at night around here) and screwing up the hunters who were still working solely with guns and bows. There was quite the outcry against the practice, and now it’s illegal to hunt deer with dogs.
So, there we are. I feel better to know that the people who need to know are aware of the problem and are working to fix it. Meantime I’ll take Scylla’s information under advisement… we haven’t been here long so our compost pile is too small right now, but that idea may come in handy for the future.
Actually, my family was actually in what you would call the “hobby” league. We just didn’t see the need to buy food when we could hunt and grow it for a lot less money. But I can assure you that there were a lot of families that depended on hunting, fishing and gardening. I agree that most people don’t have too, but there are indeed some that benefit highly, and would be in trouble without it. We often would get 3 deer a year, with one of them being given out to some of the old timers who couldn’t hunt. I know that some of the dirt scratching poor ones didn’t hunt with a license if things were desperate, but even then they only hunted during season, so the game warden would usually look away.
My main point was that hunting is not an expensive thing to do. It can be, but doesn’t have to be. We never used scents. Never used duck calls. Never understood why somebody would need a “bird dog”. Building a tree stand involved setting a board across two tree limbs and driving in a couple of nails, and most of our posting areas were on the ground. I’ve seen the RV’s on stilts that some people build but it wasn’t considered in our home, and many others. If you wanted to hunt, you did it without shelter and stoves. That was part of hunting.
Growing up I never heard of taking a deer in to have it professionally butchered. I thought butchering an animal was something that everyone was taught as a kid, or at least could use common sense to do. Cut everything that looks like meat away from anything that looks like bone. To this day, I don’t understand people who take a deer in to be processed. A bit of the purist in me. Take the hunt to completion. If you shoot it, you clean it, haul it, and package it. The most that I can see is taking the scrap bits of meat that you don’t just package as “stew meat” to be ground, but even that is pushing it.
Can you feed a family on rice and beans? I’m sure you can, at least for a while. I certainly wouldn’t try it on my own family or even myself. There isn’t a whole lot of nutrition in them. Most every culture that I know of supplements their diet with meat or fish, and always has. There are a lot more well to do vegetarians than there are poor ones, but this isn’t the time or place for that.
Sorry to be rude Bobkitty, I should have responded to your OP first. I agree that it was most likely a roadkill that someone took a “trophy” from. No hunter or “poacher” (horn hunter) will drag an animal to a road, especially without field dressing it, just to get a skin, and it takes a pretty huge pair to shoot an animal from a road, and then cape it (which isn’t the easiest thing) without moving it away from the road. Wanton waste is illegal in most places I know of with very stiff penalties. I’ve seen road kilt deer out here and wanted to throw them into the car, but that is illegal here. I only assume that it is to keep “car hunters” at bay. I’m surprised that you are having so much difficulty in having it removed. In MN, you called the game warden or sheriff’s dept. and they took care of it. If fresh, it was distributed across the needy list, and if not, they at least took it to a more deserted area and pulled it into the woods or took it to the sled dog folks for dog food. There are some shit hunters out there, but this just doesn’t seem like something anybody with an inkling of smarts would do.
As a side, two years ago a guy at work told me his group saw a guy in the distance wandering through the woods out in Ozark area looking hurt. They got to him and he was beaten up, his arms were neatly trussed in barbed wire, rifle shoved through the crook of his elbows behind his back, and had a piece of old wood planking tied around his neck and on it, written with charcoal, “I shoot at sounds”. Out here, even the rednecks don’t take kindly to poor hunting practices.
Damn, so it was a shooter. That really sucks. Hope the catch the bastard.
We get a lot of that too. It’s pretty easy, at night, to hear the trap shooters in the night competitions at the sportsmen’s club. They are well within their legal rights to shoot at night, on their property, which is set up for their trap shooting and has stadium lighting. Although sometimes I wake up with a healthy dose of ‘INCOMING!’
Much of the equipment you listed lasts a lot longer than some rice and beans. My deer hunting jacket is over twenty years old. My rifle is around 15 years old. Boots last me four or five years before I’ve worn them out, and other clothing lasts much longer (as long as I don’t change sizes), on the order of 10 years.
I don’t use dogs when I hunt small game, so there is no need for me to care for dogs.
Ammunition becomes very inexpensive if you save your brass and reload your own, and a hunting license for an adult resident here is 20$ for a year, and 26$ if you want to hunt antlerless deer too. Which means you can get your daily limits of small game, and a buck, and a doe for the season.
You could say that the time is an ‘expense’, but I consider it no more one than the time I would have to spend mowing the lawn or shoveling the snow.
We do in my house. My father, his hunting buddies and I work together to butcher any of the deer we kill. The cost of the tools was split among three of us, $39.
I haven’t bought any of the ‘store bought’ hunting items you listed. The one and only tree stand I ever used was made of scrap wood permanently nailed into a tree on a farm on which I had permission to hunt.
There is also a provision for that under Pennsylvania game law. There are also differing deer limits for areas that are in heavy deer-damage areas.
Oh, and I hope they catch the fucker who (apparently) poached that deer.
I smile everytime I see this thread, because I am imagining it without the comma in the topic line.
This was the first one he’s ever gotten. He did field-dress it himself (with a little help from one of his huntin’ buddies), and then brought it home and it hung upside down in the garage overnight.
We got several different cuts of meat; chops, steaks, stew meat, two roasts and several packages of ground meat. I wouldn’t know the first thing about doing it. We also bought a venison summer sausage that is just incredible, very sweet and tender. The place had lots of deer when we dropped his off and looked to be doing a booming business, so we’re not the only ones who did it.
Maryland is allowing Sunday hunting this year for the first time in something like 100 years (not sure it that’s the right number) because they’re trying to thin out a huge over-population.
Maryland also allows hunting on private property (w/o a license) with permission from the owner. A regular license costs $25.
My husband goes out to Western MD, but they have to be very careful about exactly where they are, because if they stray into West Virginia, and shoot a deer w/o a license, they’ll get arrested. He could buy an out-of-state license, but it’s $125.
Good lord, what are you deer butchers implying about my non-butchering, hunting relatives? Eh, I probably agree with you.
Look, my major hijack of bobkitty’s thread is just one of my most minor peeves: that people still say things like
when we’re not in frontier times anymore. This just isn’t true in today’s economy; there are other ways for poor families in North America to get protein. My point is simple: hunting is just a hobby today. An very practical hobby, but in our society no more practical than fixing up cars or tinkering with computers. That’s my point (or my opinion). It’s pretty minor and certainly not worth all this attention.
I can certainly see your point, but in some more rural places (like Appalacia) I can see where people would prefer to hunt on their own property then line up at a food bank for a handout. Other than bullets, it would practically be free. And they’d be doing it on their own.
It’s also a cultural thing. Out in Western MD where my husband goes, everyone has a pickup truck with a gun rack. Here in Baltimore, there are plenty of trucks, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a gun rack in one.
I’m a rural Pa to Baltimore transfer. This thread reminded me of how terrified I am of men wearing camo on the streets of B-more…
I had no idea you lived here! Howdy, neighbor.
My son (who’s 7) wears camo all the time. He wants to be a soldier, though.
He was too scared (or squeamish) to look at Daddy’s dead deer.
I should mention, it (camo, that is) is relatively cheap and very sturdy and therefore warm. They were showing city and county workers attaching plows and salt spreaders to the trucks and they were all wearing camo pants. I’d be willing to bet they had long underwear underneath it. It’s better than wearing jeans and long underwear.
Of course, it’s also a fashion statement. Get that purple and gray camo :rolleyes: , and you’re a Raven’s fan! 
Well, howdy. Your son will probably lose his squishishness very quickly. My little brother was gutting game before he was 10- but he still couldn’t clean out the cat box because that made him gag.
I know camo’s sturdy and practical. I just keep seeing the greens or khakis on guys on the #3 getting off at Lexington muttering to themselves. Often in summer.
You should see the supposed hunters where I hail from.
Example I saw while working at a gas station/covience store. Three guys with a camp tailer in tow behind their pick up, get a fill up on their tank, and 20 gallons of gas in cans, talking about their weekend trips.
Guy 1 “OK we got everything we need?”
Guy 2 “We got the gas”
Guy 3 “I already stocked the food. We got a loaf of bread, and balogna”
Guy 2 “I packed enough ammo for two days. Fifteen HUNDRED rounds”
Guy 1 “I’ll go get the rest of what we need”
5 minutes later guy 1 came out of the store with 15 CASES of beer. They had prewviously stated this was a TWO FUCKEN DAY trip.
You are absolutely right Rizree! That guy was at least 3 cases short!
Warning! Your kitties outdoors in that area makes them part of the food chain. Hawks, coyotes, and raccoons like to eat a little pussy now and then.
Actually, coyotes appreciate all that we people have done for them and have expanded their range considerably beyond what it was 500 years ago. They are thankful for the pets we leave outdoors, the garbage cans we leave behind the house, the restaurants with workers who don’t manage to get everything into the dumpster, and the roads, railroads, and sidewalks that make it easy to travel. Do not pity the “poor” coyote–he’s doing just fine.
I personally don’t hunt, unless you count bowling cans, beer cans, and paper targets as hunting. But I do know a huge number of hunters. And I’d have to say that every one of them would be disgusted and angered by what happened. Responsible hunters view poachers as the theives that they are. I’d venture to guess that any arrest of poachers that occurs most likely led from a tip from a hunter. From a hunter’s point of view, the poacher is taking away a deer that very well could be walking past their stand. They take away herd management dollars by not paying license fees. Heck, those dollars also go to disease control, helpful information, and education for the next generation of hunters.
I’d have to say that hunters probably have more people who are hyper-responsible for their sport than any other sport. There are over a half million deer hunters in Minnesota alone. Even if 99.95% of them are responsible, those 250 folks who aren’t can cause a lot of damage. They have firearms fer chrissake! For that reason alone, some hunter’s feel it’s their personal responsibility to keep their eyes out for those morons.
My BIL hunted with a guy who admitted that he shot at sounds. Not only did my BIL stop hunting with the guy, but when he found out he was hunting without a license the next year, he called the TIP line and turned him in. And I wouldn’t even include my BIL in the group I consider hyper-responsible. In his opinion, he was turning in an asshole who shouldn’t be hunting.
If anyone is going to find the putz who shot that deer, it will be the hunters in your area.
Rizree, Most hunters don’t just limit their trips to one two day stint. They keep going back every weekend, to take advantage of the deer’s habits and patterns. Those guys were probably stocking up. And if they bagged a deer the first weekend, that doesn’t mean they stop going. “Deer Hunting” and “Fishing” in my area can often be directly translated to “Drinking beer” and “Playing Cribbage”. The beer doesn’t spoil. It can be packed up and shipped home. But in the event everyone bags a buck the first day, overstocking is the prefered planning style.
As a hyper-responsible hunter, this may be the most astonishing thing I’ve ever read here. I had no idea such idiots existed.
We go to the extreme in the preparation and management of our lease. Anything less just mystifies me to no end.
lieu, a friend told me about a friend of his cousin who was lamenting after a day hunting that he didn’t even see a “shaker.” A “shaker” is when the bushes shake and you shoot at them hoping for a deer.
I wish I was joking. Or that the guy in question had been.
Oh believe it. Our neighbors at one point liked to stand on their back patio and spray bullets into the treeline. After our cat came home with a suspicious-looking missing chunk of tail, we kids quit playing in the woods. Yep, we stuck a lot closer to the house.