DEERGATE

This Garza County gate has swinging bars that allow deer to push inside to enter the property but that are blocked and won't allow the animals to leave once they've entered. Maj. David Sinclair, chief of wildlife enforcement for Texas Parks and Wildlife, said such gates are legal.



DEERGATE

By Mike Leggett
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, February 10, 2008

I wouldn't describe "this" situation as a landowner's or hunter's finest hour. There's no deer important enough, or big enough, to merit hunting it right on a fenceline or trying to finagle it away from a neighbor.

At least I thought that until last week, when I was confronted with situations that took the corn inducement to new lows. A reader, who asked not to be identified for fear of worsening neighbor relations, asked if I thought a neighboring land owner at his relative's lease might be breaking the law with his high fence.

It seems the brazen landowner erected a high fence around his property, which is legal and with which I have no problem. But then he went further, installing gates on pulleys — with ropes running to deer stands inside the high fence — that could be raised whenever a deer outside the fence approached and wanted to get at corn inside the fence.

A deer enters the hole in the fence and a hunter (we use the word loosely here) inside the blind lowers the gate and traps the unsuspecting deer inside the fence. The reader included photos of the gates, complete with nylon ropes running into the stands across the fence.

Unbelievable, I thought. Unconscionable, I sputtered. Un-legal, I figured. But I was wrong.

Recommending the reader to Maj. David Sinclair, chief of wildlife enforcement for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, I was stunned to learn that not only was such a practice legal in Texas, but it was happening all over the state.

"There's nothing to prevent it," Sinclair said. "It would take the Legislature to stop it."

Sinclair has photographs of every manner of fence-lowering or raising or defeating device one could imagine, slots and puzzles and holes of every sort, all designed to let deer on to a high-fence property but not let them escape to the ranch from which they came. There's even a berm of sorts — kind of like the earthen platforms heavy equipment operators use to load dozers on trailers — that allows deer to jump over a high fence alongside the Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge up on the Red River.

Sinclair has seen them all and he's investigated many of them, but he's also expert in the ins and outs of the Texas Wildlife Code and he knows right now it's all perfectly legal.

"They are enticing deer onto their ranch," Sinclair said. "If the enclosure were (20 feet by 20 feet) or something, we could watch that (and possibly make a canned hunt case), but they aren't. They're just getting them on to their property, and there's nothing to stop it."

"We see regular gates with pulleys and ropes on them, some with teeth and rods swinging just one way," Sinclair continued. "It creates some bad blood."