Post by Woody Williams on May 18, 2006 20:27:43 GMT -5
Here's an article that appeared in the Dallas TX paper.
Modern deer hunting in Texas....
Two cents for the bucks [/b][/size][/color]
09:09 PM CST on Saturday, December 3, 2005
Texas deer hunting has changed enormously since I became involved in 1973. Based on calls, letters and e-mails from readers, the changes are not all perceived as positive. I'm as guilty as anyone of emphasizing big bucks, including deer hunted behind high fences and a few that were genetically engineered.
As I talk with deer hunters and landowners across the state, it's obvious everyone has different levels of acceptance for modern whitetail hunting and management trends. What one hunter views as a great development, another considers unacceptable.
Here are six things causing public-relations problems for Texas deer hunting in the 21st century:
6. High fences which restrict the movement of deer from one property to the next. Under Texas law, the game belongs to the people of the state. Why is it legal for a landowner to construct a fence that traps a natural resource owned by every citizen?
If the landowner has a fence that keeps deer from leaving his property and the landowner has the ultimate authority over who hunts the deer there, why not just admit that the landowner also owns the deer? After all, the landowner can charge money for you to hunt on his property.
Texas has huge high-fenced ranches where deer live and die without seeing a fence. Deer in this state are also being hunted on high-fenced properties smaller than 100 acres, and that doesn't help the sportsman's image.
The authority of a Texas landowner to build any fence he wants will never change. High fences are terrific deer management tools to keep unwanted deer out and allow hunters inside the fence to let bucks reach their potential.
I fully understand why landowners build high fences. If I owned a big ranch, I might build a high fence, myself. As surely as they fragment the habitat, game-proof fences fragment the hunting public. That's not good for the future of deer hunting.
5. Genetic engineering of herds by selectively breeding captive deer, then releasing the offspring for hunting. Deer breeders say that deer released from pens quickly revert to a wild state, but Texas A&M professor Bob Brown likens the practice of hunting these animals to hunting skittish cows.
All hunters have a fascination for big-antlered bucks. The bigger the antlers, the greater the fascination. The inarguable success of breeding programs has devalued truly wild deer. A self-made buck that grows antlers scoring 150 B&C points is a terrific trophy. On some ranches these days, a buck that size is considered a cull.
Breeding programs and high fences are transforming our finest game animal into a form of glorified livestock.
4. A state wildlife agency working to give select landowners added authority over native game. The ultimate example is Texas Parks and Wildlife's managed lands deer permits. The MLDP program can be useful to deer managers, but it can also be misused. MLDP gives landowners longer seasons, and the top-level MLDP erases any semblance of an individual bag limit.
The MLDP sets a harvest quota for the entire ranch. If the quota is 100 deer per season, it doesn't matter if 100 hunters each kill one deer or one hunter kills them all. Rather than expanding recreational hunting opportunity, which TP&W claims as a goal, the MLDP program allows hired guns to "cull" deer by the thousands.
Shooting white-tailed deer as if they were coyotes or skunks is not in deer hunting's best interest. It is a measure sanctioned by TP&W.
There is no application fee for an MLDP, and hunters are not required to tag the deer through their hunting license. MLDP tags are provided by TP&W, ostensibly funded by license sales to the general public.
In exchange for the extraordinary benefits of MLDP tags, ranches must perform basic management measures that many would be doing anyway. Now TP&W is attempting to extend the managed-lands program to include quail, turkey, pheasant, prairie chickens and chachalacas.
3. Baiting deer with corn, which has always been legal in Texas. It's hard to argue against baiting as the most productive hunting tactic in a state overrun by deer, but using it has created generations of hunters who don't know much about their favorite game animal.
Texas hunters are adept at setting up an automatic feeder. They know how to position a blind in relation to a feeder so the wind and sun are favorable. They don't know how to scout for deer sign or pattern deer movements. They are largely unfamiliar with deer habits.
Baiting deer is illegal in many states. In Texas, baiting is almost mandatory. A large percentage of hunters hunt on a property small enough that they can only set up one or two blinds. If the neighbors use feeders to attract deer, the only way to be successful is to compete with the neighbors.
2. Too much emphasis on big-antlered bucks. Every town in whitetail country has at least one big-buck contest. There are entire magazines devoted to monster bucks. Deer-hunting success should be more about the experience and less about antler size. Any mature buck taken by fair chase is a good buck.
1. The almighty dollar. The great thing about whitetail hunting 30 years ago was that nobody could buy a B&C-quality buck, no matter how much money they were willing to spend. That was before billionaires discovered deer hunting, and the market responded.
It's not uncommon for a hunter to pay $10,000 to $20,000 to shoot a huge buck genetically engineered and fed a customized diet for six or seven years. Texas bucks have sold for as much as $30,000, probably more. Of course, it's not really legal to sell a wild deer. At least, that's what they say.
Texas deer hunting is a classic case of supply-side economics. Habitat will be preserved for whitetails as long as they are valuable. It's bad news for the hunter who cannot justify the escalating expense.
The bottom line on deer hunting is the fiscal one. The dollar bill became known as a buck in colonial times when a deer skin fetched a dollar. Today, the dollar is worth less – and the deer a lot more.
E-mail rsasser@dallasnews.com
-------
TPWD Field Notes:
"If the guide says no, he means NO! This hunter paid $4150.00 for a weekend hunt.
On Nov. 8, a Schleicher County Game Warden received a call from a landowner agent informing him that one of his hunting clients had taken a white-tailed buck without consent. Upon investigation it was determined the out-of-state hunter was being guided by the agent and wanted to shoot a buck they had seen. The guide opposed and told him repeatedly not to shoot the deer because it was not a mature buck. The hunter stated he did not care and he was going to shoot it anyway. When interviewed about the incident, the hunter stated he did not know why he shot the deer and offered to pay for it. The landowner was adamant about charges being filed, so the county attorney was contacted and the case reviewed. State jail felony charges of take wildlife resource, white-tailed deer, without consent of the landowner were filed. The subject was arrested, bond set, and placed in jail. Restitution on the 120-class buck is also pending."
-----------
Here is Shannon Tompkin's article from the Houston Chronicle on his take from the TPWD field notes.
"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell's line in his novel Animal Farm applies as legitimately to white-tailed deer in Texas as it does to the "animals" in his allegory condemning tyrannical leaders and governments and the people who blindly follow them.
White-tailed deer in Texas are more equal than other wildlife when it comes to state law and even to interpretation and enforcement of state law.
Over the past two decades, deer in Texas have been transformed from a simple natural resource into antlered currency. And although the letter of the law says deer, like all wildlife, are a public resource with no owner and can't be bought and sold like steers at an auction, reality is quite different.
This unsettling truth manifested itself this past month in a strange twist of events underscoring just how state law has come to be used to protect the economic value of a deer to landowners.
Early in November, a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department game warden was called to a ranch in Schleicher County to investigate a report of a deer taken without landowner permission — the long-winded legal term for what most call "poaching."
But this was not a simple poaching case.
According to a TPWD law enforcement division synopsis of the event, a person who had engaged the services of a guide/outfitter to take him deer hunting was afield in the company of a guide.
The pair saw a buck deer. The hunter wanted to shoot the buck. The guide, according to the TPWD report, adamantly and repeatedly told the hunter not to shoot because the deer was not a "mature" buck.
The hunter ignored the guide's directive, shot and killed the buck. The hunter offered to pay more than the fee the business charged for taking such a deer.
The outfitter — the "landowner's agent," in legal terms — and the landowner were not satisfied with the offer, it seems.
The landowner pushed for the hunter to be charged under a 6-year-old law that makes killing a deer without permission of the landowner a felony offense.
The shooter was arrested, felony charges filed, he was jailed and had to post bond to be released pending disposition of the case.
This situation — a paying, licensed hunter being charged with a felony because he shot a deer that the landowner or landowner's agent didn't want killed — almost certainly was not a scenario considered back in 1999, when the Texas Legislature passed the statute elevating poaching of deer to a state jail felony.
Poaching deer is a persistent problem, but has been cut to a level where it poses no great threat to Texas' huge deer population. It does, however, threaten a few bank accounts.
As bucks wearing big antlers became a highly marketable commodity, commanding as much as $20,000 or more from people wanting to kill one, landowners began to take poaching seriously.
But state law said poaching a deer was a misdemeanor offense — not a big deterrent when a poached set of antlers might fetch its holder several thousands of dollars on the booming antler market.
This issue shot to the forefront in the wake of Operation Venado Macho, a months-long undercover operation Parks and Wildlife Department game wardens conducted into poaching and selling of deer antlers.
The 1998 undercover operation produced 14 arrests and 124 charges. But the only felonies were for drug or weapons violations. Poaching charges were, remember, misdemeanors.
Within months, the Texas Legislature passed the felony poaching bill.
Under the statute, a person who takes a deer (whitetail or mule deer), bighorn sheep or pronghorn antelope — the four game animals commanding highest "access" prices — without the consent of the landowner or landowner's agent faces a state jail felony. Penalty upon conviction is 2-10 years in prison and a fine of $2,000-$10,000, plus the associated stripping of rights and privileges that come with a felony conviction.
The felony charge for poaching was aimed at deterring the activity, giving law enforcement and the courts a big club with which to pummel egregious violators and a major card to play in plea negotiations.
It was not, almost certainly, imagined that a landowner would use it to punish an otherwise legal hunter for ignoring the landowner's desires concerning taking of a public resource — a deer.
But the letter of the law says it is a violation to "hunt or catch by any means or method or possess a wildlife resource" unless the landowner or the landowner's agent "consents."
If the landowner could convince law enforcement and county prosecutors that the hunter didn't have "consent" to kill an otherwise legal deer and pushed for the felony charge, that's what happens.
In Texas, shoot a deer without the landowners permission and you're looking at a felony.
Paying for antlers Of course, the letter of the law says it's illegal in Texas to sell wild deer, too. Actually, the law reads: "no person may sell, offer for sale, purchase, offer to purchase, or possess after purchase a wild bird, game bird, or game animal, dead or alive, or part of the bird or animal."
It would seem logical that charging a hunter a fee based on the Boone and Crockett Club score of the antlers on a buck the hunter shoots, a common practice in Texas, is no different than offering to sell a field-dressed doe for $1 a pound. But don't expect game wardens to be issuing citations to the operators of the businesses selling deer by the antler inch.
In Texas, buck deer and many of the people marketing them are, it seems, a little more equal than the rest of us."
Modern deer hunting in Texas....
Two cents for the bucks [/b][/size][/color]
09:09 PM CST on Saturday, December 3, 2005
Texas deer hunting has changed enormously since I became involved in 1973. Based on calls, letters and e-mails from readers, the changes are not all perceived as positive. I'm as guilty as anyone of emphasizing big bucks, including deer hunted behind high fences and a few that were genetically engineered.
As I talk with deer hunters and landowners across the state, it's obvious everyone has different levels of acceptance for modern whitetail hunting and management trends. What one hunter views as a great development, another considers unacceptable.
Here are six things causing public-relations problems for Texas deer hunting in the 21st century:
6. High fences which restrict the movement of deer from one property to the next. Under Texas law, the game belongs to the people of the state. Why is it legal for a landowner to construct a fence that traps a natural resource owned by every citizen?
If the landowner has a fence that keeps deer from leaving his property and the landowner has the ultimate authority over who hunts the deer there, why not just admit that the landowner also owns the deer? After all, the landowner can charge money for you to hunt on his property.
Texas has huge high-fenced ranches where deer live and die without seeing a fence. Deer in this state are also being hunted on high-fenced properties smaller than 100 acres, and that doesn't help the sportsman's image.
The authority of a Texas landowner to build any fence he wants will never change. High fences are terrific deer management tools to keep unwanted deer out and allow hunters inside the fence to let bucks reach their potential.
I fully understand why landowners build high fences. If I owned a big ranch, I might build a high fence, myself. As surely as they fragment the habitat, game-proof fences fragment the hunting public. That's not good for the future of deer hunting.
5. Genetic engineering of herds by selectively breeding captive deer, then releasing the offspring for hunting. Deer breeders say that deer released from pens quickly revert to a wild state, but Texas A&M professor Bob Brown likens the practice of hunting these animals to hunting skittish cows.
All hunters have a fascination for big-antlered bucks. The bigger the antlers, the greater the fascination. The inarguable success of breeding programs has devalued truly wild deer. A self-made buck that grows antlers scoring 150 B&C points is a terrific trophy. On some ranches these days, a buck that size is considered a cull.
Breeding programs and high fences are transforming our finest game animal into a form of glorified livestock.
4. A state wildlife agency working to give select landowners added authority over native game. The ultimate example is Texas Parks and Wildlife's managed lands deer permits. The MLDP program can be useful to deer managers, but it can also be misused. MLDP gives landowners longer seasons, and the top-level MLDP erases any semblance of an individual bag limit.
The MLDP sets a harvest quota for the entire ranch. If the quota is 100 deer per season, it doesn't matter if 100 hunters each kill one deer or one hunter kills them all. Rather than expanding recreational hunting opportunity, which TP&W claims as a goal, the MLDP program allows hired guns to "cull" deer by the thousands.
Shooting white-tailed deer as if they were coyotes or skunks is not in deer hunting's best interest. It is a measure sanctioned by TP&W.
There is no application fee for an MLDP, and hunters are not required to tag the deer through their hunting license. MLDP tags are provided by TP&W, ostensibly funded by license sales to the general public.
In exchange for the extraordinary benefits of MLDP tags, ranches must perform basic management measures that many would be doing anyway. Now TP&W is attempting to extend the managed-lands program to include quail, turkey, pheasant, prairie chickens and chachalacas.
3. Baiting deer with corn, which has always been legal in Texas. It's hard to argue against baiting as the most productive hunting tactic in a state overrun by deer, but using it has created generations of hunters who don't know much about their favorite game animal.
Texas hunters are adept at setting up an automatic feeder. They know how to position a blind in relation to a feeder so the wind and sun are favorable. They don't know how to scout for deer sign or pattern deer movements. They are largely unfamiliar with deer habits.
Baiting deer is illegal in many states. In Texas, baiting is almost mandatory. A large percentage of hunters hunt on a property small enough that they can only set up one or two blinds. If the neighbors use feeders to attract deer, the only way to be successful is to compete with the neighbors.
2. Too much emphasis on big-antlered bucks. Every town in whitetail country has at least one big-buck contest. There are entire magazines devoted to monster bucks. Deer-hunting success should be more about the experience and less about antler size. Any mature buck taken by fair chase is a good buck.
1. The almighty dollar. The great thing about whitetail hunting 30 years ago was that nobody could buy a B&C-quality buck, no matter how much money they were willing to spend. That was before billionaires discovered deer hunting, and the market responded.
It's not uncommon for a hunter to pay $10,000 to $20,000 to shoot a huge buck genetically engineered and fed a customized diet for six or seven years. Texas bucks have sold for as much as $30,000, probably more. Of course, it's not really legal to sell a wild deer. At least, that's what they say.
Texas deer hunting is a classic case of supply-side economics. Habitat will be preserved for whitetails as long as they are valuable. It's bad news for the hunter who cannot justify the escalating expense.
The bottom line on deer hunting is the fiscal one. The dollar bill became known as a buck in colonial times when a deer skin fetched a dollar. Today, the dollar is worth less – and the deer a lot more.
E-mail rsasser@dallasnews.com
-------
TPWD Field Notes:
"If the guide says no, he means NO! This hunter paid $4150.00 for a weekend hunt.
On Nov. 8, a Schleicher County Game Warden received a call from a landowner agent informing him that one of his hunting clients had taken a white-tailed buck without consent. Upon investigation it was determined the out-of-state hunter was being guided by the agent and wanted to shoot a buck they had seen. The guide opposed and told him repeatedly not to shoot the deer because it was not a mature buck. The hunter stated he did not care and he was going to shoot it anyway. When interviewed about the incident, the hunter stated he did not know why he shot the deer and offered to pay for it. The landowner was adamant about charges being filed, so the county attorney was contacted and the case reviewed. State jail felony charges of take wildlife resource, white-tailed deer, without consent of the landowner were filed. The subject was arrested, bond set, and placed in jail. Restitution on the 120-class buck is also pending."
-----------
Here is Shannon Tompkin's article from the Houston Chronicle on his take from the TPWD field notes.
"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell's line in his novel Animal Farm applies as legitimately to white-tailed deer in Texas as it does to the "animals" in his allegory condemning tyrannical leaders and governments and the people who blindly follow them.
White-tailed deer in Texas are more equal than other wildlife when it comes to state law and even to interpretation and enforcement of state law.
Over the past two decades, deer in Texas have been transformed from a simple natural resource into antlered currency. And although the letter of the law says deer, like all wildlife, are a public resource with no owner and can't be bought and sold like steers at an auction, reality is quite different.
This unsettling truth manifested itself this past month in a strange twist of events underscoring just how state law has come to be used to protect the economic value of a deer to landowners.
Early in November, a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department game warden was called to a ranch in Schleicher County to investigate a report of a deer taken without landowner permission — the long-winded legal term for what most call "poaching."
But this was not a simple poaching case.
According to a TPWD law enforcement division synopsis of the event, a person who had engaged the services of a guide/outfitter to take him deer hunting was afield in the company of a guide.
The pair saw a buck deer. The hunter wanted to shoot the buck. The guide, according to the TPWD report, adamantly and repeatedly told the hunter not to shoot because the deer was not a "mature" buck.
The hunter ignored the guide's directive, shot and killed the buck. The hunter offered to pay more than the fee the business charged for taking such a deer.
The outfitter — the "landowner's agent," in legal terms — and the landowner were not satisfied with the offer, it seems.
The landowner pushed for the hunter to be charged under a 6-year-old law that makes killing a deer without permission of the landowner a felony offense.
The shooter was arrested, felony charges filed, he was jailed and had to post bond to be released pending disposition of the case.
This situation — a paying, licensed hunter being charged with a felony because he shot a deer that the landowner or landowner's agent didn't want killed — almost certainly was not a scenario considered back in 1999, when the Texas Legislature passed the statute elevating poaching of deer to a state jail felony.
Poaching deer is a persistent problem, but has been cut to a level where it poses no great threat to Texas' huge deer population. It does, however, threaten a few bank accounts.
As bucks wearing big antlers became a highly marketable commodity, commanding as much as $20,000 or more from people wanting to kill one, landowners began to take poaching seriously.
But state law said poaching a deer was a misdemeanor offense — not a big deterrent when a poached set of antlers might fetch its holder several thousands of dollars on the booming antler market.
This issue shot to the forefront in the wake of Operation Venado Macho, a months-long undercover operation Parks and Wildlife Department game wardens conducted into poaching and selling of deer antlers.
The 1998 undercover operation produced 14 arrests and 124 charges. But the only felonies were for drug or weapons violations. Poaching charges were, remember, misdemeanors.
Within months, the Texas Legislature passed the felony poaching bill.
Under the statute, a person who takes a deer (whitetail or mule deer), bighorn sheep or pronghorn antelope — the four game animals commanding highest "access" prices — without the consent of the landowner or landowner's agent faces a state jail felony. Penalty upon conviction is 2-10 years in prison and a fine of $2,000-$10,000, plus the associated stripping of rights and privileges that come with a felony conviction.
The felony charge for poaching was aimed at deterring the activity, giving law enforcement and the courts a big club with which to pummel egregious violators and a major card to play in plea negotiations.
It was not, almost certainly, imagined that a landowner would use it to punish an otherwise legal hunter for ignoring the landowner's desires concerning taking of a public resource — a deer.
But the letter of the law says it is a violation to "hunt or catch by any means or method or possess a wildlife resource" unless the landowner or the landowner's agent "consents."
If the landowner could convince law enforcement and county prosecutors that the hunter didn't have "consent" to kill an otherwise legal deer and pushed for the felony charge, that's what happens.
In Texas, shoot a deer without the landowners permission and you're looking at a felony.
Paying for antlers Of course, the letter of the law says it's illegal in Texas to sell wild deer, too. Actually, the law reads: "no person may sell, offer for sale, purchase, offer to purchase, or possess after purchase a wild bird, game bird, or game animal, dead or alive, or part of the bird or animal."
It would seem logical that charging a hunter a fee based on the Boone and Crockett Club score of the antlers on a buck the hunter shoots, a common practice in Texas, is no different than offering to sell a field-dressed doe for $1 a pound. But don't expect game wardens to be issuing citations to the operators of the businesses selling deer by the antler inch.
In Texas, buck deer and many of the people marketing them are, it seems, a little more equal than the rest of us."
