6ptsika

C903, where I hunt in MD, if you limit yourself to one buck and one doe for the season, any farmers who gave you permission to hunt would not invite you back the following year, in most cases. The deer you passed would be shot and left to rot, and their fawns starve, in July of the following year on crop damage permits.

by23856

6ptsika, you touched on something here that has been a sticking in my craw for some time on this board with all the super ethical hunters that we seem to have. I have no problem with great ethics, but there is a real world out there also.

Farmers farm to live. Deer eat to live. Deer eat the farmer's living, especially with deer heards like Maryland's and apparently Alabama's and other states. I grew up around farmers in PA and live around them now in Nebraska. They do not 'love' and 'respect' deer like so many others here on this site claim to do. They are large rodents in their eyes. They need to be thinned out and thinned out hard.

To anyone that says, 'Well, deer eat to live, like you said. They are only doing what they do by instinct and for survival." I say- Tell that to the farmer who is trying to raise a family and send his kids to college and who has had a run of bad crops because of drought out here in the midwest, or too much rain in PA/MD/VA this year. They want and need every bushel they can get. Deer are in their fields every day that their corn or alfalfa or whatever is growing. Over the 3-4 month growing season, they can do a lot of damage.

I respect deer's survival instincts and the difficulty of bagging a really nice one. That is as far as it goes, though. I don't get all sickly sweet over them and elevate them to a status of honor or anything. Heck, listening to some people on this board, deer will soon become our India cow- sacred and worthy of worship.

However, with all that said, I still would not want to shoot 200 of them, or even more than a half dozen a year, max.

c903

Regarding the killing of vast numbers of deer to protect people, property, and crops is not primarily an ethical issue. With some hunters, as it is for me, the real issue is to preserve the spirit of the hunt. I will not engage in killing great numbers of deer primarily for deer population control. That role should not be the role of a "hunter," and the general public and the anti's should not be able to say that we (hunters) voluntarily fill such a role.

If a person engages in such government and commercial solicited activity chiefly for the purpose of deer population control and to protect property…or just to see how may deer he or she can stick, that person is not a "hunter" in the true sense of the term.

farmcntry

c903 you are right. I have a DMAP area that the landowner wants all the deer dead. I can kill 75 does this year and am trying to do so because they did over $25,000 worth of crop damage last year and the deer are so thick they are suffering. Starvation, bad genes, etc.

As one person told me "Do not confuse this with hunting." He was right.
All the deer I kill there are being given away to poor families and to FHFH.

This is not hunting. This is control. And I have faith in our Wildlife people who deemed it necessary to kill that amount of animals this year.