uncle matt

Antler worship is certainy the main driving factor in property costs, outfitting and sorry to say, even most leases.

Who hires an outfitter to take a doe?

I would have no problem at all if IL required you take 2 antlerless deer before you could harvest a buck. even if the 2 A/O were by bow and then you gunned the buck.

Listen to this...... for reasons of disclaimer this is just "heresay".

A fella in S. IL fills guys tags for them. The guys whose tags he's filling, year-after-year are "Big Dollar Bills" (BDBs) as he calls them. He charges them a considerable amount of moneyand does things very secretively.

These BDBs might or might not be able to go out and shoot their own deer but choose to pay him to guarantee a dandy. My best guess is that they are not able to shoot what they desire but can afford to pay someone to do it for them. He has guys offer him property they own or lease to do this stuff on but he takes it to his home turf. He thinks if anyone is gonna set him up it would be easy to trap him on their turf.

These blow hards sit in the bars, day after dayand it's nothing for them to buy the house round after round. The local guys will laugh at all their little stale jokes if they're buying.

Then back home to tell the wife all about the rigors of their hotel "deer camp". Get the shoulder mount in their office and tell anyone who will listen all about the big hunt.

This fella has been doing this for years and he makes more money doing this every year than he does swinging a hammer.

BDBs big yearly deer hunt? All paid for with lots of cash and a liberal application of BS.

djschuett

Bh,
I have several problems with your claims, logic, and hypocrisy.
1. You are ticked that the price of land is jumping to the point that "only doctors and lawyers" can afford to buy land to hunt yet you yourself mentioned that you are going to school "so some day my children won't have any worries when we have our own property to hunt" Basically you are saying you plan to do the same thing with land other people are doing that p*sses you off; buy land and hoard it.

2. So what if only doctors and lawyers can afford to buy large tracts of land? Our society and economy is set up as a reward system whereby those who make a lot of money can afford to buy more than those who don't. Without that motivation, we become a communist state. Tell me, would you be going to school and planning to work hard at a job if you got the same things in life if you would have dropped out of high school?

2a. As a 3rd year medical student, I know the hours most doctors put in and the work and time it takes to get into and through med school in the first place. By the time doctors graduate, they have been going to school for 21 straight years and they will still have a 3year minimum residency ahead of themselves before they start making anywhere near enough money to start paying back the massive amount of loans incurred from med school and college.
The average doc has over $200,000 in debt by the time they graduate school and are paying back loans for on average 32 years after they graduate. Then you add on malpractice insurance and fighting with insurance companies to a likely 50+ hour work week where people's lives are in your hands on a daily basis plus a minimum of 1 night a week being on call and you begin to scratch the surface of why someone who goes through that much schooling deserves the fruits of their time and labors.

OK, off of my soapbox, it just ticks me off when people assume that doctors have cake lives with everything handed to them on a silver platter where the biggest concern is when the next tee time is. As far as lawyers, they're all dirty savages, hate them all you wish

3. If someone offers your $5 an hour to do a job and someone else offers you $15 an hour to fo the same job, would you take the $5 because you have worked there before? I doubt it. Why shouldn't the farmer get more money for leasing his land when he can? It's his right. Maybe if you helped him do some work around the farm in the off-season he would have seen things differently.

4. I'm in med school and married to grad school PT student. I have no money and between my wife and I we're racking up debts by the tens of thousands. I live in town in an apartment in the heart of Des Moines. Despite this fact, I have 7 different options of quality land to hunt. Most of this is public land that mostly only those who live nearby know about. The rest is farm land where I have stopped in and asked permission as well as offered and given my time to help with harvest and other labors in exchange for the opportunity to hunt there.

5. As many have said, we have ourselves to blame at least partly for the lack of available land in some areas. For many years, we supported and watched Real Tree Outdoors and all the other hunting shows that used to be relegated to Sunday mornings on ESPN. I remember watching every last minute until it was time to leave for church, then setting the VCR to record what I would miss while at church and watching that soon after getting home. I enjoy watching a good buck hunt on TV as much as the next guy and the problem is, there are many of us, enough for these videos to go mainstream and for those who don't know a 12 guage from pellet gun to see it and think they could do it. They then bought land and are trying to do it themselves.

6. Is it really a bad thing that people who didn't have the advantage of knowing and loving hunting from an early age that we did are coming to know and love it? If there are twice as many hunters in your state, imagine how much more difficult it will be for gun control laws to be passed let alone anti-hunting laws!

7. It's kind of selfish (and I'm the first to admit guilt on this account) to think that no one else should have the privilege of hunting when we know how much fun and how relaxing it really is. Do people born and raised in a non-hunting/city dwelling family deserve the pleasure of hunting any less than the rest of us?



My prediction? That eventually a lot of these newbies will discover how difficult hunting really is and how much work, planning, and thought goes into properly managing a deer herd. When they start offing every trophy buck and leaving the smaller ones with the does and they can't get bigger than a 6pt 100" buck off their $1000 an acre land, I think they'll lose interest. When people aren't getting what they want out of expensive land, they're often anxious to get out from under it. Ever seen someone who bought wooded property planning to log it when they realize it's 80% swamp land and the trees they were drooling over when they bought it are an overwhelming minority? Those are some eager sellers if I've ever seen 'em!


I empathize with your situation and I hate high fence deer slaughter farms as much as the next guy, but when it comes to people spending their money to buy hunting land, I guess I'm kind of ambivalent. I'd rather see good hunting land become good hunting land I can't use than see it become a Wal-mart shopping center.

furgitter

I think djschuett summed it up.Ive been thinking the same thing ever since this thread got started.Im just not as good with words as he is.Everything he said hit the nail on the head....mabe you dont like it....but then again,thats life.You wont change that,but you can get into something that will make the money you need to do what you want.Crying never got anyone anything except wet cheeks.

North Texan

After reading that, I'd say God is also a fan of high fences.[8D]

North Texan

Make sure you keep your malpractice premiums paid....

djschuett

I will, don't worry about that! I'll be a doc in the Navy for the first 5-10 years so I don't have to worry about paying half my income to cover my ass!

Crazy thing about malpractice law, in regular civil cases you have to prove you were wronged "beyond a shadow of a doubt." In malpractice cases the burden is "a preponderance of the evidence."

So basically to lose in a civil case, the jury has to be 100% sure you did wrong. In a malpractice case, they have to be 51% sure. It's a helluva lot easier to get a jury 51% sure than 100%, especially when many of them don't understand 50% of the words being used in the case!

Another weird quirk; malpractice cases are the only area of law that I know of where counter-suits are not allowed. This means that you could sue me as a doc for totally bogus claims that you know are false, drag my name through the mud, cost me days to weeks of work plus legal fees of $200 an hour and I can't sue you back for libel, slander, or even to get re-imbursed my legal fees.

Also, in most states, if you win a settlement against me by convincing the jury that there is a 51% chance I was wrong and your settlement is more than my malpractice insurance covers, you can go after my house and my car to cover the damages.
How many jobs can you think of where if you screw up at work there's a chance it could make you homeless?

North Texan

Not exactly true. Off hand, I can't think of a civil matter that requires beyond a reasonable doubt standard. Most merely require the preponderance of the evidence. Usually the high evidentiary standards are reserved for criminal prosecutions. That's why OJ got hit with over $33M in liability by Nicole's family, even though he was not found criminally liable.

Not exactly correct there, either. There are still some options for frivilous claims. If not against the plaintiff, against the plaintiff's attorney.

Any job where you are a licensed professional and render services under the basis of that license. This includes attorneys. If I give someone bad advice or make a mistake drawing up a document, they can proceed against my malpractice insurance. If that is not enough, they can seek compensation from me personally.

Aught Six

Some people have more than others, but I'll figure out how to get what I need in the long run. I hunt 20 acres of family land on the edge of a luxury housing development, and wander onto over-pressured public land here and there. Somehow, I still manage to shoot game.

djschuett

True about the civil part, I mis-typed I meant criminal case.

The part about counter-suing for frivilous lawsuits came straight from a lecture by a medical malpractice lawyer given to my med school class last spring. May be a difference in the laws there between Iowa and Texas. A state senator here in Iowa tried to introduce a bill to counter this in Iowa last fall saying that it's not fair that someone can bring a malpractice case without any merits without any personal risk. If a doc "wins" a malpractice suit, he/she still loses days of work as well as legal costs and the way the system is in Iowa right now, the doc has no way of getting that money back.

If I understand it right from a buddy of mine whose dad is a doc in Texas, Texas is one of the few states where a physician's house and care are protected from seizure as part of a malpractice settlement. This is why most docs in this area don't own their homes, their wife or husband does thereby protecting it.

Regardless of who it affects, I feel there needs to be some form of a cap or personal property protection in all states for physicians, attorneys and anyone else who may have a lawsuit brought against them. In the health care field, this would drive down malpractice insurance costs which would in turn drive down health care costs which would drive down the cost of health insurance for the individual. I'm not implying a $100,000 cap either, I fully realize there are situations where that simply isn't enough to reimburse for some forms of damages. I just think that someone shouldn't be able to sue a doc for several million dollars when their gastric bypass surgery fails when they eat McDonald's everyday. That case is currently pending in Iowa.

I did not know that about attorneys potentially losing their houses as part of a ledal malpractice settlement. I would argue however that it is much more likely for someone to have a multi-million $ lawsuit against a physician than an attorney, but this is just my guess.

North Texan

Regardless, I'm going to enjoy hunting IL in place of bhunter50's kids once I become a wealthy attorney.[8D]

I hope once you get your practice established, you are able to afford the same.