Freak Show Bucks

You guys hit the nail on the head, the biggest problem the whiners have is it isn't free to them and they would never admit that. I would guarantee you anyone of them who has sat in a stand in an area or property that is free and just lets everyone hunt has had a hunt ruined by another person and has thought to themselves "if I had enough money to buy this place and fence all these other people out I would". If you told them you had to many management 160 class bucks and they could hunt as many as they wanted for free, everyone of em would show up. This is the time for the high fence hunt to take a turn for the better with all the caribou and elk dying from the wolves like Jack said and out here in SD we have the mountain lions that the biologists said never existed eating the majority of the elk and deer fawns in the Black Hills because they are now too far out of control, enough to where the population is going backwards fast. More and more people are going to get tired of going on an expensive hunt and not even seeing anything that they are finally going to figure it out that the GOOD high fence operations are a good alternative. I believe if we can get more people to try it out by either donating management buck hunts or the ones we can't sell anyway to some good organizations and youth hunts, etc., we can make more of the public accept it. It has to be a real hunt and not some of these little penned shoots that give it a bad name. I've seen adds on E-bay for hunts for a particular buck with pictures of him standing in a corral with fence and buckets in the background and even saw one a couple weeks ago with the buck standing in a small pen with a white deer trailer about 30 feet away. These are the types of things that people see and what gives people a bad taste about high fence hunts. Selling a particular animal isn't selling a hunt, it is selling a shoot and right or wrong, this is the reason some people refuse to do it. It personnally disgusts me because so many people are working so hard to do it right trying to get the public to accept it and then you have the ones that are so lazy they can't even take a picture in a nice setting with trees in the background instead of fence or use the picture where the tag is turned behind the ear and not visible instead of it looking like a billboard, I mean you can buy a $59 game camera, come on. It was the same way with pheasant hunting 10 years ago, everyone said they would never hunt on a preserve and now the good preserves have excellent habitat and thousands of wild birds including the released ones that most people don't even think about it or care anymore but it has too be a great outdoor experience. Walking down a grass strip with 3 planted birds won't cut the cake these days, too many quality places to hunt good birds rather then going on a chicken shoot.

Don't consider my comments meaningful....but... like most deer enthusiasts I do have my thoughts on what I think I want in my herd. I can only say that I realize that some folks have worked hard for years and have given everything within their means (sometimes probably more) to get what they have and to be where they are. I take nothing away from them for their results. We can all agree that there are more unknowns to this genetics thing than we care to admit sometimes. I don't think we've developed "deeroids" yet!