Remember this: This ain’t the O-K Corral.
I have a current, active hunting and fishing license. I’ve been several times since my escape from that land: the Southwest.
For the past two years, the last couple of days of hunting
season bring out the worst desperation for hunters. Every year it gets worse.
I am not sure what drives this need to do desperate acts. Is the
stress and pressure to keep up, produce a product, and suck up to everyone to
stay in the nook of their good graces that much of a problem in the hunting
world? Is it worth it and for how long?
I was having a tire plugged and doing some farrier work on my
pony. The other horses alerted me that something was amiss out by the road. I
looked up and saw a dark blue, Chevrolet truck parked in the road at the edge of
the other pasture. This pasture extends out to the woods and my horses ramble
around wherever they please eating.
I thought, “How creepy. Not sure if that is someone casing the
joint, or just being a douche.”
I turned my head to grab the part to put air in my tires when I
heard a loud shotgun go off. I jerked and looked straight at the vehicle. Three
more were popped off. I said some profanities.
Every horse person in the known universe can concur: You do not
mess with my horses.
This person was sitting in their truck shooting out over the
pasture from the window. The truck was parked a stone’s throw from the neighbor’s
residence. The wife is always in the house but hardly ever comes out.
I wasn’t sure what they could be shooting at. The woods were two
pastures away. I couldn’t remember if it were dove hunting season-but still-no
one is supposed to shoot from a vehicle especially out over someone else’s
private property.
It agitated my father, who sent me after another truck while he
watched the dark blue Chevrolet now backing up to hide behind the neighbor’s
magnolia tree. Someone has been trespassing on his property and menacing him
while he hunts. He can’t hunt in peace because of the boundary agitation by
out-of-community hunters and community hunters skulking about in vehicles.
Now the private land owner that hunts is being assaulted by the
vehicular hunter, who acts pretty much like a scavenger predator (coyote) at
the boundaries.
I don’t think anyone foresaw this problem with landless hunters
not willing to hunt sparse public land then converging on the areas outside of
private land owners while trying to circumvent the land owner’s request for
hunt lease funds in lieu of access; then trying to figure out how to run
wildlife off of rest areas or quiet hunt areas in private lands by using
trespassing hunting dogs, gun fire from mobile vehicles, and trespassing by driving
onto ungated private land as a get-in and get-out scenario.
Just because you have a hunting license doesn’t give anyone the
right to expect a property owner to hand over access to their property and open
the property owner up to liability because of someone’s potentially hazardous pastime.
I left and followed another one barreling down the road. You
find out one hunter-he or she knows who the others are because they are
literally sucking at pack hunting. Low and behold, he was crawling under the
neighbor’s cattle gate to grab a hunting dog.
The problem with hunting dogs with this scenario is putting them
out on the boundary of a private area you have no access to, then know those
dogs are going to cross over that inaccessible land without permission of the
land owner in hopes of driving animals off-this is probably done while another hunter
is in a stand trying to hunt that area with a valid hunting lease.
It is blatant disregard; much like someone shooting out over my
horse pasture.
I thought of some suggestions. People like the option of
suggestion.
If hunters are going to be allowed to hunt with dogs, those dogs
should be microchipped, wearing identification collars, or collared with
tracking systems. If a private landowner should find one on their land, should
be able to require a payment of a return fee to have that dog relinquished back
to the owner-payable by the owner to the landowner. Also, there should be
accountability on the part of the hunter using the hunting dog. That dog’s
identifier should be register with the DNR for monitoring for a fee that way if
the hunter is unwilling to pay the return fee on the dog-they should be fined
for negligible abandonment. This would reaffirm accountability when the dog
walks out in front of someone’s vehicle and causes that person’s property to be
damaged and in need of repair.
Now, this business of shooting from a vehicle can cause all
kinds of problems. You never know when you are pointing a weapon at someone’s
property, even if you think it is the woods, that there might be someone
standing right there or walking by that could catch the spray of it. It is also
wrong to open fire around residential areas far from the woods, even if you’re
shooting at birds out of bird hunting season. Home owners don’t want to be menaced
by out-of-community vehicular hunters blasting away for unknown reasons and
scaring people. This is a good way to
get shot at by senile, older people who take offense at unwanted gun play from
hooligans.
This has become an embarrassing and shameful way to be. Deer
feed people, even undeserving, selfish people. Yet, the very animals everyone
claims as “only for food” are treated like corn fodder, nothing more than an
object, not deserving of any kind of respect.
Hunters are state constituents with a purchased privilege to do
an activity. They are not God, nor are hunters entitled to walk around like
John Poppy Cock demanding non-hunting participants smooch posterior because of
implied and expected erroneous, cognitive delusions of being an alpha hunter; one
that uses everything under the sun to catch a sad little deer.
There possibly is plenty of deer in the upstate. Several years
now, my observation is the steady lack of visuals on deer. In order for me to
even hear a buck, I have to listen in the dark after 10 pm. Not only the animal
but the human is menaced by the ever imposing presence of vigilant hunters
waiting to score.
I would hate the idea that people are so hunter-greedy someone
wants to make deer hunting a nighttime sport-because I am a hunter, I don’t
apologize- blah, blah, blah.
Everything is eventual, per Stephen King, at the rate hunting is
traveling it will reach its carrying capacity before it makes a free dive.
I ponder that hunters lost sight of how to be. Hunting appears
to be an ever-growing soulless dead thing that no longer knows how to be-at
least from my vantage point.
Is this the irony of hunting? To be a soul-less dead thing much
like the multitude of soul-less dead things that is the eventual outcome of its
labors.
Written by: Angelia Y Larrimore
