Feast at the club

[LDS]

Not to get into a forbidden G-word thread but:

The local sport shooting society had their 2nd weekend of the month sunday lunch today so I dropped in to renew my annual membership and snag some KFC.

There were skeets exploding, steel plants falling, vanilia wafers crumbling and various shapes of paper being preferated in abundance, as well as good food.

I feel blessed to have a place to go and do these things.

This club is sponsored by the wildlife management area 2 miles from the house. 1000 acres for me to roam and contemplate life and nature, paid for by taxes on sporting goods but otherwise not draining a dime from the non-using taxpayers of our state. I also contribute $25 a year as a use fee for the areas, but that is volluntary. I also have another WMA about a mile from the house but it is only 800 acres and does not have a shooting range. Just a ton of squirrels and more deer than the bow hunters can drag out each year.

KY harvested nearly 200,000 deer this season, not counting the ones killed by cars. The heard is growing and healthy.

[dixieangler]

Deer like hogs and other critters numbers will explode if they are not culled routinely. Its the same here and elsewhere. I wonder about the ever tightening game regulations though because the tighter the regulations get, the less animals culled that could begin to cause nuisance problems for farmers and growers. A lot of farmers and growers get permits so they can thin out the animal populations that are eating (destroying) their crops. A measure that they must take if the FWC does not loosen game restrictions. Even permits and looser regs they say may not be enough. It is a very severe problem for farmers and growers and I hear it from them all the time.

[LDS]

Biggist problem I see is the limited land available to hunt.

Deer are at nuscience levels here. Hogs are getting there and are over running some parts of the country, yet people have vast areas posted due to leasing land to hunters or not wanting hunting period. I know several people that lease large blocks of land for hunting and the hunters show up once a year, take 3-4 deer in two weekends and the land is not hunted for the next 50 weeks. They will allow no one else on the land because of the lease agreement. All the while the deer are breeding, does are dropping twin fawns right and left and hogs are moving in untouched.

Here in the east, where there is not really that much accessable public land, we are promoting this overpopulation and invasive species problem.

I am all for private property rights, I am a property owner myself. Perhaps we need to start requiring landowners to police their land and scientifically manage their heards. The officials do not mind telling me when and where I can build a barn or shed, what I can plant or where I can dig a well, what I can park in my driveway, what I can float on the water and they base it all on the public good, why not game management.

We also have vast tracks of federal land that can not be hunted. Corp of Engineers land and such. We now also have the Fort Knox military reservation that is no longer a combat operations area and the land is no longer used for training. It is now the military human rescources center. We are talking an area of 107,000 acres, 167 square miles of the best deer hunting territory in the nation, that is largely restricted.

Things like that really get to me.

[dixieangler]

Here in the east, where there is not really that much accessable public land, we are promoting this overpopulation and invasive species problem.

You got that right. I agree.

I am all for private property rights, I am a property owner myself. Perhaps we need to start requiring landowners to police their land and scientifically manage their heards. The officials do not mind telling me when and where I can build a barn or shed, what I can plant or where I can dig a well, what I can park in my driveway, what I can float on the water and they base it all on the public good, why not game management.

Makes you wonder if its really private property doesn't it? But I agree there should be a requirement that animal populations are to be controlled on the land by the land owner on their land as long as they are land owners with penalties for not complying. If they have enough money for that much land (land size should be the determining factor), then they have enough money to have it managed even if by contractors if necessary.

We also have vast tracks of federal land that can not be hunted. Corp of Engineers land and such. We now also have the Fort Knox military reservation that is no longer a combat operations area and the land is no longer used for training. It is now the military human rescources center. We are talking an area of 107,000 acres, 167 square miles of the best deer hunting territory in the nation, that is largely restricted. Things like that really get to me.

The requirements for animal population control should be the same for all government Federal, State, and County land as for private land owners. Even legal court penalties for government agencies failing to comply. Obviously neither the private land owners nor the government are controlling the animal populations on their lands.