Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire High Fenced Hunting

At one time the National Forest owned property on the west bank behind/near Cottingham hunting club on the Ayish. It was great because nobody knew it was public land.

They traded it away in a land swap tho. Until they built the lake it would really flood out and for weeks at a time you couldn't cross it.

The biggest problem with East Texas is 95% of the hardwood bottoms are now under water permantely because of resevoirs.

Here's a hint tho. Not all draw hunts are parks...not all draw hunts that produce B&C bucks in are in South Texas and not all public Type II land is in East Texas. There you go get your map out for the best public hunting in Texas.

Hunters are ruining hunting? By, hunting?

I guess I missed the part of the constituion that provided as a US citizen you were guaranteed the right to access land to hunt on.

Of course it's about the money. I mean of course if you owned land and didn't hunt you would just give away access when people are willing to pay for it....yeah and deal with all the hassles that come with it.

To a landowner it's no different than timber or cattle. It's an income producer. At least here you pay for a lease it includes LAND and wildlife in the deal as opposed to where I've been out west where people charge for access "across" their land.

It's PRIVATE land. If you don't like it go hunt PUBLIC land, nobody is stopping you.

Widlife access and land are limited resources...what makes them immune to the market forces every other recreation is?

I'm glad for leases because without them in our part of the world everything would be 5 acre lots and the big tracts of land would have gone the way of the dodo bird.

By the way I'm also a leasee of some land on the border of South Texas. I pay a whopping $1,000 for 6 people (each) for year round access (with electricity and water, a place to stay etc..) on 10,000 acres. That's less than many people pay on gas getting to public land every year.

That's what's great. There's a choice. If you want cheap go public, if you want to spend more go private.

How does me paying a lease affect you at ALL? If your not willing to pay you would never set foot on the property anyway? Serious question.

I've been hearing this lease stuff will run the average hunter out of hunting for the last 30 years or more. I hear it's too expensive for young people...who live in a house they can't afford, buy 2 new vehicles every other year and spent 20% of their income on entertainment and then gripe that hunting has gotten too expensive. Lol whatever.

If you want to hunt you can. Make priorities.

Private landowners don't function to provide a cheap/free place for people to hunt. If that's what you want go public land.

Basically you want a landowner to subsidize your play time.

Part of the O 'me' crowd....it's growing in this country.

You can have your Texas hunting....Ill pass on all that chit, BTDT!

I dont have issues with private land ownership, its the coersion of private landowners from money hungry [bleep] that I have issues with, and so does a lot of the hunting community. Yeah why shouldn't a guy be able to throw up high fences and keep the game from free ranging, I dont see anything wrong with that......NOT!

Never seemed right to me that a land owner can charge to kill public owned animals.
It is HIS property he should have the rights to do as he pleases with it, allow who he wants on it or not, but not to make the public pay for what is not his in the first place?
Something just not right there.

The state charges you to kill the animals, that's what the license and tag are for. The property owner charges you for the permission to use his property to find them on.

I guess in some places you have little choice and I suppose that sucks but that's the way it is. I can't see taking away a guy's right to control who comes and goes on his own property so people can enjoy their favorite passtime.

I like to ride my horse and I think golf courses are a huge waste of land to chase balls around on. They sure make a great place to gallop a horse though. Maybe I should be able to use those privately owned golf courses to do just that. Who are they to keep me away from my fun?

Sorry man but that "logic" just doesn't compute.

I actually agree with 700LH on the "trapping" of free range animals by private land owners. Where I disagree, is the idea that a man doesn't OWN animals that he legally bought and bred for the purpose of hunting. And if you purchase a property that gets surrounded by neighbors fences, look at it this way, you got free fences, to put in whatever you want.

Thats understandable, but what about taking the rights of free ranging publicly owned game away from the neighbor of the landowner who high fences his property?

This can be spun a lot of different ways with a lot of good ideas.
Landowners rights come into play which I wholehearted support. Still somehow is just doesn't seem right for the public to be charged for what they already own which is public game. I am not refering to high fenced exotic game farms.

In truth I don't have a answer that even suits me completely.

I do like some regulations that will allow the state to reward land owners that allow hunting, which otherwise receive nothing.

I don't care for a system that only allows the affluent to hunt, like places in Europe, or at least the way it used to be there, where only the Kings and nobelmen could hunt.

Riding a horse on a golf course isn't a very good comparison, about like saying I should be allowed to 4X4 through a farmers alphalfa.

I'm with AlaskaCub - You can't sell the oil on your property unless you own the mineral rights, how do you sell the animals if the public owns them. Landowner should be able to do anything he wants with his property including not allowing anyone at all onto it, but shouldn't be able to sell what isn't his to sell. Take the money out of the equation and the bulk of the stupidity involved in the hunting world today will cease to exist. I'm all for landowners doing as they see fit until they start taking what doesn't belong to them. The biggest problem is that it would be tough for anyone to turn down the money that is thrown around in the way of leases. Solution is to put a stop to the raping of publicly owned resources and make ranching and farming about ranching and farming - not leasing hunting land.

What do you think of MT FWP easements and controlled BMA's?

While they are great considering the current situation, I'm thinking that if leasing weren't an option they wouldn't be needed. If buying access isn't an option for the Realtree boys then it isn't needed from the state. Which isn't to say that I wouldn't be in favor of the state paying landowners to allow public access in the absence of private leasing. In that case it would be the public providing an incentive to landowners to open their land to the public. In the case of private leasing we have individuals de facto buying the animals that belong to the people as they are the only individuals allowed access. The result is greater crowding on available public lands, inability to manage #'s, and a decrease in hunter recruitment as a quality experience becomes more and more of a pipe dream for many. This isn't to say that this is the current situation in MT, however, considering the logical progression of leasing it very well could be.

I bet there's a few deer in the haystacks this winter eh?

Nasty one for sure.

We've got a few hundred right here in town. I had one in the corrals with my horses yesterday that thought she was just another horse. Wouldn't even run when I went and checked the waterer and fed. - Not looking like a great year for birds or deer next year.

You guys got hammered up there. I heard ND got nailed hard as well.

Things are better to the south of the Missouri. Still lots of pheasants hanging in the road ditch.

50 degrees today here in the banana belt, hopefully some warm air heads your way.

Really sucks to see the wildlife suffer...

They aren't selling you the animal since they can't do what they see fit with those animals. The taking of the animals is regulated by the state. When the landowner has full control and ownership of the animal (like a hunting preserve with privately owned animals does) and he can allow you to hunt whenever and however he wants then and only then is he selling you the animal.

What you pay for is the rights to trespass on his land. If you don't have a legal hunting license he can't allow you to shoot game on his place. Not a tough concept.

Let's use the golf course again. They charge you money even though you're playing with your own balls. How dare they?! You should be able to club your own balls anywhere you want for free. Who cares who owns the land?

Well, they aren't charging you for playing with your balls, they're charging you for using their land to do it on. They don't need to own the balls to do so and ranchers and farmers don't need to own the deer to charge you an access fee.

Hear ya on the wildlife suffering - A little warm air would be a good thing, although if the coffee crowd at the cafe is right, we're in for as much snow in the next month and a half as we've gotten to date. Gotta wonder where they get stuff sometimes.

Theres many evils in this equation, but thanks to the grey area of our laws, man is much smarter than anything written in black and white, as there is always grey between the two. What is happening is not illegal, but it should be, because we humans dont know when and were to stop and seldom think about others or consider the backlash of our actions, when seeking a monetary profit for ourselves. The Texas model of deer leases , is a money maker simply put. And I have flat out seen guys quit ranching livestock, to ranch the wild game of the land at a soo much higher profit margin. Then you have these sneaky azz outfitters that roam the country with check in hand to lease up any land they can find for a healthy price and then run the hunting operations from those chunks of land. They have turned farmer/rancher landowners into entrepeneurs. The whole [bleep] thing has outpriced most average joe hunters, leaving them to fight and misreat each other in overcrowded public land. This grossly selfish behavior is IMO what is ruining hunting across our nation, and all that without even mentioning the high fence ranches which is another evil all in itself. I'll tell you what, Americans are too [bleep] smart for their own good wen it comes to making money, and who knows what the outcome will be in the end. I am thinking that the economy being in the toilet may help slow down this man made monster for a little bit, but the future of hunting for Americans that dont fall into the category of the "the affluent", is grim for sure.

Now back to all the talk about private land, and free enterprise!....grin