Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Lost my East Texas Lease

Oldman3, I never thought of Chapman boats as fancy, just nicely built. I had one for a while, but it wasn't suited to the intended use. I wanted to fish the flats of the Texas coast, and it caught too much wind. A flat, sit on top kayak worked better for that. But I was impressed with the boat and the people a Chapman's. Just good people.

Lease hunting does have some advantages.
You know who is on the land. Most hunting accidents in Texas involve people falling from stands, not getting shot. If they do get shot, it is usually due to unsafe "administrative" gun handling as opposed to the unsafe gun handling of getting shot by someone you don't know.
You can manage the game so that inferior bucks are removed early in life and the better bucks have time to grow up. This is not to say they are tame or managed like cattle, only that some rules are followed about what you shoot. (That said, I was on a lease for three years where you were allowed only one "good" buck a year. I was always holding out for a taxidermy worthy buck. I passed up a number of bucks over the years that would have been great in a year or two, but were good enough for other hunters at the time. I'd be saying "Nice deer" while thinking "$h!t, I passed on him two weeks ago. Actually had the crosshairs right where they belonged and my thumb on the safety. Oh well. Someday." But those other guys were following the rules, so it was what it was. I never got that taxidermy buck, but I did shoot plenty of deer off the place. Whining over.)

And of course there are disadvantages and opportunities for abuse.
One of the reasons people hunt from stands is that you need to know where people are, or at least you ought to know. If you have five people hunting 1000 acres, it is not all that productive or safe if all are moving about the property. In the western US, where it is often easy to get in a spot and see 1000 acres, or sometimes much more, the concept of a hunter per 200 acres, sometimes less, seems ludicrous. Much depends on the size of the place, the number of hunters, number of hunters that day, fences, other surrounding properties (and how those properties are or are not hunted), just all manner of things. There are sometimes disadvantages you must work around, and sometimes you are pretty much forced to do things you'd rather not do. Not illegal things, but forced to hunt in ways you'd avoid if you could.

There are some great thoughts on this thread. But there are also some poorly thought out judgemental comments (or maybe carefully thought out comments from some overly judgemental aholes.) People who are lucky enough to have access to lots of land, be it public, due to relatives, due to good relationships with the landowners, or due to being wealthy enough to lease it or even own it, aren't "superior" people. They just happen to have, for whatever reason, great circumstances.