ORIGINAL: Flairball
I hunt private land because there is ussually less hunting pressure. This doesn't mean the deer come waltzing right in or that another hunter might not mess up your set-up. It's the same as public land hunting, but you know it's the same few other hunters in the area, and you can coordinate with them. To say it's not hunting is idiotic, and juvinile. As far as guides go, that's hunting too. Maybe some of these guides practices need a little refinement, but that's where each individual hunter has to decide what he will accept. I look at it this way. Scouting is part of hunting, but for whatever reason (ussually distance) one can't get out and scout, so a guide is hired to do it. Now, in some cases the area being hunted is so large that even if you could scout it yourself it would take you a couple months to figure out what the deer are doing. ( I know, one good deer trail is all it takes to fill the freezer. Some people hold out for a racker. It's their choice.)
Now. If I owned 500,000 acres in Texas, or Kansas, and I wanted to shoot a big mature deer, and wanted my guests, and my friends to do the same what would I do? I think I would probably plant some food plots, suplimented with feeders, and make rules about what constituted a mature deer. I wouldn't worry about fences, the deer probably wouldn't leave my propery, it's big. After a couple years I can only imagine that there would be a lot of big, mature bucks on the property. Between me, my father and the handful of deer hunting friends we have( about 5 )the pressure would be minimum. Sound good? It's called managing your land, and this is a very basic look at it. It's also what most South Texas ranches do, but they allow hunters on for a fee, and hire guides to assure that the huntershavegood chance toharvest deer.
Anyway,.....
YES!!!!! took the words right out of my mouth. it is just plain idiotic to say that hunting on private land in general isn't hunting. in some cases this may be true with high fenced crap but where i hunt in ky there aren't fences other than an old barbed wire fence but it's still private land. by no means is hunting on private land a sure thing. i've been hunting on my family's property in ky for years and i just got my first one last year and i had to work for it to.
bowedark's ideas on guiding may have some good intentions but they are extremely one sided and definately don't look at the big picture or at certain situations where things are different. but that could just be me. but saying that managing land and such on private land should prohibit animals from being entered in a record book is a bad idea unless of course it's the pen raised type stuff. ..... well i'm done for the time being.