Muley Hunter and Flags I was just joking with you guys!
Muley Hunter you have already been more than helpful with me on a number of issues I've had, I couldn't ask anymore of you!
Help is handy but I've already been trying to help myself, I spoke to the Montana fish, wildlife and parks people and had hunting information sent to me from them. Mind you I'm still as confused as I was to begin with but it's a start!

I agree though, we get it heaps here in Australia. People here in Aus just asking on forums "where can I go to shoot a good stag" and expecting people to just give up their best spots. I personally love to help hunters and if they seem like genuine people I'm happy to forward them on to some decent public land but I'd never give out my best stuff or my private to anyone but my brother, myself and a very select couple of other people.
The biggest issue we have is there is no bag limit so we get idiots wanting land, then they'll go there and shoot everything they see day and night. Two incidents come to mind, the first was a bunch of Melbourne wankers (city slickers from about 4 hrs away) that we ran into a few years back. They were shocked they hadn't seen any deer because the year before they'd shot 25 (20 of which were hinds). What they were doing was male or female they'd shoot them (legally or illegally) and just cut the head of, tie it to the bullbar and leave the corpse where it lay.
The second bloke this year posted up a trip hunting fallow where he'd shot 6 forkhorns (2 year olds) and was whining that he couldn't find bigger ones! I said well if you let them grow they will grow and I was shocked at the amount of people who cut me down and it made me realise the kind of hunting culture that is building here with those city idiots.

Because deer laws for all our species (bar one) are so lax, management comes down to personal ethics and unfortunately there are too many people that don't care at all about that. Hound hunting crews are a good example here also. They put blood hounds, harriers and beagles on to deer trails, watch them through GPS trackers and move in to cut off the deer, the more they can shoot the better regardless of whether its a recently cast stag or a two day old fawn - and believe me I've seen pictures of plenty of both.

My philosophy with trophy hunting has been that I'd rather one big guy on my wall than 10 young ones gathering cobwebs in the shed. Meat animals, I won't shoot velvet stags or hinds/does that have young fawns at foot. Having said that, in the US I'd happily shoot, eat and mount a 6 point buck if I was fortunate enough to find one because for me hunting is far more important than killing and the trophy at the end is great but time in the bush is the best part of it. People laugh at me for saying it but as much as I love deer hunting and there's no way I could ever stop I do not enjoy the act of physically killing a deer, I just have so much respect for them, regardless of species they are just the best creature god invented.

Anyway that's just my personal rant