I have never hunted behind a complete high fence. This year we asked the owner of our lease to high fence a portion of our ranch because we had been experiencing a lot of poaching from a specific neighbor. The neighboring landowner divided her property into 100 acre plots and sold them off. The new ownere of the 100 acre plots put feeders all along the fence line and a some of them were caught on our ranch. our lease manager went to our land owner explained this and said we were either going to need a lower lease price or one mile of high fence along that border. So now on our 6,000 acre lease we have one mile of high fence. I think we did the right thing, but it is pretty discouraging that we have to go to these lengths to combat poachers.

So again I have never hunted a high fence enclosure, but I can see why they are becoming more prevalent. If we were experiencing poaching along all our borders and high fenced all our ranch, I would probably move to another lease even though I do think that an area as large as 6,000 acres would still be a challenging hunt under high fence. The bottom line with me is that when I do finally get that 170 class deer, I want him in the record book and deer killed behind a high fence cannot be entered in the book.

I also think that if I had a 170 class deer on the wall from a high fence ranch I would spend more time explaining to people how high fence hunting is real hunting than I would telling stories about how I got the deer.