RE: tipping your guide
Tim Buma is right with his last sentence in his last post.
I did some guiding back when I was in college on a couple of different private ranches. I guided probably 50 different hunters most of which were deer hunts. And like Tim said, the guide knows who can and cant afford to pay a good tip. I've guided everybody from guys who arrived on the ranch in there own private jet, and who paid $8,000 for a 5 day deer hunt. To a guy who was a police officer from San Antonio who brought down 1 of his 4 kids for his first deer hunt.
Now I would have been pissed if the guy who has a jet, went cheap on the tip. But on the other hand, I didnt even really care how big of a tip the Police officer gave me. I knew that the first guy could give me one hell of a tip, which he ended up giving me $1,000 cash and a pair of Ziess binoculars (he had 3 of the exact same pair). The police officers son ended up taking a 120" cull buck on his 3 day of hunting, he tipped me $100, which I was completly fine with. So money is not everything. I was lucky in that the ranch that I worked on gave me $150 a day, plus I kept what ever tips I made, so I was doing pretty good for a college kid.
It is my experience that the "rich guys" are the ones who normally go cheap on the tips. The average guy normally is the best tipper. The main reason for this is that the average guy feels embarressed and feels like he must give a good tip. He dosent want to seem like a tight wad. But the rich guy knows that he is rich and can do/have what ever he wants, so he dosent really care what anybody thinks of him. So the rich guys normally think that they can give the guide a little tip, and he will be/should be happy with it. The average guy normally gives you money, the rich guy normally gives you a piece of there equipment. I have a friend who guided a quial hunt, the hunter tipped him by giving him his brand new high end beneli shotgun. Why? Because that hunter had just bought the shotgun and had never been quail hunting before, he went down only on an invotation, so he was never going to use that shotgun again after that hunt.
The tip is all up to the hunter, it is there call.