+1 Alltlk4 I had not planned on making any more posts on this thread for fear of just blowing up and not accomplishing a friggin thing! After reading the last post by huckleberry I have to say kudos to the gent and that just maybe we are all a lot closer on most things than I thought we were. After all, that is the way it should be in order to keep our great sport alive and well!

The world smiles upon those that smile upon the world! :arms: Kudos to you all!

A deer to fill the freezer? That is not what those hunts are about, because unless the hunt was won instead of paid for, you could fill your freezer, my freezer, and their freezer a few times with the cost of the hunt itself.

I tried to pull it up and I could swear I did post it here under either the bow hunting or traditional thread but it does not show up in my search. but though off topic I'd be glad to repost it here.

I was hunting a neat spot that I love. It's where a field corner meets the corner of an old abandoned gravel pit. The wall of the gravel pit is just 5 yards behind the tree I climb and is so steep and tall nothing can climb it. Anything coming from the thick woods below the gravel pit to this field has to come around it and this spot is the first place they can enter the field. You can face one way confident that nothing can approach from behind you. And the tree I climb is tucked up into a little cubby hole of other pine trees making it next to impossible for an animal to see you until he is in range. I had seen 4 or 5 does, even practiced drawing on a few as they passed me from right to left. I was waiting to see one of the good bucks I know to be in the area. But the only horns I saw were on a little 4 point that proceeded to chased every doe in the field all over the place. Finally it was getting so dark I had started to gather up my stuff to come down when I heard something walking in the woods to my right. This old big boar came out and stopped broadside at 15 yards. As he stood there looking at the deer out in the field, I drew, hit my anchor point, picked my spot, locked eyes on, and released. I saw my arrow hit him a little farther forward than I would have liked but it looked okay. It did not pass completely through and I heard him rattle that aluminum arrow on a tree as he ran back into the woods. I climbed down and picked up his blood trail which was okay but not heavy due to no exit hole. I trailed him to where he dislodged my arrow and kept after him till I reached about the 100 yard mark. I have bow hunted for many years and if I'm not 100% on the shot and the animal has gone more than 100 yards I typically back out unless the animal is just pouring blood. Also the prospect of finding a still live wounded boar hog in a thicket at night kinda sucks too. So I returned and picked up the trail the next morning. Sure enough he had gone another 100 yards where I found him dead. I caught part of his shoulder and in conjunction with his shield it had limited my penetration to about 8 inches. May have just stuck one lung or he could have gone so far just because he was just a tough old booger.

You have mine as well. I'm not nearly the ###hole I can appear to be online. LoL! I am just very passionate about bow hunting and fair chase. But the personal jabs and insults are over the line and I shouldn't go there. So lets just agree to disagree on the topic at hand. Best of luck to you in your endeavors.

Good stuff (story). How many animals have you taken with the trad gear?

Thanks for posting that.

man, theres to many fence places these days. I would take a 120" buck from the wild over a 300" farm raised buck any day. I mean, whats the point in shooting a deer for $20,000, when you can way more fun hunting with some close friends and tellin deer stories from way back. Plus the deer are unnatural. look at the buck in this picture, grosses 510, 510?!? If I ever saw a 190 in the wild, i would probably fall out of my stand!
Attachment 17571

I see some of those deer sometimes and wonder how they can keep their head up. Like a woman who gets a boob job about 2 sizes to big. Just does not look quite right.

To each his own, but my opinion on the subject is: If a deer is born or raised in a fenced in area ( no matter how many acres ) then it can not be considered wild, if that deer is shot then it can not be considered hunting.

Definitions(Merriam-Webster Dictionary):
Wild- A. living in a state of nature and not ordinarily tame or domesticated
B. growing or produced without human care or aid
C. not subject to restraint
D. not inhabited or cultivated
Hunting- pursuit of game
Game- wild animals hunted for sport or food

I came on this late and just had to read through the whole thing. Same old crap, "Lets all stick together". Like hell. If you want to really find out what hunters are, show a couple of tapes to people that don't hunt but have no objection to hunting. Those people will become very opinionated on what hunting really is about half way through the tapes. They are disgusted by them and I don't wonder why because I am too. Somebody said it earlier, it is not the hunters or the anti's that matter, it is the people sitting on the fence. (No pun intended)
Elitism? You bet. I started with a recurve that had a split riser that I screwed and glued. I am still using it. You are not a bowhunter unless you can use all 4 bows like a REAL BOWHUNTER. I love to rifle hunt, and still do. If you hunt land open to the public it is harder than bow hunting. I don't want to hear that nonsense that "I hunt with a bow to challenge myself". What a bunch of crap. I remember when the compound came along and guys that almost never got a deer during rifle season started to get deer every year. Then the bow season was extended into the rut. Everybody and his brother ran out and bought a bow. Then the crossbow. Then the early muzzle loader. Anything to make it easy. After all this venting, what it comes down to is: How many of those high fence "hunters" would still hunt if they did make it illegal and they had to resort to real hunting? As the "easy" deer are being shot out in my state due to the above mentioned regulation changes, more and more people are dropping out of hunting. The first ones to drop are the casual hunters that really don't care about hunting, it was just something to do that was easy. That is my definition of hunting.
Game Farms should be illegal. The only cases of CWD in Pennsylvania were in captive deer. Their is no doubt in my mind that CWD got to the east because of Game Farms. It mysteriously appeared in the 80's out west. My theory is it came in with exotics on some ranch. Probably carried by an animal that is immune to it but is a carrier.
Do what you want to do, hunting is on the way out anyway.