Sunday, November 20, 2005
It Really Takes A Lot To Make Me Angry
It takes quite a bit to make me mad, but one of my hunters tonight found a deer that someone had shot and not recovered.
I sell hunts for bucks and does, and also have a few friends who join me by personal invitation to help maintain a proper buck-to-do ratio. Whoever shot the doe must have known they hit the animal, and the deer was found only 60 yards from a hunting coop.
It had been dead for several days. Its eyes were shrunk back in its head, and some animal had eaten part of the carcass.
My investment in my private deer herd is high. There are taxes to pay, feed bills for the deer, and although many might think having a private enclosure is a big money-maker, nothing could be further from the truth. Each animal, whether buck or doe, is valuable to me.
I don’t know who shot the deer. What I do know is that no one told me they shot a doe and couldn’t find it. Knowing the deer was lost would be too bad, but knowing that someone deliberately shot it and was either too lazy to look for it, afraid I would be mad, or simply shot the deer to kill it.
Who knows what possesses people to do such things. I’d rather a client or friend tell me they wounded an animal than to ignore the fact, and hope I would never find out. If we know a deer is hit, we almost always can find the wounded animal.
However, this is the second deer we’ve found in a week that was killed but not recovered. In both cases, the animal was a doe and would have easily been found. The animal we found tonight was only 10-15 yards into the woods off an open field. It’s hard to find deer if we do not have the hunter’s cooperation.
Now, I’m angry because a client or friend shot the doe and didn’t tell us. They purposely left the animal out in the woods to rot, and that animal’s life apparently meant nothing to the person who killed it.
The hunter who initially found it made a point of telling me what they had found. One look at the deer was enough to know that it wasn’t shot by the hunter tonight, and this sportsman had never set in that stand before.
Through the process of elimination I may be able to determine who did this. Perhaps it will be one of those things that we’ll never know for sure, but such acts are not what I would expect from one of my hunters or close personal friends.
This is something I will get over, and it is something I will work hard in the future to keep from happening again. Hunting has a great tradition behind it, and that tradition is built on a solid foundation of personal ethics, respect and trust.
The sad thing is that my trust has been shaken tonight, and even worse, that deer’s life was wasted by someone whose hunting ethics are in question. My anger will cool, over time, but now I’ll probably have to write down who sits in each stand so there is a permanent record.
When a dead deer is found, and no one has told me about it, it will be an easy thing to determine which people had set there before. Doing so may protect my interests, but it’s a lousy thing to have to do.
Sadly, one or two uncaring individuals, like one rotten apple in a barrel, can make things more difficult for everyone. It’s so sad!