The deer season is about to rear its ugly head.
Some look forward to it more than Christmas, and others dread it more than a trip to the dentist. It is a time when some of the best hunters in Missouri will go out into the woods and some of the worst hunters ever to don an orange outfit will be out there as well. It is definitely not a time to commune with nature!
If you are there on opening weekend, get bathed in orange, stake out a spot and keep your head low. If you are patient, you may have some deer run over you about mid-morning that were two miles away before dawn.
Actually, after the first weekend, the deer season isn’t so bad. It is a circus on the weekends, but during the week, most hunters are out of the woods, and you can find some places to hunt where you can be alone. The deer in some areas are so hard pressured though, that they begin to become very nocturnal in habit. A mature buck doesn’t behave on the first Monday of deer season as he did on the Friday before opening day.
We had a little survey on my radio program this past week, and out of 22 hunters who called in, 19 opposed the four-point restriction the Missouri Department of Conservation has placed on antlered deer in about two-thirds of the state. If you are a deer hunter, you may take part in this informal poll by mailing me a post card and letting me know if you are for it or against it. If you are for it, please let me know, because I have talked to few hunters who were.
The department claims the deer hunters of Missouri are overwhelmingly for this management idea which they believe will create more big antlers. Is it the truth?
You folks who read this regularly know where I stand on hunters who are looking for “trophies.” Please read last week’s column, if you haven’t already. I don’t believe, if all hunters in the state had a say in this, you would find support for the four-point restriction greater than 25 percent. Most hunters who truly are hunters are not hunting for a big set of antlers. But the money aspect of “trophies” over the years has definitely attracted a lot of people who hunt nothing but deer, and for no other reason than big antlers.
As I said last week, I think it will wane in the future because there are now so many big-antlered half tame deer being grown in pens and sold to hunters who want a trophy. The law of supply and demand should take over someday. Sure, some 12-point racks from 10 years ago sold for $10,000, but when there are thousands and thousands of 12-point racks available, will there be such a demand?
If the MDC sells 18,000 non-resident deer permits to non-resident hunters this year at $225. each, they are not likely selling those to some farm boy who grew up and left the farm to go to work in another state, and is coming back to hunt with his dad. Most of them are being sold to fairly wealthy people, from suburban areas, and the majority of them are trophy hunters. Large numbers of them are leasing up private hunting land that is being closed to local hunters who hunted such land for years and years.
Convince those non-resident trophy hunters we are about to grow bigger antlers and more of them, here in Missouri, and chances are good that number can grow to 25,000 soon, and they have the money to pay $300 for tags if asked to. Now you might begin to see what is behind it all.
A landowner hunter who read last week’s column said he has a son from out of state who comes in and hunts on his dad’s landowner tags. He only gets to hunt only a day and a half, and that $225 deer tag to hunt land he grew up on seems unreasonable. The man told me he considers himself to be a conservationist and has always managed his land, where he runs a certain amount of livestock, for all kinds of wildlife. He says he even has several coveys of quail. But he is revolting against this four-point restriction, and last year he called in a six-point buck as an eight-pointer, discarded the antlers and put the meat in the freezer.
“Trophy-hunter?” he said. “How many deer antlers have we already nailed up on the side of the barn? Do we need more? I never hunted deer for antlers only. Every buck my sons and I ever killed were valued, regardless of the antlers. We took pictures of each and every one.”
He told me that only someone who puts a deer in a vehicle and takes it back to the city has to worry about seeing an agent at roadblocks. And he is right. They aren’t out in the deep woods during deer season. That’s why many hunters will just kill the deer they see, and utilize it.
Others will honestly make a mistake and leave a dead deer in the woods. If it was as easy as discerning a rooster pheasant from a hen, it would be no problem, but it isn’t. A large percentage of the time, I can’t tell if that buck moving through the timber at 70 or 80 yards is a six-pointer or a seven-pointer, and I believe I have spent as much time in the woods over the last 40 years as anyone. The problem is, I have seen heavy-beamed six-point bucks, and some very spindly-antlered 8- and 10-pointers.
The trophy hunters are sure the restriction will make bigger bucks, because they want to believe that. A set of antlers is why they are out there, and likely the only reason for many of them. But whether or not it will or won’t make bigger antlers, the four-point restriction will account for hundreds and hundreds of dead deer left in the woods, and make violators out of hunters who always followed the rules before. It is a bad situation, and a bad law.
The MDC is making a calculated risk that if they gain the support of the trophy hunting segment, and the masses in the cities, they can write off the Ozarks people who increasingly feel that conservation doesn’t have a thing to do with wisdom and common sense anymore, but rather, money.
I do not believe the MDC’s assertion that most hunters want this is accurate, and I wish there was a way to really get a vote on this matter from hunters and landowners both who aren’t interested in the economics of the situation. Want to be heard? Send me your opinion on a postcard.
I will be out hunting ducks as well as deer the next week or so, looking for a trophy mallard perhaps. And with this mild weather and all the water, I have never seen such fishing in November. A grizzled old veteran outdoorsman’s life is one of difficult choices!
Address correspondence to Larry Dablemont, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo., 65613. Send e-mail to lightninridge@windstream.net, check the Web site www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blog-spot.com, or call 417-777-5227.
