Poaching Makes Me Angry

Why do people poach? It’s a question I too often find myself asking and it makes me angry that I have to do it. Poaching is never “right” to me but if a person has a legitimate reason for it such as they are starving and truly need the food to eat then that I can understand. However, when people spotlight, or otherwise hunt illegally for no real reason, it just stuns me. How can you take pleasure in killing a trophy buck when you cheated to get it? Not only do you cheat the deer, you cheated other sportsmen, and you cheated yourself. Part of the fun of hunting is challenging yourself against an animal that is smart and cautious and to take your prey down you have to be on top of your game. When you cheat you take the fun out of it. Anyone can take a spotlight out in to a field and kill a nice deer or any deer for that matter. For me, when you cheat, it stops being hunting and becomes shooting or killing. If I want to shoot I’ll go to the range, and the killing part of hunting is not what gives me my greatest satisfaction. To me the kill is just the finality of all that came before it. Anyway, this rant came about because I found out that on the property I’ve been hunting the most, one of the neighbors has been spotlighting deer at night and to make matters worse he’s not even taking the meat. He’s killing these deer and just letting them lie. If the deer were bothering his crops or something I could have a little more sympathy for the situation but he has nothing like that and as far as I can see he has no justification for shooting the deer aside from just target practice. It’s some family owned land and he better be glad it’s not my family because if I owned the land he would not like what I would have to say to him. It’s people like him who the anti-hunters use to try to make real hunters look bad but anyone who would do something like he is doing is not a real hunter.

Sorry for the rant, I hope I’m the only one of you having a problem like this. My best to you and yours!