I don’t think we ban cell cameras but I do believe that our harvest allowances are insane and probably half the hunters in this state actually game check. I’m not saying give us all kinds of rules but anyone who says they need to kill 15 deer to feed their family is just full of crap. Everything in a meat market is cheaper by the pound than what venison ends up costing.

in all cases thats not true .

Matt ,,,,, well they wanted baiting to be legal . i knew when it happened ever body with 5 acres was gonna bait .

they could ban ever thing i'll still kill deer . same with any thing else , i have it i'll kill it i know how to hunt it .

Great post Burbank!!!

I know cell cams are newer technology, but baiting in other states has been legal for quite some time. They still have deer and turkeys. But maybe the addition of cell cams to the long time baiting will do them in.

I dont know if people do this on purpose or if human psychology just wants to always make everything have to be all or nothing….black or white………Probably some of both.

It’s not going to “do them in”…….You’ve adjusted the left side of the equation and now the right side will have to adjust to find the new balance……This new balance will be less deer on the landscape with even poorer age structures. The population will not shrink evenly though. The smaller more fragmented properties with higher hunter density will be the ones receding the most. I think it will likely have some level of negative impact on just about everyone but the biggest landowners and clubs will be the least impacted by baiting and cameras.

Burbank is correct about trigger control playing a key factor. The first thing we could do is to voluntarily pull back the reigns with doe killing and everyone get out of this mentality of managing inside of our own little bubble. Zoom out to 30,000 feet and start thinking on a landscape level around you rather than thinking you exist within your own 1000 acre block. If we want to produce more males then we need to maximize the doe population across the bigger landscape. Your does will spread out if/when resources get thin and fill in the holes in the bigger landscape around you. There are only a small handful of situations occurring that need to worry about any kind of real doe management. Right now we’re a LOOONG ways off from maximizing our space that’s available.

So this is what the other states had to do when they implemented baiting? Did Alabama have to do this when greenfields became a thing and people started baiting deer with them? Or did states have to start doing this when big agriculture took root and people started mass farming in the Midwest and shooting deer off of corn and bean fields? Deer eating food put on the landscape by man is not new right?

After we fixed what the European fur market did to wildlife in North America, our game management has been pretty good at keeping game animals thriving. I’m not saying that baiting doesn’t effect the other side of the equation at some level. I’m just saying chill out and give it some time to work itself out. Like it has in every other state that has legalized baiting. Like it did when green fields and mass farming took root. Look at history and learn from it. CHILL BRO 😂 zoom out to the last 100 years across the continent and several species.

I know you aren’t gonna listen and you’re gonna come back with some bubble graph or study that was done 75 years ago about an extinct gopher mouse lizard due to over harvest or something so… Let er Rip Potato Chip.

U can not stop technology. I agree it gives and advantage at times but no more regulation because the ones that regulate u don’t follow those regulations period. Once it’s out of the box there isn’t anything good that comes from them trying. Rules for thee rules for me that’s how it always goes because too much money involved. Alabama doesn’t have thousands of acres of ag land planted in beans and corn such as in Illinois.

With the first two I totally agree. I’m seeing bigger deer drop nowadays due to that combination. Literally have seen and heard about hunters who received pics of a shooter at a feeder who went and shot it that day. Most being guys who wouldn’t have been going that day/time. At some point hunting isn’t hunting… it’s merely shooting.

skills are being lost and then not taught , just a fact .

Nah it's just hunting isn't that hard, it's the same with fishing. Technology has shown us where and when critters move and it just so happens they are not very hard to kill once you know the current area they are in.

In other words just wait for things to suck bad enough that behavior self-corrects itself…..is that what you’re saying??......Kinda like we did with the two-a-day doe slaughter??

And that shows why folks are becoming complacent and recruitment is low. It really is a catch 22 where there is so much information that one easily becomes bored as it is the one with the money or technology that outcompetes at camp. A rat race to nowhere really.

It’s true though, skills are being lost and replaced with technology

Does 2 question marks mean something different than one? Are you trying to make your question more questionly? That’s a serious question, I’m not trying to be smart. It seems like when you want to make someone feel stupid you add an extra question mark.

One other point I made in my post was to take into consideration the history of other states. How their wildlife handled baiting and such. But instead of saying “Yeah that’s a good point. Mississippi and Texas seem to be doing ok.” you take one piece of my post and ask stupid questions about it. So yeah to answer a smart A question with a smart A answer that’s what I think we should do CNC, get stuff real sucky and then change stuff.

I think you are assuming things are gonna get real sucky, and what I am saying is, in the past in the other states that allowed baiting years ago, things didn’t get real sucky. So there’s a pretty good chance they won’t get sucky here either.

I’m not sure why I add extra ?? or the dots…….I’ve never really analyzed it too much. Just something I do putting space between my thoughts sometimes……It’s certainly not meant to make anyone feel stupid.

As far as the comment about Texas and Mississippi…….I didn’t acknowledge it because it wasn’t a very valid point but I was just going to let it go. Comparing us to any other state, especially Texas, is just apples to oranges. We have our own set of variables here for how the game board and game pieces are arranged. We have more fragmentation and urbanization occurring here with a higher hunter density. That creates the potential for different outcomes when you implement change.

Texas and Mississippi are vastly different states. Different from each other I mean. They both are fine. I guess we will look back at this deal in 10 years and say one of 2 things. Either we will say man we should have hit the panic button 10 years ago and made some drastic changes. Or we will say man those guys that panicked 10 years ago were worried about nothing. I think we will say the latter. But I’m kind of wired that way too. I’m also wired to only use one question mark or 3 periods at an ellipsis. 😂

Have we determined if cell cameras are going to be legal on private land or not? I am not going to renew my spy point subscriptions if it's going to be illegal?

May want to start paying monthly until the truth comes out on the matter.

I will reiterate what several have posted about Alabama. It is so different from Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, etc that you cannot look at what those states have done and apply it here. Those states have large properties that are intensely managed to raise the age structure and health of deer. Supplemental food (for nutrition and bait) and cameras have been a huge aid in saving bucks that need a few more years to reach their potential.Alabama has such an intensely high level of competition between adjacent landowners that these things can certainly be detrimental to the local deer population..In most areas, it is kill em before the neighbors can. I should add that we are so far behind those other states in deer management that a 3.5 year old 10 pt here is considered a deer of a lifetime and shot without a second thought. It's hard to argue with that as the neighbors will certainly do the same.

No one in our club or the surrounding 10k acres thinks a 3.5 year old deer is a deer of a lifetime. I don’t know any of my friends that hunt in Alabama that think that. A decent buck? Yes. A shooter buck? Some do some don’t. But none think it’s a deer if a lifetime unless it is a 160” 3.5 year old 10 point.

And I was mainly talking about Mississippi as an example. They are not vastly different. Mainly CNC and I were talking about baiting. Which to a large extent has been going on in Alabama since I was a kid. So about 40 years. Now I know it wasn’t happening at the level it is now but it was happening on a large scale level. Cell cams are a different story. The technology is only a few years old so there is no history of them being used in other states.

But, even if those states you mentioned are very different from Alabama, deer are still deer. And if baiting was going to cause a big problem in Alabama, I think it would have caused a big problem in those other states as well. I’m not talking about what the states did to manage the deer herd. I’m talking about what did baiting do to the deer herd. Some people seem to think baiting is going to be detrimental to the deer in Alabama, when it wasn’t detrimental to the deer in other states. I meant we been baiting deer with green fields forever. Just because we changed the bait from grass to corn it’s gonna hurt the deer?