re: Drone Recovery for Deer

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I agree with Will Ferrel ( ), I just don't see it. Here or anywhere else I hunt. Leases continue to increase in price and even scrub trash land gets scooped up immediately at inflated prices. Parking stays packed everywhere you go. You can't hunt public land in any state without seeing people. From what I see now vs what people tell me hunting in the 80's was like, I sure do not see the decline in numbers. Maybe it's due to less opportunity being available, but there's a shitload of people in the woods everywhere I ever go.

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I agree with one thing in your statement. , see, common ground.

I really don't necessarily disagree with you overall. Leases increasing in prices is simple economics, more demand with a limited supply is going to lead to higher prices.

I am just going off the numbers, but there are a lot of people that hunt without a license. At the same time, that's always been the case.

And to be honest, I can't speak too much on it other than numbers I can look up. I've been blessed to have family land that I can hunt on and so I don't see the packed public parking lots.

Hunting is not meant to yield a 100% success rate. These fkn for-profit nerds overthink, over complicate and ruin everything they touch.

The challenge and risk of fricking it all up is the fun part, for me anyway.

Like I said, I'm not immune to can't beat em join em. My elk trip is the largest time and money investment I have in hunting every year and being that it's public land and I'm competing with the other humans, I'm going to do what I legally can to beat them. I still think electronics need to be kept out of the woods and would gladly give mine up on that trip if others couldn't use them. My personal odds of success would go up drastically on that hunt, and my enjoyment in deer hunting locally would increase drastically as well. It'd be so damned nice to kill a nice buck that nobody knew existed, felt ownership of, and had no idea when/where it would appear.

I don't like the appeal to ethics here. In the grand scheme of it all, why does losing a wounded deer trigger this big ethical high ground that justifies using the most advanced thing available to a human to recover it? What's one more dead deer left in the woods? The reality is, you (the proverbial you) just want "your" deer. They get hit by cars, they get eaten by wolves, they get bush hogged by tractors, they die by the bazillions each year all year without ending up on a dinner table. The few that are lost per year to mortal hunting wounds and not recovered is a negligible blip. The fact that it might have a nice rack is irrelevant. The fact that a hunter shot it is irrelevant.

I'd take it one step further, if you shoot one and draw blood you should have to burn a tag AND not be able to use a drone to find it. A dog should be the most advanced thing allowed to be used and if you cut a hair on it, it should cost you a tag whether you find it or not. Don't misunderstand me, I do not like losing wounded deer and ran a tracking dog for years recovering them. But if hunters losing a few deer is the cost of keeping electronics out of the woods, I'm cool with it.

Kinda weak minded if you ask me to bitch about tech yet use said tech because that’s what everyone else is doing, that’s my opinion though. I don’t let what others do dictate hunting how I enjoy it, it’s me against the deer/elk. If that would be the case I’d never pick up my bow and just carry a gun.

Perhaps taking the advice you previously gave about becoming a better woodsman/hunter would be of some benefit.

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Perhaps taking the advice you previously gave about becoming a better woodsman/hunter would be of some benefit.

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I'm so glad your ultra shiny hook gotcha attempt yielded some results!

Things have changed so much. There are definitely less hunters in general. No one has permission to hunt on private because common people don’t own big tracts of land anymore. Incredibly wealthy people and corporations aren’t giving away hunting rights for free or even at all in some cases.

The common, unconnected dude is slugging it out on public while he sits on a waitlist for a hunting club. There aren’t many people who have an appetite for that so they just don’t hunt.

I can agree with you on being aligned with your neighbors, it's paramount when trying to manage that the neighbors have the same goals.

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I just disagree here. I enjoy going hunting, but in reality my family uses the deer that I kill to eat on for the next 9 months until the next deer season rolls around for me to get more meat. Could I buy it from the store? Sure. But I enjoy the act of going out there, and I enjoy the taste of deer meat. I'm out there to provide for my family, not as a killer of deer.

And no, it's not always because it's "my" deer. I couldn't care less which doe I shoot, typically I want the biggest one, but I'm not going after it because it's "mine".

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You kinda made my point for me here. You're doing it because you enjoy it, not because you need it. We all do it because we enjoy it. We want the crippled deer. We don't need it. If you shoot it and don't recover it, or hit it with a car, or run over it with a tractor, what's the difference? Shooting it was deliberate and the others were accidents, but that doesn't matter. The end result is the same.

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Hunters do so much for herd management in the wildlife industry that there is a moral responsibility, in my mind, to take care of the game we are after, the game we shoot, and the game we find.

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I don't disagree. In a vacuum, I want them all recovered. If the drones could be used ONLY for recovering dead deer, great. The problem is that will never be reality and the information a thermal drone can convey is too advantageous to the hunter. Everybody has their line in the sand somewhere between hunting butt naked with a sharp stick and using every tool available to humanity. My personal line cuts off everything electronic.

So, if some wounded deer becoming buzzard food is the price of getting electronics out of the woods, I'm cool with it.

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I also don't think of the electronics being used in the cynical/unethical ways

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Well when you aren't an a-hole it's hard to think like an a-hole.

Thermal drones are where this comes in for me. Live-update cell phone cameras are REALLY close to being too much for me, but it's a stationary object. I don't like them, but I don't think it gives the hunter such a tremendous advantage that the deer would be helpless without having one on every tree and some badass data processing equipment. If our goal was to kill ALL of the deer, it'd be a useful tool but wouldn't make it easy.

Thermal drones are a different animal all together. A man could spend $200,000k on a very bad arse drone, spend some time learning how to use it, and lay waste to everything on four legs if he wanted to. Possessing the ability to locate any deer at any time 24/7/365 as long as you have the money to spend makes me throw up in my mouth. We aren't fighting a war against the deer. I don't want them in the woods at all. If you lose a wounded deer because you couldn't find it, oh well. Your loss. I don't want those things used for anything remotely related to hunting.