King Ranch Buck

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I am an english man myself ,they live hard here if they chase a deer. Mostly coon and bear. How bout horses?
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I have had all manner of coondogs, and breaking one off deer is a pain, to say the least. A dog that will run deer never makes a good tracking dog. If they are willing to run a healthy deer anyway, they will leave a blood-trail in a heartbeat if they come across a hot deer track laid by a healthy deer. A little dose of tri-tronics, and a good dummy collar is the only sure-fire way to break one off deer in my experience (and it's not always sure-fire). My dogs won't chase a horse but once, the ones I raise usually never do. Other's dogs who chase my horses get one warning.
 
LOL...good guess. We raise running Quarter Horses...thus the handle, our stable's name is Rockin U Running Horses. I do have 2 Thoroughbred mares though.
 
Well, since this thread is drifting all over the place, how about this never-answered question:

Why is it not "fair chase" if a high-fenced pasture in south Texas brush country is several thousand acres?

Wildlife biologists, via studies using radio collars, tell us that a whitetail deer's home turf is generally about a section. A square mile, 640 acres. So if a bunch of deer can run for miles from any given point, how is it not a fair-chase situation?

Me, I don't care how high the fence is. If I'm out trying to hunt in brush where I'm lucky to be able to see fifty to a hundred yards in a 5,000-acre pasture, the notion of "pen" or "canned" strikes me as plumb silly.
 
Me, I don't care how high the fence is. If I'm out trying to hunt in brush where I'm lucky to be able to see fifty to a hundred yards in a 5,000-acre pasture, the notion of "pen" or "canned" strikes me as plumb silly.
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I have a two-pronged opinion about that.

First, I fully agree with you WRT hunting for one's personal satisfaction. A deer can easily outrun any man, and man can only walk so far in a day, and anything past that distance is pretty much irrelevant to the hunting experience -- i.e., if there's a fence somewhere over the next ridge, it doesn't fundamentally change what you're doing in the brush where you can't see 100 yards. It's hunting, plain and simple.

Second, I don't think that paying 20 grand to get shuttled into someplace where nobody else can go, to shoot a deer that everybody knows is there, is record-worthy, at least not in the same list as a record won with blood, sweat and years. Jim Shockey's "muzzleloader" hunts with weatherproof, scoped rifles shooting sabot rounds at 250 yards shouldn't be anywhere near the muzzleloader record book, either, particularly where the guys he has "bumped" got their deer with a sidelock, lead bullet, and no magnification.

Maybe its the whole concept of the record book, beyond a biologists's interest in how big a deer could get, that's problematic -- not any sort of hunting.
 
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Well, since this thread is drifting all over the place, how about this never-answered question:

Why is it not "fair chase" if a high-fenced pasture in south Texas brush country is several thousand acres?

Wildlife biologists, via studies using radio collars, tell us that a whitetail deer's home turf is generally about a section. A square mile, 640 acres. So if a bunch of deer can run for miles from any given point, how is it not a fair-chase situation?

Me, I don't care how high the fence is. If I'm out trying to hunt in brush where I'm lucky to be able to see fifty to a hundred yards in a 5,000-acre pasture, the notion of "pen" or "canned" strikes me as plumb silly.
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This is why I think it needs to be left open for interpretation. A 10,000 acre high fence is a whole different animal from a 350 acre high fence place. The main thing to me is that the deer should be wild. Not hand fed, no ear tags or any of that stuff. A deer can get away in a couple hundred acres, but he has to have the instinct to want to.
 
Some biologists have told me that a ranch needs to be a minimum of 5000 acres to have contained deer and even then it will only be on the inner most part of the ranch. Deer move a lot more than you might think, especially when a buck starts chasing. On our ranch we had a common feeder buck get shot 4 miles away on a different pasture.

Also once you put up a high fence you can improve the genetics of the ranch much easier than without. You can eliminate subpar bucks from breeding your does much more effectively.

I'm not going to speak out against high fences but they will have a noticeable effect on just about any ranch.
 
A deer's turf being a square mile........I just don't think so.

I've run coyotes with Walker Foxhounds all my life and occasionally they have got after a deer. When they do, I've seen deer run 15-20 miles straight as they can go to a lake to jump in to try and get away from the hounds. You can't tell me the deer didn't know where the lake was.
 
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