OK... interesting thread with a lot of good points.
It seems that the thread has a uniform understanding that private land is private land-- and that no one is entitled to make use of it except the landowner. Anyone given permission to hunt on it has received a gift or has paid some kind of compensation for that permission.
That's great. I truly wish more people were as rational as THR members.
So, I say this not to THR members. I am not even making a case. I thought I'd tell a short-ish story of how my family's land in MS became Posted.
This land has been in our family for literally around 200 years. Our family had been on this land years before Mississippi became a state at all (we came as Methodist missionaries to the Choctaw Indians.)
For years, people in this area had free-run on our property. It became common for a lot of people from as far as 30 or 40 miles would come into our community and onto our land to hunt.
Even though we didn't have any particular master-plan, we never intended people from outside of our community-- strangers if you will-- to come in and do as they please to our land.
Over the years even the strangers became to see a sense of "entitlement" to hunting on our land because they had done so for so long.
Never mind the fact that WE paid the taxes on the land every year. Never mind that WE paid to upkeep the roads.
Two events caused our land to be offically Posted in 1978.
First.
My grandfather drove up "Above the Dam." (there used to be a dam making a lake larger.) He came up to one of our lakes during Duck Season. The lake literally was COVERED with floating shotgun shells from the duck hunters. They had left-- and left the lake littered with thier empty hulls floating in the water. He spent two days scooping them out in a boat with a net-- in the dead winter. Never mind the trash that they would throw out on the road or where they parked.
Incidently, when we broke the artificial dam that had been put up years ago (we broke it to make more dry land for deer hunting.), we actually had strangers who never even asked to be on our land calling my father and screaming at him for "ruining their duck hunting."
Second.
Just prior to our Posting our land, my father did what he routinely did during deer season. He went to his favorite planted field (yes, we paid for and planted it). This particular one was great is he was running late because it didn't take as long to get to. Because of this, he hunted it often.
As he is sitting one day on his stand, he notices movement about 25 feet up a tree on the other side of the deer plot. As he scopes it, he realizes that someone ACTUALLY put up a crappy deerstand on the opposite side of Dad's own deer plot. What was worse is that if he fired, he would have fired directly AT my father in his deer stand!!!(Which was a free-standing -- obvious stand)
It gets better.
Dad yelled to the guy and told him to get out of the stand immediately-- and that he had his rifle trained on him-- so don't do anything threatening.
The guy left.
Immediately, Dad went and got an axe and tore the deerstand out of the tree. Later that night, it seems that the man went back-- only to discover his stand was torn down.
He actually had the nerve to call my father and curse him out for destroying the stand instead of allowing him to come back and get it down! As Dad informed him, he never offered to pay for the cost of planting the plot he was using-- and never considered my father's safety. He hung up on him.
Right after that event, Dad Posted our land.
But it wasn't over.
Because so many of these people felt entitled to our land, they felt that WE wronged THEM by preventing them from what was "rightfully" theirs to use.
We had gated and locked our road. Practically every day, we would find that someone had poured Crazy Glue in our lock. This was bad because there were other landowners that needed a key to the lock, and there was a couple companies that came in. It would not be possible to simply put another lock on until the other people had keys.
In the minds of those people wishing to come in, this was a way to FORCE use to unlock our gate-- even if it was temporary.
To combat this, my father finally bought several CASES of locks keyed just alike at considerable cost. Now, a lock could be replaced immediately.
But that did not prevent gluing the locks.
To add insult to injury, practically every time we would go in our property, we would find rotting, dead animals such as dogs and deer hung over our gate.
Calling the sheriff was practically a useless effort. It wasn't something they could devote manpower to, and not a thing that they would "stake out." We just had to deal with it.
That changed when my mother decided to take a day off and sit in the woods overlooking the gate with a thermos full of coffee and a 30-06.
Sometime around 11 AM, she watched a guy come up and glue our lock. In the age prior to cell phones, she held him at gunpoint until someone came by that she could send to call the sheriff.
We prosecuted this person and he ended up with a bit of Jail time. This news spread like fire and soon the instances became less frequent, and finally ended.
It took that-- and about 3 years of fighting-- for the RIGHT to Post OUR land.
So I not only have NO pity for anyone that thinks that they are entitled to use ANYONE'S land without expressed permission, I have ABSOLUTE distain for anyone that does such a thing.
And I hope anyone who suggests that we have a "responsibility" to let people on our land, or anyone who suggests that we are unethical for it, re-read the efforts we went through only to assert OUR claim to our own land.
If that doesn't convince them, they know where they can go.
Sadly, those that many would normally have no problems letting hunt on their lands had their shot blown in many cases by those that disrespect the landowner, trash the land, or kill indiscriminately. Yet, the LANDOWNER is the one that they blame for their misfortune-- because he is a stationary target. They should probably save some (99.9999%) of their anger for their own hunting buddies.
-- John
anyway, i think you get the jist of it.
