Poaching: Who does it, and why?

[blindhari]

I guess I started poaching pheasant and quail about 1954 in rural Calif. with a slingshot. I didn't know there were seasons tags or liscense until I was 12 about 1958. Thank goodness the statute of limitations protects me now. As I remember I got my first fishing liscense when I got out of the Army.

blindhari

 

[T.R.]

When I think of the word poaching, I imagine a hunter trespassing out of season to take an animal.

TR

 

[rhinoh]

To me poaching means taking game illegally- that can be involve trespassing, out of season, limit violations or by an illegal method.
Unfortunately I occasionally have to put up with people poaching on my neighbors 1300 acres- haven't caught anyone yet poaching on my little 10 acres but we do share a common driveway that is marked "private drive" and "no trespassing".
Apparently some can't read or a few trespassers I've caught say something like "oh I didn't realize that meant ME I was just walking" or "I was just looking around".

BTW I've found a rather large handgun open carried makes the trespassing conversation go much easier

 

[eastbank]

i do know where there is a large farm about 900 acreas with alot of mountain land and they raise corn,wheat and soybean and its posted tighter than a drum, yet at the local coffee shop in the mornings the owner is always pissen and moaning about the animals eating his crops.lots of the locals have ask to hunt and trap it and have been told no, no way. and thats his right, but where he pisses and moans now he just gets laughed at and told to bad. i have been told that a few people that own land bordering his shoot more than they should as the animals also eat their crops too and go on his land to bed down. eastbank.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Art and Short Barrel,

..., those time you poached to cull the herd was not in harmony with sound doctrine. You can't set yourself above state regulations, because by doing so you announce to yourself that you know more about game management than the state. Maybe you do, but I suspect you don't. You can't say the state is wrong and you are right, based simply on your observations.

I too am LE, but I look at it this way...say Art is quite correct, and the DNR folks did a sloppy job, or no job in actually estimating the herd. A hunter who does a good job at observing and counting, maybe even has advanced degrees in wildlife biology and land management to boot, does a good count, and thus knows what needs to be done.

BUT...what about the other yahoos out there that aren't like the well educated, highly observant, steward of the land? All they see is somebody dropping a lot of deer, and have no idea where the parameters of "necessary" end, so they shoot a bunch too, and so on and so on......So instead of a proper culling, you get over hunting...and everybody looses.

LD

 

[Art Eatman]

The thing about most Texas ranches is that if the rancher doesn't go running his mouth, he's not going to start other people doing any over-hunting.

Nowadays, TP&WD has a pretty effective system in place to deal with over-populations of whitetail.

As far as "educated" in wildlife population dynamics, my family's been in farming/ranching/hunting for some five generations, going back to the time of San Jacinto. Done more land reclaiming than ruining.

I wouldn't have done my deal except that when I first moved back to the old family place, I went out jeeping around one night with a spotlight and counted over fifty pairs of eyes in just one little 100-acre pasture. You don't have to be real smart to know that it's way too many.

 

[alsaqr]

Here in OK we have a lot of slob poachers with horn fetishes. They start poaching deer in August.

At two of my hunting properties we see a few really nice buck deer in July and August each yeer. By the time bow season comes in on 1 October slobs have poached those deer.

Soon after the photo was taken this good young buck was poached by the neighbor:

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll268/alsaqr/SUNP0083.jpg

That guy is well known to all the folks in the area. But the game wardens never catch the guy. i'm tired of it. Next time his cattle come on my place one or more are going to the meat processor.

 

[short barrel]

Yep, I can see that. Also, location has a lot to do with both over hunting and too large herds. Here, I prize every wild animal I see. I can see huge reductions in some species since I was a kid. Intelligent management has helped a lot, especially with turkeys. Not knowing what it's like elsewhere, I have come to detest poaching of any kind. If I lived in Texas or Alaska, maybe I would see it differently.

 

[BigBore45]

Again, as I pointed out in the other thread, the "I can't feed my family" excuse hardly flies when unemployment is less than 3% in the area. If you can sneak into the woods and night to jacklight Bambi, you can also get your a$$ up at the crack of dawn for your job at Burger King. Not wanting to work the jobs available in a area is NOT the same thing as not being ABLE to get a job. Very few people I knw that have taken part in poaching in one way or another had no other option. Some may not have LIKED their options, but they had options nonetheless. I see far too many "help wanted" signs around town to believe that poaching is the only way some people can put food on their plate. Hell, we have Sportsmen Against Hunger in this state, where hunters can donate unwanted vension to the needy. Going to the food bank might not be as much fun as killing it yourself, but if one is legal and one isn't, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the proper route to take. Even if you just HAVE to have wild game....you can get it...(here at least) WITHOUT POACHING IT

I'm going to argue this one. lol maybe take $350 home a week from a job like that lol. have 3 kids and a wife. no way in hell you can pay rent or mortgage have a car and pay for kids stuff. Before you say wife get a job, daycare is outrageous and really kids should be with a parent over a stranger any day. So if it is food your lacking and you go get a deer once a month so be it, hell i say don't let out of state people come get them and let the poor guy eat. lol poach for food, easy there king of the people.

 

[alsaqr]

i totally agree with the article linked by the OP. Very few folks poach to feed their families. i find too many deer that have been shot and left to rot. The big bucks are always missing the antlers.

Want to feed the family in OK or TX; then kill wild hogs. Wild hogs outnumber deer at least 5-1. Every year my hog trapping partners and i give away about 150 field dressed hogs to folks who need the meat. i sometimes have wild hogs processed: The meat goes goes to the food bank.

 

[shootr]

Feral hogs for subsistence folks is a match made in heaven. I don't poach and don't condone it but think circumstances matter. Couple observations:

In northern Michigan areas jobs are very hard to come by and some people there depend on fishing, trapping and taking a deer here and there to get by. I know of folks who do this and I see no issues with their actions.

I've seen DNR in action on three occasions and common sense/discretion seemed absent. They were nasty, aggressive jerks looking for any infraction they could possibly find. Not a helpful or impressive bunch IME. Can't imagine those I've seen giving any poor, subsistence hunter a break.

 

[3212]

It seems there are fifty shades of poaching.The one poacher I knew was a thief and cheat in every area of life.Apparently he used the meat,but his main motivation seemed to be impressing less successful hunters with his photos.It was his downfall.Some people got sick of it and alerted the proper authorities.He paid some fines which would have been much higher today.

 

[coloradokevin]

First, we must establish that poaching is strictly a legal definition, and judging it from a moral perspective involves a bit more humanity and consideration.

Obviously I'm not a poacher myself. I'm a full-time career law enforcement officer (though not involved in game management), and I don't put myself in a position where I live outside of the law. Nor would I encourage others to do so!

But, in my lifetime I've lived in a number of places, and traveled at length to many rural places throughout this nation. Although many sport hunters wish to deny this fact, there are people in more depressed backwoods areas who do poach for the sake of putting food on their tables. I'll put these folks in a category I'll call "survival poachers". They eat what they kill, and kill what they eat… they take no more than they need, and they aren't interested in trophies. Yes, their behavior is clearly against the law. They sometimes hunt with unlawful methods of take, or hunt out of season, or kill more than the designated bag limit would allow for. But, their behavior (to me) is still more noble in purpose than that of the person who lives off of the government welfare teat; we sure have a lot of those folks these days. This poacher probably represents less than 5-10% of all poachers out there, and probably isn't having a notable impact on the ecology of any given area. But, to deny his existence is to deny a way of life that still exists in some area of Appalachia, the deep south, the rural Rockies, and many other sparsely populated areas where people still have trouble earning a reasonable living. A number of modern day homesteader types also seem to find themselves attached to this category.

The remainder of poachers mostly fall into the "thrill killer" and "trophy poacher" categories. These are the truly despicable types of poachers we all abhor. In my part of the country the trophy poachers are the most notable ones, and they kill for no other purpose than to put a big rack of antlers on the wall. My better half grew up on a property that bordered a county open space park in the Rocky Mountains. She has told me a number of stories of finding headless elk (otherwise intact) laying in the fields behind her childhood home — the product of those who killed merely for thrill and trophy, and nothing else. I have personally arrived at a public rifle range to find a poached deer laying along the 100 yard berm. It wasn't gutted, it wasn't capped, it was merely shot about 100 times — a "thrill kill" to be sure.

A final category of poacher that I'll mention is one I'll refer to as the "anarchist poacher". This person is often a landowner, and doesn't believe that the government has a right to tell him when or what he can hunt on his land. He doesn't necessarily need to hunt for sustenance (like the survival poacher I first mentioned), but he poaches because he likes to hunt, and feels that he can decide when and how he is going to do so. He usually treats his kills like any other hunter would (keeping and processing the meat), but doesn't follow game laws in pursuit of his quarry. This poacher often lives in the same backwoods areas where the "survival poacher" lives, but doesn't have entirely the same motivation for his hunts. I have a friend with 60 acres in a backwoods area of Ohio, a couple of hours away from where we both grew up. He tells me that many of the people in that area hunt deer year-round, simply because they feel like it, and because they know they can get away with it (it's mostly deep woods, all large private tracts of land, and out in hillbillyville). I don't think he's wrong in his assumption about his neighbors, and I imagine this happens more often than many of us might think on large tracts of private land.

Anyway, that's my $0.02 for this subject.

 

[ironworkerwill]

Well stated Kevin.
Cheers

 

[buck460XVR]

I'll put these folks in a category I'll call "survival poachers". They eat what they kill, and kill what they eat… they take no more than they need, and they aren't interested in trophies. Yes, their behavior is clearly against the law. They sometimes hunt with unlawful methods of take, or hunt out of season, or kill more than the designated bag limit would allow for. But, their behavior (to me) is still more noble in purpose than that of the person who lives off of the government welfare teat; we sure have a lot of those folks these days.

Then as a law enforcement officer, you must condone the robbing of stores and the selling of illegal drugs on the street as ways of feeding your family, as it is much more "noble" than taking a government handout. Always amazes me how many regular LEOs consider game laws as trivial and the breaking of them just as trivial. Don't drink and drive Bubba, but go shoot some deer outta season. Sorry, but poaching is stealing, just as is breaking into a jewelry store and fencing the items for money to buy food. Welfare is not a "treat", and claiming breaking the law is more "noble" is the same justification a poacher gives. Again, I doubt if anyone here would deny a starving family a squirrel or rabbit outta season. But if they could drive the same distance, burn the same amount of gas and spend the same amount of time to get healthy food for themselves and their family legally, I see no justification at all, other than hunting is more fun that standing in line at the food pantry.

 

[BigBore45]

Then as a law enforcement officer, you must condone the robbing of stores and the selling of illegal drugs on the street as ways of feeding your family, as it is much more "noble" than taking a government handout. Always amazes me how many regular LEOs consider game laws as trivial and the breaking of them just as trivial. Don't drink and drive Bubba, but go shoot some deer outta season. Sorry, but poaching is stealing, just as is breaking into a jewelry store and fencing the items for money to buy food. Welfare is not a "treat", and claiming breaking the law is more "noble" is the same justification a poacher gives. Again, I doubt if anyone here would deny a starving family a squirrel or rabbit outta season. But if they could drive the same distance, burn the same amount of gas and spend the same amount of time to get healthy food for themselves and their family legally, I see no justification at all, other than hunting is more fun that standing in line at the food pantry.

I see what you are saying but remember that only a couple hundred years ago we had to hunt to live, it was a normal way of life. Stealing was never deemed a normal way of life by society.

 

[Art Eatman]

Then there's the game hog.

A game warden not far out of Austin, Texas, back in the 1959 dove season, heard shotguns near the end of shooting light. He checked it out.

Three hunters. In the trunk of their car were maybe three limits of doves.

As he was writing tickets, the guy in the back seat asked, "Do you know who I am?"

"Yeah, I know you, you jug-eared SOB."

He kept on writing tickets for LBJ, Judge A.W. Moursand and U.S. Rep J.J. Mansfield.

 

[buck460XVR]

I see what you are saying but remember that only a couple hundred years ago we had to hunt to live, it was a normal way of life.

Remember, only a couple hundred years ago it was acceptable for a elderly male to marry a 13 year old girl and impregnate her. It too was a normal way of life. Don't make it acceptable now.

Stealing was never deemed a normal way of life by society.

It still isn't. Poaching is considered the theft of game animals from all of us. The one that always gets me is "yeah, my uncle poaches deer because he's too proud to take welfare or food stamps.!" He's too proud to accept help when he's down on his luck from folks that are willing to help, but is not too proud to lower himself to the level of a criminal instead? That's just as silly as claiming poaching is somehow "noble".

It comes down to poachers poach, because they want to. The odds that anyone in the lower 48 really needs to poach to survive, is so low, that they are not worth mentioning.

 

[earlthegoat2]

I knew of a whole clan (family) who never bought meat from a grocery. They only shot the game around their property whenever they wanted. They would often shine bait piles in the night to increase their chances and lessen the workload. They always used what they shot. Not just the backstraps and haunches either. Every edible part they ate and they used the antlers for the scales of the knives they made and made clothing from the leather after they tanned it. They were not doing it for profit and as far as I could tell they were not doing it for thrills. They never just killed game to kill it. It was just what they did.

Does any of that make any of it OK? Eh, maybe. Maybe not. Does it make it illegal? Absolutely. Some folks decide what laws are right and wrong and those same folks choose to follow those laws or not. Does the sign say STOP or does it say STOPTIONAL?

 

[oneounceload]

Then there's the game hog.

A game warden not far out of Austin, Texas, back in the 1959 dove season, heard shotguns near the end of shooting light. He checked it out.

Three hunters. In the trunk of their car were maybe three limits of doves.

As he was writing tickets, the guy in the back seat asked, "Do you know who I am?"

"Yeah, I know you, you jug-eared SOB."

He kept on writing tickets for LBJ, Judge A.W. Moursand and U.S. Rep J.J. Mansfield.

As it should be.............thanks for posting that

I do not care WHAT the lame excuse is, if it is against the law for any reason and you do it, you deserve to lose everything connected with it. In NV, if you were caught poaching out in the field, besides a fine and jail, you risked losing all of your possessions at the scene including your vehicle or boat, gun, etc.

 

[22-rimfire]

I have "poached" on several occasions throughout the years. One time that I know of was on the old family ranch in NM. We had multiple depredation permits for elk. I was driving past a hay field and caught a group of cows grazing. I shot and killed several of them with the rifle I had with me at the time. That rifle was a .223 using 55 grain ball ammo. It is illegal to use anything smaller than a 6MM (.243) on big game in NM and it's illegal to use full metal jacket ammo for the taking of big game animals. FYI They are quite effective through the head or upper neck.

I shot a bull elk once across a canyon. He went straight down. I dropped down into the canyon to retrieve him and much to my dismay down in the bottom of the canyon was a fence and a no trespass sign! The elk was shot on public land and had slid down the hill and wound up on private land. The ONLY tiny, thin, strip of private land within hundreds of thousands of acres of public land BTW. I was completely unaware of it's existence. This was in the days long before GPS technology was widely available and back then it never occurred to me to have a map, only city boys get lost, right? In any case the land owner was an absentee owner. I retrieved my elk and moved on out. But that could have had the potential to be a major pain in the legal buttocks under different circumstances.

I'm sure that with the vast amount of hunting I've done over the years that I have unwittingly broken some of the finer details of the local game laws. For instance;

If you are going coyote calling in NM as a resident or with your non resident friends and you call in a bobcat the non resident must have a trappers licensee to kill it and must get the pelt tagged before leaving the state...People call in and shoot bobcats all the time, no big deal right? Well it is in NM.

Who would have thunk it? And how many folks would NOT shoot a bobcat on a small game license if they did call in a bobcat? I've known several people who have done it and I didn't know it was a problem for a long time. You have got to read the fine print folks. The devil is in the details.

I haven't "poached" that I am aware of. But I do consider it okay to move from one property into another to retrieve a game animal that you shot. I know the rules on that. But letting an animal rot because of some line is just stupid to me. Sometimes you don't even know the owner to contact if you wanted to.

I have had multiple opportunities to shoot bobcats. I never really wanted to shoot a bobcat, but certainly it crossed my mind. Saw one during deer season one year that walked up to my stand. I would have loved to have shot him, but I was unsure of the rules. I didn't.

Where I grew up, shooting deer at night (spot lighting) was common practice. 22 Mags were popular for this. I hated it then and I continue to hate it. Finding dead deer, nice bucks, during small game season was such a shame. These are the deer that were shot along roads and didn't drop quickly and ran off to die. I never knew the reason, but my guess is that they were poor and probably had been doing it for generations. For me, it had to stop.

Poaching game for sport or profit is the worst offense of all.

 

[BigBore45]

Remember, only a couple hundred years ago it was acceptable for a elderly male to marry a 13 year old girl and impregnate her. It too was a normal way of life. Don't make it acceptable now.



It still isn't. Poaching is considered the theft of game animals from all of us. The one that always gets me is "yeah, my uncle poaches deer because he's too proud to take welfare or food stamps.!" He's too proud to accept help when he's down on his luck from folks that are willing to help, but is not too proud to lower himself to the level of a criminal instead? That's just as silly as claiming poaching is somehow "noble".

It comes down to poachers poach, because they want to. The odds that anyone in the lower 48 really needs to poach to survive, is so low, that they are not worth mentioning.

The reason marrying a 13 y.o. girl was acceptable was from most people dieing by age 40. i do not see how that is comparable to people requiring food to live? we still have to eat but we do not have to have kids and raise them by the time we are 35 y.o.



Why even have welfare when they can go out early in the morning and get there own food, would keep them off of drugs and out of trouble if we did not feed them. As far as people needing to poach, that number is probably really low but for those few that need to i see no reason for them to get into trouble or even calling it poaching. I remember when i was a boy very young 20+ years ago, my dad was laid off, my mom was going to school and working part time at a dairy queen, me and my younger brother went to bed 2 nights without supper. well supper came the 3rd night out of season and we were thankful. and before you go on about gas in the truck and the cost of a bullet, lets take times a deer will feed a family of 4 vs 5 dollars in gas and a .13 cent bullet. Why take tax money when you can hunt and provide like everything on this earth has done for millions of years?

 

[coloradokevin]

Then as a law enforcement officer, you must condone the robbing of stores and the selling of illegal drugs on the street as ways of feeding your family, as it is much more "noble" than taking a government handout. Always amazes me how many regular LEOs consider game laws as trivial and the breaking of them just as trivial. Don't drink and drive Bubba, but go shoot some deer outta season. Sorry, but poaching is stealing, just as is breaking into a jewelry store and fencing the items for money to buy food. Welfare is not a "treat", and claiming breaking the law is more "noble" is the same justification a poacher gives. Again, I doubt if anyone here would deny a starving family a squirrel or rabbit outta season. But if they could drive the same distance, burn the same amount of gas and spend the same amount of time to get healthy food for themselves and their family legally, I see no justification at all, other than hunting is more fun that standing in line at the food pantry.

Your suggestion that one law violation is automatically equal in kind and morality to other violations is utterly ridiculous. Just because I'm saying that I can understand the motivation of the poor hillbilly who takes a deer off of his land to feed his family does not mean that I can or should equally understand and accept the motivations of an armed robber, or someone who steals another person's property for the sake of their own benefit. Nor can I equate this to the person who is selling drugs as an "easy way out" (which is really all that is).

Incidentally, thieves and robbers very rarely steal food in my experience, and many of them are already on government assistance. And, most of these criminals live in the city, with easy access to charitable food banks, jobs programs, and access to various other kinds of private and government sponsored social welfare programs (a far cry from some of the backwoods areas of the country). Frankly, the people who rob jewelry stores are usually doing so for the sake of financial gain or drug money. They certainly aren't doing so for food. Conversely, the person who shoots a deer on the back 40, then processes it and puts it on the table is clearly doing so for the sake of food.

One thing I can tell you as a LEO is that I don't believe that all laws were created equally, even if I am charged with enforcement of said laws. I also didn't write any of these laws. The government obviously claims ownership of wildlife that naturally occurs in a region, and states that to take any of this wildlife without following a strict set of laws is stealing.

The hungry hillbilly who isn't interested in a trophy sees things a bit differently, and commits a largely victimless crime. Aside from the government, who is victimized by this crime? Are you? Am I? Did the guy who took a deer to feed his family ruin your sport hunt later in the season? Sure, that's possible in theory, and certainly probable if everyone hunted without following the regulations. But, that ignores the greater body of my previous post, in which I discussed a variety of poachers and their motivations.

People have been feeding themselves from nature's resources since the dawn of mankind itself. Some people still go back to that method of survival during times of need… they take care of themselves, rather than asking society to do it for them. It's illegal, to be sure. But, is it really immoral?

You would honestly equate someone taking a wild animal for sustenance to the person who walks into a bank and puts a gun in the teller's face while demanding money?? You're certainly entitled to feel that way, but I don't.

 

[BigBore45]

People have been feeding themselves from nature's resources since the dawn of mankind itself. Some people still go back to that method of survival during times of need… they take care of themselves, rather than asking society to do it for them. It's illegal, to be sure. But, is it really immoral?

You would honestly equate someone taking a wild animal for sustenance to the person who walks into a bank and puts a gun in the teller's face while demanding money?? You're certainly entitled to feel that way, but I don't.

I believe he is arguing with no moral values in conjunction with humanity or God. The same kind of argument that makes stupid laws and destroys the low and middle class. I agree with what you say and i wish more LEO had that kind of attitude and moral compass.

 

[coloradokevin]

I believe he is arguing with no moral values in conjunction with humanity or God. The same kind of argument that makes stupid laws and destroys the low and middle class. I agree with what you say and i wish more LEO had that kind of attitude and moral compass.

Thanks, Big Bore. While many people don't like to admit it, my job is a people job, and you have to like and want to understand people (and their motivations) to be effective in this career.

Something about this thread reminded me of an encounter I had with a hillbilly in the wilderness of West Virginia some 15+ years or so ago. I was on a backpacking trip in the Cranberry Wilderness area during a particularly warm and dry Fall season, and was sitting down by a stream when I heard some sort of strange scraping sound coming from the trail. I walked up the hill only to see an older guy with a draft horse pulling a sleigh along the dry (snowless) trail.

I started a conversation with the guy, who was clearly of low education and deep cultural roots in the area. I couldn't help but ask: "why in the world are you dragging a sleigh along a dry trail?"

His response kind of makes me laugh a bit to this day. And, remember, federally designated wilderness areas do not allow wheeled vehicles — for sound reasons that are in accordance with the goals of designating a "wilderness", but reasons that are hard for some folks to grasp if they grew up with it being otherwise. This guy was probably north of 70 years old at the time, in a wilderness area that was designated in 1983, and this was around 1997-98 or so:

"Well, they done told me that I ain't allowed to use my cart no more in these woods, and that I could be arrested if I did… we been huntin' these here woods for over 120 years, but they told me I ain't allowed to have no wheels. But, they told me I'm allowed to have my sleigh, so I'm usin' my sleigh for my deer hunt." (he was probably hunting during legal deer season, for whatever that's worth. I have no idea if he had a tag).

I don't mean to go off on a tangent here, but that experience always served as a reminder that rules and regulations made in Washington, and various statehouses, often make very little sense to those who live in the areas that are most affected by those rules.

I think those rules seem even less valid and/or sensible to the guy who knows he wants to put food on the family for his table… he doesn't have enough money for everything he needs, but he has a rifle or a bow, and there's a group of deer standing in his back field. Again, this is a small minority of the poachers out there, but there are certainly people who fall into this category.