. As the years go on, times change and people find different ways to make a living and so forth. I do like all the new guns, scopes, and premium bullets that we now have. They are obvoiusly not necessary, but times have changed and we can purchase them now if we choose. I could do without alot of the other BS on the market and choose to not buy it. The fact that hunting has gone commercial is a reality that began many years ago. Todays hunters IMO need to carry on the tradition with their kids and continue to teach them how to respect others property, hunt, fish, woodsmanship, etc. The old days are just that, old. One hates to see them go, but they are gone.

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if it was so good back then, throw the feeders away, take the scope off your rifle, go by a few pieces of plywood and slap them together and make a blind, no one is stopping anyone from doing that.

Txtrophy take 10 boys and 5 volunteers out you can barely afford to have a truck with tires on it LOL.

i remember the good ol' days and the cold nights in a haybarn and hearing a rattler set off somewhere in the cabin. and i wouldn't give up those times for anything. however just like everything in america we always look to improve things and sometimes not always for the better. but it is nice to have a sealed camper were most likely all you have to worry about is a field mice at worse.

The prices have gone up and they will continue to go up like everything else. And as stated before if you compare the prices of the land to what the rancher collects for lease money it don't even cover the land taxes in a lot of cases,and in some cases they don't even have to run livestock or farm.

We need all the hunters we can get, because even though hunting is big business and the revenue is up the customer base is dwindling.

What happened to the days when you were the only deer hunter on your street, in your city???

Chances are, you're still the only deer hunter on your street.

The commercialization of what was once a sport where men put forth the effort to actually "hunt" deer has been replaced with nothing more than "shooting" them. The sporting goods section of any store consisted of nothing more than guns, ammo, boots, and military-style camo. And of course if you had asked about feeders or corn, the clerk would thought of you as being crooked and/or crazy. For most today, hunting skills are nothing more than being able to fire two or three shots a year at most, and knowing enough about basic carpentry so that you can sit warm and hidden long enough to wait for something to show up and eat.

Most game today is killed in a cafeteria shooting ( at a feeder ) or drive by shooting ( out of a vehicle). Why? Due to the time people have to hunt and the size of the property they hunt on. Skill only need be what you posted. Many still have great woodsman skills though but their numbers are fading fast.

also a safety issue so you know where ppl should be while they are hunting.


To be honest I've never really given much though about what woodsman skills are.

(just wondering how many over 50 year olds are reading this topic and smiling at the fact that several under 30 year olds are talking about the "good ole days")

There are relatively very few things in life you can hang your hat on ... one of them is that times always have, and always will, change.

You can just hear the elders of the clan standing at the front of the cave saying, "These kids today with the wheel and fire ... I miss the good ole days".

Or when the good old days was a trip to Colorado because deer were not plentiful enough to even hunt for a lot of people. I made my first trip to Colorado in 1950, because there was no deer in Runnels county. I did not see a deer in Runnels county until about the 1960's.

i remember the good ol' days and the cold nights in a haybarn and hearing a rattler set off somewhere in the cabin. and i wouldn't give up those times for anything. however just like everything in america we always look to improve things and sometimes not always for the better. but it is nice to have a sealed camper were most likely all you have to worry about is a field mice at worse.

The prices have gone up and they will continue to go up like everything else. And as stated before if you compare the prices of the land to what the rancher collects for lease money it don't even cover the land taxes in a lot of cases,and in some cases they don't even have to run livestock or farm.

We need all the hunters we can get, because even though hunting is big business and the revenue is up the customer base is dwindling.

I hunted in those old days when we used hand me down 30-30 rifles that were well worn with iron sights, and parts missing off of them, and also the old military rifles you could buy at any Fed Mart or Gibsons. There wasn't much for camo gear and the old blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt usually in red was what broke up your outline against the brush, but you wanted to be seen and if you were lucky, you were able to buy one of those new fangled flourescent orange caps.

Your ATV was an old beat up two wheel drive pickup with mud tires on the back wheels, and your blinds might be an old shipping crate if you where lucky, but most of the time it was an old folding chair or a cedar post wedged between two limbs, and some 2x4 nailed to the tree for steps.

The old camp had a pot bellied wood stove and cots to sleep on under a canvas tarp fashioned tent to break the wind, with plywood walls and floor to keep out the critters and rain.

Usually you saw a forked antler that was a legal buck, and if you were lucky you got to bring him back to camp and hang him on the meat pole, and we couldn't shoot does or spikes back then.

We had fun, but now that I think about it and have seen it grow and become big business, I feel it's made deer hunting better and opened up more opportunity to more hunters than those early days.

Like said above, there isn't any use complaining about it because the old days are not comming back and I wouldn't want them to because I'm having more fun nowdays and enjoying the hunt even more.

Before the days of food plots and feeders, ANY deer was considered a trophy because it took a lot more knowledge and skill than it does today to find and shoot one. It was also a time when the value of the meat meant as much if not more than the value of the antlers.

don't know how much truth there is to this.....its not hard to knock off a deer walking down a game trail. it dosen't take a degree in wildlife biology to figure out that if your watch that well worn path thru the trees thats littered with deer tracks, odds are one will walk down it again soon and then you'll have your deer.

feeders and foodplots just concentrate them more.

Many of deer, big ones too, have been dropped in a apple or pear orchard or under a acorn producing oak tree as well.

I think alot of people make whitetails out to be alot smarter than they are.

its not about (at least for me) outsmarting a deer and bringing it home, its not about the deer meat either, personally, i think whitetail, with the exception of dried sausage, tastes like doo-doo. its about having fun. the second it stops becomming fun, is when I will quit