People dart deer all the time. It’s nothing new.

To doctor them, move them, saw their antlers off, etc. been doing it for decades.

Never heard of one being darted to bleach it though….

You go first.

You go first.

7k acre pen?

Im pretty sure that was his point. They are already being “handled” for reasons you listed, so if people like colored deer they could just bleach them. Or maybe they will dress them up in a tutu before shooting them. Or they could perform plastic surgery to make them the way they want.
I prefer wild deer in wild places.

The place where you close the gate behind you after taking your rifle inside with the wall art to shop?

I don’t harbor any ill will or have anything against high fences. None. I know some men whom I have the utmost respect for that own incredible, large high fence ranches. Men that to my knowledge don’t halfway do anything. Different things are more interesting to different people though.

That's incomplete. I think you're insinuating that the deer can't come and go. Every lease I have hunted would be a pen by your definition, but the deer could come and go. The fence was to control cattle movement. But you knew all that.

Selective breeding inside deer proof high fence’s is what we are discussing. Instead of wild deer with the genotype Mother Nature bestows, breeding for a one in a million phenotype inside an enclosure you can close yourself inside with animals exhibiting one in a million phenotype is being discussed. But you knew all that.

😊😊😊

Having read the thread I understand that. I was simply pointing out your incomplete definition.

Carry on.

^

Interesting Topic.

Free range has a different definition than “wild”. Lots of game are free range, but wild, in which the definition is surviving with little to no influence, assistance or interaction with Man, compromises a much, much smaller percentage of animals.

Deer are my place are free range, but not Wild, and that would hold true for most whitetail shot in Texas. The are conditioned and in many cases, dependent, on supplemental feed and agricultural crops.

Come to think of it, I can’t say I’ve ever killed but maybe 1 or 2 truly wild whitetail deer.


I too prefer wild places and wild game, but can appreciate and enjoy a well managed property with a manipulated wildlife population

Wow. Txtro, I like you enough and you seem smart, but who in the wide wide world died and left you in charge of defining the word “WILD”.

IMO it is an attempt to denigrate the hunting efforts and successes of anything that is not high fence hunting in an attempt to put HF and LF hunting on the same plane. I've seen posts that state that high fence and low fence tactics are the same, if a feeder is on your LF lease, it was no different than hunting a high fence ranch, most whitetail shot in Texas are not wild...........so a deer that beds on my LF lease and travels a couple of miles to feed on a neighboring wheat field isn't wild? You can't take remarks that are opinion yet stated as fact seriously.

It's not an attempt to put high fence and low fence hunting on the same plane. It's an attempt to open a discussion about the true nature of whitetail hunting in the state of Texas, just how much influence we have on them in their day to day lives and what really is wild and what is not wild.

Sure, you can throw out outlier examples such as yours where deer are residing in large, low-density country where they move miles to target a food source. But that's the exception not the rule for today's Texas whitetail deer.

As far as different tactics, I've hunted both high and low fence properties for the past 28 years and can't recall every switching up tactics based on fence height. Hunting Whitetail deer the standard is going to be hunting out of a box blind over a feeder no matter what the property is enclosed by.

But hunting high fence or low fence wasn't what I was talking about. What I was referring to is/was a sub-class where a deer is free range but so dependent/influenced by people where there is grey area as to them being truly wild or not. A whitetail deer that eats net wire enclosed cottonseed every other day, has water available to him via a concrete trough and can be goaded to coming out of the brush with a tailgate feeder....is that really wild? Surely you can't compare that animal to an Elk or Mule Deer or Bear living in the Bitterroots or on the Kaibab and having to make a living 100% on his own.


Many hunters have such tunnel vision they will pick apart everything someone else does or wants to do, if it's not the way they do it.

And it's my OPINON that anyone hunting Whitetail in Texas better take a good look in the mirror as to how they are actually hunting before throwing stones at someone else in an attempt to feel morally superior.

There's a whole lot more to your post that is your opinion than this one statement.

To answer your question, I can't. "Really" wild, is a subjective term based on your opinion. Just as it is to state that most Texas whitetail shot are not truly wild, as you did, is your opinion, not fact. I don't mind reading your thoughts and opinions, but you way too often state your opinions as fact.

Maybe “varying degrees of wildness” would be a better term.

Regardless, my intent of the post was to point out some of the hypocrisy in our sport and to encourage hunters to come together instead of becoming more divisive, which is a major issue today.

CWD is a stretch to put on breeders since it was first found/observed/defined/tested for in TX in wild mule deer population on NM border. Kerr WMA may finally open some minds. In mean time might be easier to point fingers at the people creating a demand for wool.




technically no one can for another. But for argument stake we had a bull calf we couldn't catch for 5 -6 years, after we caught and lost him. He was crazy spirted. @ two years we finally catch him via dogs. We got him once in pen and he crash through, we got on him quick, roped & choked him down and pulled him into catch trailer, he jumped out of a catch trailer, before he got half gate closed. We couldnt ever catch him again. Finally shot him from a helo. Would you call him wild, even though he was a domestic animal but born on the ranch?

"CWD is not scrapie and scrapie is not CWD. There are several theories that CWD originated from scrapie (just as BSE did in Europe), which could be correct. For the most part, prion diseases are very specific in regards to the species they infect, with little cross-over to other species (also known as a species barrier). Scientists have learned how to overcome the species barrier by directly infecting the brain of the test animal, which bypasses an animal's normal defenses to disease. But sometimes, one passage of the agent through the brain isn't enough (strong species barrier) and they use the brain from the first experimentally infected animal to infect another (two passages). By passing the prion through two infections, the prion adapts to the new species and is able to cause disease. This is how they were able to get CWD to infect sheep; by making two passages of CWD into Suffolk lambs. If scrapie and CWD were the same disease, the sheep would have been equally susceptible to CWD as deer were to scrapie; not to mention the animals could have been infected naturally, rather than injecting the brain. "

From Hank Edwards who has been researching and studying cwd for about 25 years and has multiple papers published on the disease.
Sorry BOBO but scrapies and cwd are not the same.
Gore was wrong on his assumptions.

Maybe its more about where you look instead of cross pollination. Edwards also said it could be from scrapie’s still. If it’s not scrapies then it is infant a wild disease, covered up by decades of successful yotes and inability to find fresh enough sample to test. neither are breeder cause correlation.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10406387211017615

and

https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/227/12/1386/6809058

CWD is a stretch to put on breeders since it was first found/observed/defined/tested for in TX in wild mule deer population on NM border. Kerr WMA may finally open some minds. In mean time might be easier to point fingers at the people creating a demand for wool.

Spread of CWD by an infected deer is limited to the range of infected animals. Over time as it is passed to other animals with partially overlapping ranges it spreads. Geographically that spread is slow and methodical. It is contained by physical barriers.
The range of a deer in a trailer can not be compared to a free ranging deer. That is why you see CWD hop scotching hundreds of miles across large uninfected geographic areas and across physical barriers and appearing within isolated high fences. The validity of that is not disputable. That migration of CWD would otherwise have taken decades in areas with only whitetail. Free ranging Moose, Elk, and Mule Deer have significantly larger ranges than whitetail. Consequently areas populated with those species appear more susceptible to spread of CWD. If you have been around enough high fences, you already know some animals will get both in and out of some of the enclosures. It just happens. Turtle up if you choose but there in lies the crux of my comment.
As pointed out by Wytex, wool production is not a vector for CWD.

The elk that were originally found to have CWD in the 60’s were held in a pen that was used previously as a holding pen for sheep. It’s thought those animals contracted it from the sheep ie: sheep scrapie.

The areas in Texas where it was first found were in isolated areas great distances from any high fence. Especially in the hueco mountains, which is very isolated.

Anecdotally, we have noticed a lot of areas where it has popped up (both high & low fence) were in areas that were traditionally sheep and goat country, as the Kerr WMA is.

I do not have an answer for how got up in Missouri, Michigan and other areas as I’m not familiar with those areas.

Subsequent studies have shown that raccoons, hogs, buzzards, etc. can also be carriers of CWD.

Good information. My opinion is until recently it was naturally occurring. Probably been around a long time. The isolated nature of places where it occurred is likely to have somewhat kept it bottled up.

Edit to clarify: that is only an opinion.

what alot of people dont even consider is that 97% of all CWD testing in TX up until two years ago was breeders/HF industry not LF deer. More testing we do more random hits we get. You test LF as much as HF and all the sudden random unexplained hits happen. Kerr WMA tradition sheep country had two random hits in a 40 year closed… Now better question when did they start testing for CWD?

As far as scrapies, USDA and western blot test says its same, and several other testing has show that its mirrors same profile in certain locations. Original observed location in Co held a research sheep infected with scrapies. I think both scrapies and CWD are natural occurring kissing cousins.

I disagree with the bottle … proof being east central CO, to SE Co to KS, Tx/okla Panhandle, NE NM testing programs says others wise, or those are just areas that test. Okla just started testing so eventually whole finger will be red. More mature and wide spread testing more hits we get.

The isolated nature makes you wonder but how did it get in there/get out of there? The pandhandle was thought to have gotten it from elk roaming over from NM but the hueco mountains is a hard area to reach. Which would point to another carrier ( like a buzzard).

Anthrax is also “ naturally occurring “ but it was brought here via the infected bones from Africa that were ground for bone meal to be used in livestock supplements. It’s now in the soil.