In Ohio for God's sake.
Please say it aint so.
A friend informed about this the other day.
I hope this trend does not grow and hope the state keeps buying land and keeping it natural.
I do not like high fence hunting, but to each his own.
I would have a hard time bragging about a trophy shot in a high fence operation.

That "High Fence" might need investigating.

There are ranches in Texas that have them surrounding thousands of acres at a time. Would that still cause you to have the same attitude?

It is not as simple as that, unfortunately.

I don't care for them, but it's due to the economics. Put up a high fence for hunters and the hunters end up paying a lot more.

You can grow some BIG deer if you keep the habitat from being totally overrun, and you keep people from shooting the little bucks.

Whether it is sporting or not is an entirely different proposition, unrelated to the size of the fence IMHO.

10,000 or more acres under a single fence would not be uncommon here.

the land in texas is a bit different than the typical buckeyes state spread.
if the fence is only to keep exotic game from running into areas that are not welcome then OK, but i reall don't see the need for fences in most hunting situations.
i like to keep mother nature as natural as possible.

Well yes but you need to understand why we have fences down here.

For the most part, you aren't keeping deer IN, you are keeping excess deer OUT.

We get a couple of good years, high fawn survival, lotsa deer, then drought.

Suddenly you have WAY more deer on the property than there is habitat for. Doesn't matter if you keep all your numbers down, the neighbors might not, now there is a stampede of their deer onto your place, and everything gets eaten down to nothing. Now the deer herd really suffers.....

The other thing is, if you want mature bucks to shoot at, you have to let them grow up, 5-6-7 years is not too long, in addition to having good conditions (food water etc.) during the entire time. This is just not possibly under any circumstances on public land, because people will shoot whatever they feel like. So the fence is keeping other hunters out, or at least those hunters who would not pass up on a decent looking 3 year old buck.

Like I said.... it concerns me for the long-term future of hunting, because it drives up the price.

Fences get holes in them, anyway (often caused by hogs) and there are always natural obstacles that can't be effectively fenced, like rivers.

One of my hunting partners once spooked a buck that panicked and ran THROUGH a 'game-proof' fence.

So, down here, anyway, the fences are 'game resistant' but not game-proof by any stretch of the imagination.

JR,

Where in Ohio is this being done? I never heard or saw any reports of this.

JR,

Where in Ohio is this being done? I never heard or saw any reports of this.
This is within 30 minutes of my home.
http://www.redmanwhitetailpreserve.com/index.html

JR,

Interesting. I hunt on my uncles farm in Licking county (Utica) and still never heard of this "fenced-in" hunting lodge. Prices are pretty high. I'll stay on the family property and hunt for free.

In Ohio for God's sake.
Please say it aint so.
A friend informed about this the other day.
I hope this trend does not grow and hope the state keeps buying land and keeping it natural.
I do not like high fence hunting, but to each his own.
I would have a hard time bragging about a trophy shot in a high fence operation.

Most of these high fence operations are deer farms that raise deer for profit. They make urine and gland scents, sell organs, velvet, antlers and hides, sell venison to restaurants and book these shoots to cull their highly managed herds. Incredible antler growth is possible when so many of the environmental factors are controlled. I don't consider such cull shoots hunting as these fenced areas are usually not more than a couple of hundred acres. Certainly is not fair chase as it is quite easy to corner the animals.

I can't believe people pay the prices there asking! :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

There have been deer herds managed in Texas for a long time. Some of the original fences went up 35 years ago or more.
Then a few of the more "sales minded" ranch owners introduced exotics.
The only problem was that it cost more to shoot one of the exotics than it did a whitetail buck. The result was that no one was hunting the foreign deer.
There were many cases of over-grazing on these high fenced ranches where the whitetail could not compete with the axis and fallow.

You can't high fence unless you have a management plan in place.

In a few years, the exotics started to show up on open ranch land as people let them go, these hunts just were not selling.

A few years later, as the price for a whitetail buck went up dramatically, the exotics found their nitch market.

Without a doubt, the one thing driving the price up in Texas
is the Big Mature Whitetail Bucks.

Try charging the same thing for a pig lease, or a turkey lease, and you wouldn't receive a phone call.
The Whitetail calls the shots!

We also had some ranches experiment with Ostrich and Emus.
After that pyramid scheme fizzled out, a lot of them were released into the wild.

On more than one occasion, I have walked up to my feeder and seen the tracks of the worlds biggest turkey, only to find out it was an Emu.
By the way, they taste good.

Anyway, we've had some good ideas down here on game management. Some but not all.

As more people hunt, I think you will see these managed ranches go up everywhere. Unfortunately !