this is a tough topic
I had about 40 acres in the middle of a long triangle piece of land, we leased it for farming, the local good-ole-boys ran dogs through it on a regular basis, small beagles just to push the deer around, nothing worse than sitting in a stand and here comes the beagle, track it in the scope and just not wanting to pull the trigger, never did
get down, catch the cute dog, remove the collar and send it on it’s way, the owners knew darn well what they were doing, they knew I was there and were just daring me to do anything, I was told that if I did anything the land would get burned out, either I was going to shoot a dog, shoot one of these idiots, get my truck vandalized or the land burned out, my only option was to stop hunting there
had access to another piece of land that was about 150 acres, 1/3 planted in beans and the rest was coastal Bermuda hay, spent many a fun afternoon in the tree, arranged for my dad to come down, checked everything that morning to make sure it was ready for him to hunt, went that afternoon and there are 3 trucks in the hay field along the tree line, basically went nuts, they saw me coming and took off, was able to get to one truck where some old man and a teenager were standing in the bed of the truck, took their guns, unloaded them and jammed the barrels into the dirt a few times, threw them in the back of their truck and ran em off, got the license plate number and called DNR, turns out this is a well-known crowd that will pick a piece of remote land and run dogs thru on weekday afternoons hoping not to get caught, they had been caught a few times but always after the fact and basically there was little DNR could do, one guy owned a junk yard and they would make junk trucks run, use old license tags and all other tricks to not get caught, they had burned a few areas, the owner didn’t want his field burned so no charges were pressed
and I’ve hunted with many respectful clubs, and only know of a few bad ones so I’m not anti-dog hunting
the few bad act
