I am not a turkey hunter. I’ll go if invited because it’s fun to do but I don’t have my own land, don’t want to pay for a turkey lease, and don’t care enough to fight idiots on public. So for someone who doesn’t really turkey hunt I think I have an unbiased and clear view of things.
Here is everything I see wrong:
1.) strutter decoys - I know guys who will limit in multiple states, claiming themselves to be great turkey hunters but will refuse to hunt with out a strutter bc then it would be hard.
2.) Social media - nothing makes me want to go turkey hunt more than watching videos of turkeys getting their heads rocked. From the full pinhoti videos to the 5 second clips on Instagram. If those videos weren’t around I’d care less about turkey hunting than I already do bc I wouldn’t ever know how fun it is. I was at a Church luncheon the other day and I overheard a guy telling a story about a recent hunt he went on at his in-laws place. He said he wasn’t a huge turkey hunter but watched videos and wanted to go and got lucky enough to shoot a hen...this is the what social media does.
3.) tagging out in multiple states/people shooting more than their tags - it was mentioned in another thread but just think of the small section of the US turkey hunter population that SCDucks makes up. There are already a good number of people on here who will tag out in SC then go on to tag out in other states as well. So imagine the other hundreds or thousands of hunters that are doing that also across the country. And of all these people, how many are working to save/restore/conserve the population in their own state let alone the other states they’re killing birds in? Probably very little.
On top of that the amount of turkey hunters that are above the law and think they deserve to kill as many birds as they want to bc damn they’re just that good at it.
I think all of these things lead to a decline in the numbers. You can say that oh the burning during nesting, or oh fire ants, whatever else. Yeah those are all issues, but do they really matter if we’re over harvesting the birds that are already here? And at what point did we reach as a society the outlook of, “well I’ve worked hard to kill a turkey and haven’t been able to yet so I’m going to use a decoy because I deserve to kill a bird.” No clearly you don’t deserve to because, A.) animals are not our God given right, we aren’t promised a bird for good behavior, and B.) you don’t deserve to kill one bc you must not be that good at hunting.
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