The New Hampshire state Senate will vote today on whether to ban the practice of baiting deer. The Concord Monitor has an editorial about this vote and there are a couple things in that piece that are a tad misleading and incomplete.
Hunting deer over bait may or may not actually improve a hunter’s chances for success, though most people would say it does. It has been proven, however, that deer that frequent bait stations become more and more nocturnal. And that reduces the odds that they will be seen by hunters during legal hunting hours.
This is a generalized statement and doesn’t completely address all aspects of what affects a deer’s patterns. Under the right conditions, continued baiting of deer can make them become more nocturnal. That’s kind of like saying that a black boot becomes blacker. Deer patterns are influenced by many things natural and unnatural. Depending upon the time of year, those influences can change greatly. When bucks are in rut, they seldom eat at all.
Widespread baiting of deer changes their normal foraging and movement patterns. If high-carbohydrate foods like corn are readily available, deer eat less of their normal, healthy diet. That puts them at risk of succumbing to a fatal disruption in the normal acid balance in their digestive system, according to studies done in Wisconsin and Canada.
Again this is a bit of a generalization. Contrary to what some are being told and led to believe, deer will not leave readily available natural forage and exchange it for other foods. Deer are forages. They don’t remain in one spot and eat until all the food is gone and move on to the next open-air restaurant. I will however agree that feeding deer the wrong foods and at the wrong time can easily kill them. This lesson has been learned in many places the hard way.
Unlike some of the cast iron stomachs some of us humans have, deer can’t just woof down a bucket of chili and a six pack of beer and go home happy. But I think what is being referred to in the deer baiting issue can be a bit different than the deer feeding issue. Putting out a pile of apples on a game trail while a hunter sits in a blind or tree stand is quite a bit different than feeding or baiting year round.
Someone has to clearly define what is baiting. More and more hunters are growing mineral pits and food plots specifically for deer on their property. Is that baiting? Will there be allowable times? This is not a simple matter of just saying we want to ban deer baiting. Is putting out a scent at a buck scrape, baiting? It serves the same purpose.
The editor talks about the aspects of spreading disease at feeding stations. It is theorized that the spread of disease occurs this way but there still is no real solid evidence this is how spreading chronic wasting disease happens. It is believed that it can be ingested through other deer’s bodily fluids. Recent studies are suggesting that it can be carried through blood. How long the prions remain alive outside of the deers body is not know either. Some believe that a deer rubbing a gland on a leg against a bush followed by another deer eating from that bush will spread the disease. Studies continue but what we are working with is mostly theories at this time. We know how to test for the disease in dead animals but a live test has yet to be mastered.
Finally, shooting deer over bait is bad for the already beleaguered image of hunting. Many hunters, and our guess would be most non-hunters, consider the practice unsporting. Hunting over buckets of apples or corn isn’t ethically the same as hunting in a beech grove or an abandoned orchard.
Beleaguered image of hunting? I’m not sure what planet the editorial staff of the Concorde Monitor comes from but I really don’t think the image of hunting is anything close to beleaguered. The image of hunting is very good and with the onset of hunter safety classes and an overall trend toward educating the hunter to make for better landowner relations, we’ve come a long way.
But when the editors get into discussing ethics and the issue of unsporting, a whole different can of worms gets exposed. There are people who frown upon baiting. I do. Under the circumstances of New Hampshire’s hunting conditions, in most places I think that baiting of deer is an unnecessary tactic.
In most states that ban or allow baiting, it is done mostly as a tool for deer management. If a state or a wildlife management district has too many deer and the call for baiting to increase the harvest numbers becomes necessary to insure a healthy deer herd, then I think it should be allowed.
We need to be careful in that we don’t unknowingly remove any and all necessary tools to allow our wildlife biologist to do their jobs.
If New Hampshire Fish and Game officials feel that baiting has no useful purpose for deer management, then the consideration for a ban should be debated. In doing so, we need to consider many factors. One obvious one is that of handicapped hunters. Whatever one’s ethical beliefs are about baiting and other such issues involved with hunting, under certain circumstances I think lowering the ethics barrier would be prudent.
Tom Remington
