What Would You Do?
Let me present a situation to you. Your out in the woods deer hunting and in your travels you come across a deer that has been shot. As you inspect this animal you clearly see a bullet hole in the carcass and upon further inspection you notice that the deer is not warm. Looking even closer you see that the carcass is somewhat stiff, it looks as if the deer was shot the previous night and just simply hasn’t been recovered by anyone.
You then proceed to look for a blood trail, but you find nothing. So you next decide to follow the deer’s tracks to see if someone was tracking it. Your curiosity takes you a couple hundred yards away and you find human tracks next to the deer’s prints in the snow. The human set stops and turns around to go back in the direction they came. It looks as if the tracks were old and you didn’t see anyone in the area you were in or any vehicles in the parking area.
Speculating that the hunter tracking this deer left it for being lost (that is if the tracks even belonged to the person who took the shot), you decide to go back and tag the deer and field dress it. Is this the right thing to do, or should you leave it lying there and let it rot or hope the hunter will come back soon to try and locate it again. With that being said, the deer has been there since the previous evening and it is now the middle of the next day.
This scenario happened to a guy I work with and he was perplexed over what to do with the deer. As he tagged it he anguished over the fact that someone lost a deer and wouldn’t find it. He would have gladly helped the hunter haul it out and give it to him, if that person showed up. He wondered all the while if he was doing the right thing, but he didn’t want to simply leave it laying there to rot in the field either. This guy is an experienced hunter and knew that the deer had been laying there over night, it wasn’t a fresh kill.
So he placed his tag on the deer and field dressed it. He then paid to get the meat processed and made the decision to take half the meat to a food bank. His thought was that since he was fortunate enough to come across this deer that he found dead, he should share it with someone less fortunate, so they too could benefit from it.
Do we as hunters have the right to take unclaimed game? If we don’t claim it, is it being wasteful? Do we have a responsibility to do what we can when we come across game that is left in the field? I think this hunter did everything he could to try and find the person who shot this deer. I commend him on his effort and his decision to donate half of the meat that he paid for out of his pocket to be processed. What do you think? And before you answer, remember he tried to do the right thing!
