As a hunter, would you set out feeding bait to lure deer or bears, or whatever in, so you could shoot them as they ate?

They are the gatherers from the hunters and gatherers.

I know enough people that feed their families by hunting, so I don’t judge how they go about it. Need the food? Hell, yeah, set out feeders!

Everyone I know that hunts does it for bloody fun. They don’t need the food. The most ironic thing I ever saw were some hunters, with a deer in the bed of their pick up, eating hamburgers at Barums.

So they should have just stripped the meat off a freshkill in the woods and eaten it right there?

Every person that I know who hunts does it responsibly, and either uses the meat themselves or donates it.

People I know that hunt also eat and share the meat. My point is, they don’t HAVE to to live, so they hunt purely for the joy of killing something. When hunting purely for fun, I just don’t think baiting the animals like that is a terribly sporting, or challenging, way to go about it.
I actually wouldn’t even dignify that by calling it “hunting,” because it’s not.

It would be acceptable as a way of feeding a hungry family but it is not sport.

I might. But in some areas/states it is illegal.
@Dutchess_III I have never seen a hunter who took a meat grinder hunting so he could grind up some fresh venison for burgers. Also, venison is too lean, usually, for burger meat and has beef fat added to enhance flavor, and maybe for other reason(s).

Exactly @flutherother. Exactly.

I don’t hunt.
Baiting is wrong and should be illegal unless you are hunting for food to survive.
Sport hunters should not be baiting. It’s not sportsman like.

While that’s not very sporting, it does have some advantages. The best thing, is that the hunter should get a good clean, and accurate shot. A good shot in the heart or lung field, should make death much faster, or humane. A bad shot, and the animal runs off wounded. It may take hours, or days to die of it’s injury. And the hunter may not even find it’s body.

Baiting is illegal during hunting season and if you get caught you are fined and lose hunting privelages. Outside the season you can. My friends will go out before and set up the blind, trim trees, maybe set out apples and game cams so they learn where the deer are. Huge no no to do a canned hunt or baited hunt.

In some places it’s illegal. Not all places. Deer feeders themselves aren’t illegal. In fact, this is what started this question. A FB friend bought a deer feeder for her husband. I didn’t know what it was by the picture so I asked. She said “It’s a deer feeder because hunting season is on.”
How do you even prove that they’ve baited the deer in a situation like that, and weren’t feeding Bambi out of the goodness of their heart?

A friend of my husband’s used to bow hunt. He didn’t bait. He actually hunted. Well, he sat in a tree and waited for a deer to wander by, anyway. One time he shot a deer. It wasn’t a clean shot. It hit the deer in the chest but he took off. He launched in to this very long, descriptive store of tracking the wounded deer down and how long it took for him to die…..I listened to it with a growing sense of horror. I know I should have kept my mouth shut, but I blurted out, “You shot him in the lung so he slowly suffocated to death?”
The guy looked at me and just shrugged and made a “Yeah, so what!” face.

@Dutchess Mo Conservation Dept takes calls like that very seriously here.

You can put feeders out anytime if you dont hunt there, or within certain number of yards away.

Maybe they want to keep their deer close to home for hunting season, safer. Or to take pictures. Or to make antlers bigger, like on a food plot.

We aren’t talking about Missouri. She specified it was to lure deer in to shoot them.

Here, they will customize corn fields for hunting. Deer stands set up with alleys of corn, and feeder stations.

Much of hunting is about ambushing an animal.

It’s not my thing. I fish. That’s pretty cruel too, when I think about it.

@Dutchess_III Ideally, the idea is to shoot the deer through the heart. A near miss goes through the lungs as does a direct hit. Finding the perfect place to place the shot, and at different angles and distances, is difficult. A good hunter will finish off the animal as quickly as possible. Also, an animal shot through the heart may run some distance before collapsing. I have shot ground squirrels through the heart and they may run for up to 10 seconds before going TU.

I understand that. What bothered me was his utter indifference to the deer suffering the way it did. He made no mention of finishing it off quickly, which I assume is done for humane reasons. The crux of the story was about how dang long it took for the deer to die. At least a couple of hours, or longer. Long, slow and agonizing, and he he honestly did not care.

Yeah, some people’s kids…

What?

Some people are sadistic assholes.
When I was working as a gun salesman, I had a hunter show me a video of him chasing a coyote with his snowmobile. The snow was deep, and the coyote was having lots of trouble. He almost ran it over multiple times. He claimed that he ran it to death. In the video, you could heat him wooping, and laughing as he took great pleasure in killing it in such a way.
I was working, or I’d have told him off.

I imagine that some cruel hunting behavior is learned from whomever taught the hunter. Other people are really just sadists.

My friend on FB just posted a pic of the deer feeder working. I asked her why she had it again? She said, “To draw deer & hogs in so we can hunt them from our stand.”

@Dutchess_III In our area, that is not honorable hunting.

Is that in Kansas? I read this: Salter said the lone exception is in a Bourbon County in southeast Kansas, where some landowners desire feral pigs so they can hunt them with dogs.

No. She’s not in Kansas. Not sure where she’s from.
I don’t consider it honorable either.

The bottom line is that humans are way smarter, and usually armed. Many hunters have trail cams, feeders, salt kicks etc set up where they hunt. They have a crazy advantage over most animals in North America.

There is not really much honorable about it, except for hunters who only take the old/weak, or only kill what they need, and make sure that the animal suffered as little as possible. Respecting the land , and not littering are other ways a hunter can be responsible.