Low Life "Hunters" tarnish our name

[Maynerd62411]

I found one on my brother's property while mushroom hunting. I knew my sister-in-law didn't want any one hunting there. My first thought was looking around for trails or food source. I told my brother about it. He didn't bother going up to take it down. He posted 4 no trespassing signs on the tree. It was gone in a week. They left the signs. :results:

 

[54ball]

Be aware very aware.
Most of us who hunt with these weapons, do it to get a sense of the era our forefathers hunted. One thing that is easy to overlook in these modern times is the fact that hostiles may still roam the hunting woods.
When I hunt my number one goal is to come back. That means taking all the safety precautions I can. That may mean using my weapon or weapons to defend myself. Be prepared for that. I'm not saying blast every stranger in the woods or even someone stealing property. What I am saying is do not be a hero but do not be gullable either. Evade if possible try to avoid a confrontation. If the confrontation is unavoidable be prepared to denfend your life. You only have one shot, make it count.
A local hunter was killed close by. There may be more to this story. But from the information we have so far is that he was hunting on land he had a permit for, ran into someone and was, get this, stabbed to death. One could guess they were in close conversation and jumped him. Trust no one.
Roundball I am sorry your propety was stolen. It may have been a blessing you were not in the woods at the time. Someone bold enough to tresspass and use their gun in commision of a crime is bold enough to kill you. Be prepared.

 

[brushbuster]

Be aware very aware.
Most of us who hunt with these weapons, do it to get a sense of the era our forefathers hunted. One thing that is easy to overlook in these modern times is the fact that hostiles may still roam the hunting woods.
When I hunt my number one goal is to come back. That means taking all the safety precautions I can. That may mean using my weapon or weapons to defend myself. Be prepared for that. I'm not saying blast every stranger in the woods or even someone stealing property. What I am saying is do not be a hero but do not be gullable either. Evade if possible try to avoid a confrontation. If the confrontation is unavoidable be prepared to denfend your life. You only have one shot, make it count.
A local hunter was killed close by. There may be more to this story. But from the information we have so far is that he was hunting on land he had a permit for, ran into someone and was, get this, stabbed to death. One could guess they were in close conversation and jumped him. Trust no one.
Roundball I am sorry your propety was stolen. It may have been a blessing you were not in the woods at the time. Someone bold enough to tresspass and use their gun in commision of a crime is bold enough to kill you. Be prepared.

:agree: :RO:truer words were never spoken...
sorry to hear of your loss :cry: this sort of thing happens a lot down here due to so many day leasin fawn killers.they make me sick!!!!! :curse: :curse: :curse: :curse:
just remember that person will have to face the great judge :master:when his/her time comes,and unless theres no way to aviod it ,dont take the law into your own hands ,i know the last thing i want to be in front of is the business end of a shotgun :nono:.tree stands can be replaced ...YOU CANT!!!!!!!

dont forget about tha feller who killed them hunters with an sks this year cause he was caught trespassin

 

[roundball]

:agree: :RO:truer words were never spoken...
sorry to hear of your loss :cry: this sort of thing happens a lot down here due to so many day leasin fawn killers.they make me sick!!!!! :curse: :curse: :curse: :curse:
just remember that person will have to face the great judge :master:when his/her time comes,and unless theres no way to aviod it ,dont take the law into your own hands ,i know the last thing i want to be in front of is the business end of a shotgun :nono:.tree stands can be replaced ...YOU CANT!!!!!!!

dont forget about tha feller who killed them hunters with an sks this year cause he was caught trespassin

Totally agree...no intentions of confronting anyone...there are too many defective people like these walking around loose in this world and life is too short as it is...unfortunately a stolen tree stand just has to be part of the overall cost of hunting

 

[jaybeach]

rb -
Sorry to hear about this situation - glad you're taking it with a good attitude.
I was hunting on private property this year with exclusive hunting rights. One morning I was sitting in my tree stand well before daylight, and when it got light enough, what do I see in a tree 75 yards away, but a huge blob of orange sitting RIGHT ON TOP OF a primary scrape!
I decided to wait for the guy to get down, and when he unloaded his shotgun and lowered it to the ground I went over to ask him who gave him permission to hunt there. His answer, "Oh, my buddy and I ALWAYS hunt here." I informed him that he wasn't to come back except to remove his stands. Now - I'm waiting to see if MY stand will be removed for me!

 

[Tahquamenon]

Always sorry to hear about this sort of thing because this is one of the negative elements that tarnish firearm sporting. I've lost two tree stands on state property that were locked. Make you wish that they could have been booby-trapped. Then they would go lawsuit and end up taking my lifesavings.

I figured that if I left the stand locked and someone used it to hunt from - ok, unless I showed up to use it.

Get this, two years ago I was hunting a close friend's property when two guys came waltzing in grilling me about hunting "their" property. I left as I was not going to get into a heated argument with me holding a muzzleloader and them holding semi-auto shotguns.
However as soon as I got to my vehicle, I call the sheriff as well as my friend. The two knuckleheads were arrested for tresspassing and their weapons confiscated. They had no permission from anyone in the area where they were found. They were just plain tresspassing.

Reflects on the way these types of people were raised in my view. You don't borrow or take things without asking or if they don't belong to you.

 

[hadtogo]

Ditto hear. I also learned the hardway. What we do here now is only install tree pegs to approx. 9' above the ground & @ every treestand we have a ladder that gets us up to the first peg. When we are done we just hide the ladder. Kind of a pain but have yet to lose a tree stand since.

 

[jim gray]

Reading through all these posts, I am discouraged that so many of you have had the same or similar experiences. It shows a really disturbing trend that reflects poorly on all hunters.

Maybe stands could be permanantly marked or tagged like traps to trace them to their owners and help identify the low life S.O.B.s who steal them. I don't hunt from one so I'm not familiar with stands, would this kind of marking be feasible?

 

[Rebel]

Marking them would only work if they were ever recovered, say in a pawn shop or something. The real pain is that we need to even worry about this. I think the best idea would be to just rid the world of the ones resposible and bury them somewhere in the woods. But then, i am getting old. cranky, and short of patience with some people.

 

[jim gray]

I agree your way of dealing with them would be better, but they have to be caught first.

My suggestion for marking was based on my hope that these people would not be from our ranks and would be looking to sell off the stolen stands as soon as possible.

 

[Gleason.Chapman]

RB, Sorry to hear that. It has happened to me. Here is my solution to your situation. I will take some pictures of my stands so you can see what I am talking about. In situations where I know stealing will be an issue, I use the first 4 steps as "sky hooks" (Cabelas sells them), they are about 4" lag bolts screwed into the tree. So they can of course shoot the lock off (in my mind thy planned to steal it since the 00 buck). So someone would have to clim up about 5 feet, without tree steps to get the stand. Not impossible for a young guy, but anyone over 35 is not going to do that. Of course they could get a ladder or shoot the chain, but I have found that Cable locks that they keep computers locked to desk are very very secure. They are difficult to cut. Also put a piece of leather or rubber inner tube over the lock and they won't be able to shoot it off, because the leather or rubber is protecting the lock, not perfect. The other solution is to use "Y" boards, and as I said I will take some pictures today and post them to the Forum so you can see my setup. Cheap. Safe. Comfortable and can't be stolen, because you nail them in and if they are stolen it is $5.00 to replace it. I thank you for your posts on Bullet Penetration on a thread I have on this forum.
Chap Gleason

 

[Big John]

Have 30 acres in deep woods of n.e. kingdom,vt. cleared trail and spot for stand, took 3 weeks,opening day some guy was sitting on my stand telling me i was bothering his hunting! Suggested he leave so he could continue to eat with teeth! Hunting alone. :sorry:

 

[Bigblue250]

This really burns me, because of the developement arround me. I use a stand for archery and BP season and thankfully have not lost one yet. I just hope this year my stand stays put, the area that I hunt is by a bunch of old cranberry bogs. Recently the owner of the property sold some land and it is now the home of"beutifull people". As far as I am concerned, my grandfather taught me well"If it is not yours don't touch it". :m2c:

 

[brfire]

I used to have a seasonal stand my buddy and I built ( put it up before season and take it down after). It weighed about 100 lbs and took two of us to put up. I went there one morning to hunt and there was a guy in it. He said "hi!" So I said hi back. He said " this your stand?" I said "yup". He got down and left saying " you picked a great spot." The next morning I went back and the same Jack a_ _ was back in it! I wasn't very happy and let him know it. :curse: Now I just use a portable stand. I take it with me at the end of the day and can be more mobile while hunting.

 

[Cherokee]

This just sucks!
I wouldnt even think of climbing in someones stand.
I just wasnt raised that way. Its not mine so leave it alone.

My dad use to have a nice detterent for kids trespassing or adults.
We had this big tree all the neighbor kids seemed to want to climb and once up in it they could reach the bottom rungs of the tellephone companies phone box/seat on the pole next to it.
They got in the box a few times and knocked out phone service to about 4 homes and ofcourse they didnt live here.
Dad went out painted the ree limbs with axle grease. He got the limbs right on top where a kid would jump and just barely get the limb and climb up.
He still tells me the story of the kids jumping at those limbs and letting go running home with grease all over them haha. That ended that problem.
He has done similar things like that all his work years.I will keep watch on people taking stands in more now. Might be the owner might not, right down aplate number and hang on to it.
Makes you think.

 

[jdixon]

If the perpetrator left casing, was there no reason the Fuzz could try to get prints off the casings? Hell, even a couple partials would be better than nothing. That could place whoever at the scne, and I'm sure the casings can be matched with the shot undoubtedly still in the tree. That shot can even be traced back to at least a gun manufacturer, which, again, could point back to the subhuman that did this.

I know this is frustrating to hear about but, crime scene forensics in this case are not a realistic option. Latent prints on the shell casings, pretty much impossible, especially if the plastic part of the casing is ribbed. Even on the brass, at best a partial print may be possible. Most partial prints are so bad that you have to have a known suspect's prints there to make a painstaking comparison effort to. AFIS (Automated Figerprint Identificaiton System) which is the computerized comparison of fingerprints does not work well with partials. Often times full rolled prints are hard to match with this system. There are no ballistic marks on shot pellets, so ballistic matches are out, even if they were, you must have the suspect weapon to do a comparison to. Same with the primer face (firing pin marks) and breech markings - those types of matches would be possible, if you had the gun they were fired from to test against. There is a system out there called IBIS (Intergrated Ballistic Identification Sytem) maintained by the ATF. This sytem requires data from known sources to be entered into it for comparison with unknown sources, or match two unknowns, like bullets or spent casings from two different crime scenes thereby linking them toether. In theory it works, in practice, there are not enough operators to do the painstaking data entry to make the system work.

By the way Jon M.... "Fuzz" ?!?! :shake: You are dating yourself.

 

[freetrapper20]

Sorry to hear of your misfortune roundball. I understand how you feel about slob hunters. I have the pleasure and also the headaches of heading up a small hunt club where I live at. Its the only way we can afford to have a good place to hunt around here. We had one stand shot this year. I guess since they could'nt get it down they shot the ladder so we couldn't climb up to it. We deal with a few trespassers, poachers and even a pot grower or two just about every year. Some times its hard for me to just enjoy sitting on stand. But anything worth anything involes some effort and hardship. Just makes my blood boil when somebody else comes in and take advantage of the good hunters out there. We had the DNR come in a set up the mechanical deer one year and catch one guy. I've thought about game cameras to catch game and trespassers but they just might steal them too if they found em'.

 

[roundball]

Sorry to hear of your misfortune roundball. I understand how you feel about slob hunters. I have the pleasure and also the headaches of heading up a small hunt club where I live at. Its the only way we can afford to have a good place to hunt around here. We had one stand shot this year. I guess since they could'nt get it down they shot the ladder so we couldn't climb up to it. We deal with a few trespassers, poachers and even a pot grower or two just about every year. Some times its hard for me to just enjoy sitting on stand. But anything worth anything involes some effort and hardship. Just makes my blood boil when somebody else comes in and take advantage of the good hunters out there. We had the DNR come in a set up the mechanical deer one year and catch one guy. I've thought about game cameras to catch game and trespassers but they just might steal them too if they found em'.

Yes, thought about the game cameras too but pretty sure flash would be required and then they'd know they were there, and steal or destroy them...as unfortunate as it is, about the only thing I know to do is chalk it up as a cost of hunting...can't let ourselves get all macho & enraged over it and then do something stupid.

Look at what just happened a couple months ago where an oriental man was using another hunters stand, got discovered, was actually down out of the stand and leaving but then racial slurs started, things escalated, other hunters got involved and 4-5 people got killed...just so tragic, wasteful, and unnecessary...and think about all the other life long impacts to the families, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives, kids, grandkids, forever...and the dirt bag will be walking the street in no time.

"low-lifes" are the lowest order stain on our planet and what they do is bad enough, but we can't let them cause us to do something even worse and spend the rest of our lives in jail, and/or lose our own lives over it...I'm out a few hundred bucks but at least that's all.

So, I'll just keep making smoke on Saturdays and just use a 'ground stand' approach on this farm this fall...it's what "Daniel" would have done anyhow
:redthumb:

 

[makensmoke]

I think that stealing from anyone makes you a jerk. There are alot of people these days that have little or no respect for the rights of others.

The only input to this I have is an observation about the topics on this thread. I lived in California at one time and have seen the PITA/anti-hunting/anti-gun groups hike out to the hunting areas and mess with the things that the local hunters have left. This also shows a lack of respect.

Happy hunting all,

Mike C

 

[bezoar]

Dirt bag will be walking the streets? Last i heard the illegal treestand occupant was fired on first and simply defended himself in a very aggressive manner. And i doubt that will get him off of teh death penalty as it is.