TexasCHLforum.com

I have limited hunting experience, all of it here in Texas (if you don't count shooting wild rabbits with a pellet rifle when I was a kid in California). There seems to me to be a conflict of definitions here.

If a rancher/land owner wants to hire/permit people to rid his land of nuisance hogs from a helicopter, I see no difference between that, and hiring a person to spray his crops for pests from an airplane. But I also agree that this is not hunting - it is pest eradication, whether or not the shooters are conscientious, make clean kills, and recover all the meat - and I don't particularly have a problem with it.

Now, reasonable people may disagree about whether or not shooting game animals from a stand or using bait is hunting or not, but in Colorado hunters have access to publicly owned hunting lands in the hundreds of thousands to millions of acres. Stalking your prey makes perfect sense in that environment. In Texas, where it has already been pointed out that most land is privately owned, a deer lease may be as small as 100 acres or less - which makes stalking almost impossible. Since you can't go to the game (without trespassing), you have to make the game come to you - hence the use of feeders. And since the land area available to you might be kind of small, compared to what you have access to in Colorado, setting up a stable shooting platform from which you can survey the largest part of your available land without detection by the game also makes perfect sense - particularly from a safety standpoint. A hunter in a stand with a clear field of fire is far less likely to shoot another hunter accidentally on an adjoining property. And even with a stand and a feeder, the hunter still has to know something about the habits of the game he is hunting. He needs to know the prevailing wind directions. He needs to know where the game trails are, the likely bedding areas, and the direction of the sun at sunup and sundown relative to his stand and shooting lanes, etc., etc.

At least that's my 2¢.