High fences not needed to produce big bucks.
Never ceases to amaze me how cruel people can be, especially those who are jealous of the accomplishments of others.
Some of the worst are deer hunters, especially those who hide behind the anonymity that the Internet provides.Take Thursday (Dec. 20) for example, the day that Joshua Bruce of Alexandria, La., killed what will eventually be one of the top 5 non-typical bucks ever taken in Mississippi at Giles Island Outfitters near Natchez on the Mississippi River.
He killed a 20-point that Giles Island manager Jimmy Riley, one of the stars of “Deer Thugs” on the Pursuit Channel, green scored at 242 6/8 inches gross (you can find the story on this website).
As soon as the buck’s impressive photo started making the rounds on the World Wide Web, a world wide network of fools went on the attack.
“High fence!”
“Not fair chase!”
“Anybody could do that in a pen!”
Those were just some of the comments found on Facebook, chat rooms and other assorted sites.
To them I say, in the parlance of the day: OMG, shut up!
Yes, Giles Island is an exclusive, high-dollar booked hunting operation, but it is all about fair chase. Big bucks get to be big bucks there because Riley and his crew of guides manage them with great care.
To say otherwise, as many have, is simply wrong.
And it’s mean.
I first ran into this petty jealousy in 2003, when Tracy Laird took his 236 1/8-inch buck with a bow in Adams County. I was fortunate to get an interview with the hunter the next day, while his excitement was still running at full speed.
He told me the story, having to stop several times to catch his breath. I kept asking him questions, not trying to trip him up but because I was so enthralled by his tale and his eagerness to relate and share his experience.
That was in the early days of chat rooms and hunting-dedicated Web sites, and within a few days Laird was accused of everything from having shot the deer out of season with a gun, to poaching, headlighting, trespassing, etc.
“You name it, and I’ve been accused of it,” Laird told me two months later when I interviewed him again after an official scoring made it the No 2 non-typical buck ever killed by a hunter in Mississippi. “I don’t understand it. Why are people like that?”
In the days, weeks and months that followed, it just got worse.
By the next summer, when Laird brought the mount to the Mississippi Big Buck Contest at the Wildlife Extravaganza in Jackson, the hunter had soured a bit over the whole issue.
“There were times,” Laird told me, “when I just wished I had never killed the dang thing. People are just mean.”
Laird was able to get over the vile treatment he was given.
I haven’t, because I’ve seen it over and over again with so many deer.
It was my job as the outdoor editor of Mississippi’s statewide newspaper for 30 years, to write stories about the best deer killed each year. For the past 10 of those years, those stories showed up on the paper’s online edition and eventually in chat rooms.
In most cases — and I’m guessing at least 90 percent of the time — the conversation turned ugly immediately. Accusations of foul play would become the norm. There were times when the hunter would call me back to tell me he or she wished they had never talked to me.
Not because I got the facts wrong, but because of the treatment they received from their “peers.”
The problem with the Internet, as every reporter knows all too well, is that it offers a forum to every person in the world who has a smart phone, a tablet, a laptop or a desktop computer. They can post under any name they choose and say what they want without fear of retribution (although in extreme cases, Internet provider addresses can be found for legal matters).
That kind of opportunity, obviously, is too much for too many people to handle. If you follow the comments of any news story in any news Web site, you will quickly see it deteriorate into either racism or democrats vs. republicans. In sports, a story about a high school kid’s great game will quickly become a shouting match between rival colleges.
And in deer hunting, when you combine idiocy and redneck (and I say that knowing I qualify by most standards), it just gets absurd.
Happy New Year.
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