Deer food is an important part of any deer management program. Public deer management and hunters are partners today. That is, much of the management is paid for by the taxes on hunting equipment, license, tags... Like most partnerships it has ups and downs.
The public land and resources are controlled by a wide variety of interest groups. The hunters who often provide most of the money are only one of them. The good news is that hunters can often benefit in one way or the other.
Some non-hunters know and appreciate that hunters are largely responsible for helping to keep our wildlife populations healthy. Hunters and hunting need any positive with the public we can get.
Sometimes we can hunt on the public land. Sometimes the deer (or other game) do not stay on the public land, and they eventually spread out to private land.
The way private resources are handled can vary greatly. A synonym for the word management is manipulation. There is a very troubling trend today to feed wildlife. Game manipulation doesn't sound as nice as game management. But that's what many are doing.
The food should be natural or farm land. Hunting laws in some states allow "hunters" to lure with deer food rather than hunting deer. Feeders take the natural out of nature, the wild out of wildlife, and the hunt out of hunting. Read:
Feeders
Advertising and the promotion of trophy deer hunting has lead to more whitetail manipulation. Where deer hunting is sold to hunters there is often far too much deer manipulation. See:
The Hunting Ranch
One of the biggest problems we face today is trying to keep our wild game, wild. Selling deer food, feed, seed, farming machinery is making money. The more we manipulate the land and the animals on it, the less natural it becomes. With every compromise we move a little further away from what is natural, or wild. See:
food plots.
In most of our country very few places are wild anymore.
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