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Respect land or be banned
It's rifle season, and you know what I'm thinking.
Kill 'em.
Kill 'em all.
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Besides, they're fun to shoot.
The overpopulation of vermin is such that on most mornings of the year I could bag a buck with a ball bat.
What I heard this morning was not a ball bat.
If we'd been awakened to the sound of shots in our last neighborhood one thing was for certain - the couple up the street would soon be getting a divorce. Here, however, things are different. I often hear and sometimes see hunters year-round. We've shot skeet and target in our back pastures. Guns are simply part of the picture.
The first year we owned the farm, we did not post signs and allowed most hunters access to our fields. We were disappointed at the inconsideration, stupidity and lack of respect some showed. One day, I looked out from my bedroom window to see two imbeciles gutting a buck in the middle of one of our cornfields.
The rules changed after that.
The No Hunting signs were nailed to trees.
The few folks who now hunt our land are first-name friends who we can trust to tell the difference between deer and horses, cows and dogs - sportsmen who understand that making a mess of a kill creates a haven for coyotes.
The last thing we need is coyote bait.
Coyotes and chickens don't mix.
If you're on the other side of my fence (literally or figuratively), let me explain what farm owners are looking for when it comes to friends (or strangers) hunting on their property.
Respect.
That's what it all boils down to - respect. If you're going to use my property as your happy hunting grounds, you'd better learn to respect those grounds. You show respect by obeying a very simple rule.
Leave the land exactly as you found it.
That's an old camping rule most of us learned on the first night of the first Boy Scout campfire. It's an idea that, unfortunately, tends to be forgotten by adult Scouts, over and over again, whether they're walking through the woods with rifle and scope or tailgating in a parking lot at Heinz Field.
I was on the north side of Pittsburgh after the Pitt-WVU game the other day and was disgusted by the amount of garbage the drunken idiot tailgaters left behind. It's the same feeling I get when walking through my woods after strangers have tacked boards to the trunks of trees and screwed two-by-fours into branches, using the leaves as bedding for their beer cans and cigarette butts.
Kill 'em.
Kill all the deer.
But respect the land or be forever barred.
It's that simple.
To hear Scott Paulsen's column, visit www.observer-reporter.com. He can be heard each weekday afternoon from 3-7 p.m. on 1250 ESPN Radio.
