Well, different issue, but true enough, without landowners, no hunting.
Maybe not generalize?!!
In limine! I am bothered at your complaint and feel you ought to share your concerns with the local foxhunt so you aren’t this upset. Have you yet? Where are you located? There might be things both of you can do to prevent these things from happening. For example; are you getting a phone call or fixture card so that you know when the hunt might be in your area making noise or coming thru? Tell them you want to know their schedules or get a reminder call. Do you know what time they are hunting? It might be easier for you to leave the horses in during that time or turn out after they’ve come thru? Some folks leave their horses out at night so can bring them in earlier. Yes, horses will run around but it’s not always fear but excitement and rarely will they hurt themselves. Sometimes its with a lot of bucking & kicking & play. Mine are so used to it; they just go to the top of the hill and stand like statues watching & listening. I wish they WOULD run around; they need the exercise!! :winkgrin:
I also put my dog inside just for a few hours so he doesn’t bark and upset the horses. The whips/huntsman may not be aware that you are absolutely not wanting them there. Or they may be desperately trying to retrieve hounds from your vicinity. Give them the benefit of the doubt as they are TRYING to control & keep track of a mess of hounds who are hunting and maybe not paying attention. I’m sure you know something about hunting but have you gone yourself?
As you know, there are good & less good hunt clubs & hunters & hounds and participants. Don’t generalize please. We are so lucky here as our local hunts are OUTSTANDING in their conduct, relationships and care of hounds. So lucky…
Arabhorse, I can certainly understand your concern and frustration. Unfortunately, these nut cases who are your concern will not heed any law that is passed. The law will only hurt those of us who are already law abiding! The same as mandatory spay neuter will only hurt those of us who breed responsibly.
All I want to do is warn everyone that these types of laws are just the start of more and more laws that will affect ALL of US who own any type of animal. We do not need more laws, just better enforcement of those already in existence.
PLEASE let’s stand together before we are all destroyed.
:no:
BTT
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
9:00 AM
4000 W Broad St
Richmond, VA 23230
Board of Game and Inland Fisheries
[Agenda]
The Board of Game and Inland Fisheries will meet and intends hear an update on the Hunting with Hounds Study. The Board will also receive staff’s recommendations for migratory waterfowl (ducks and coots, geese and brant, swan, gallinules and moorehens) and falconry seasons and bag limits based on frameworks provided by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, solicit and hear comments from the public, and then intends to adopt 2008-2009 seasons and bag limits for those species. The Board will also receive public comments on non-agenda items and hear committee reports. The Board may discuss general and administrative issues and may hold a closed session at sometime during the meeting. For more information, please contact Board Secretary Beth Drewery at (804) 367-9149 or by email at beth.drewery@dgif.virgnia.gov.
[QUOTE=arabhorse2;3409399]
Unfortunately, hunting with hounds will continue unabated and unchanged, according to the latest update of Hunting With Hounds.
I am saddened, but not surprised. After all, “the board” was made up by a majority of hound hunters, and didn’t include a whole lot of non-hound hunters or people who don’t hunt at all. When it’s uneven like that, don’t expect any type of realistic compromise.
I for one am sickened by the number of scrawny, mangy, half-wild dogs that I come across every year, and not just during hunting season. So many of them are run over, because they’re left to run loose and fend for themselves. I also see indiscriminate breeding, because God forbid any of those dogs are spayed or neutered!
I’ve had to run hunters off my POSTED land. If there are decent hound hunters out there, they’re seriously few and far between in my neck of the woods. Buncha asshats.
The foxhunters aren’t the ones who annoy me, because they leave with the same number of dogs they went out with, and those dogs are always happy, healthy, and well fed. It’s the deer/coon/whatever hunters who are doing wrong by their dogs, and something needs to be done about it.
I’m tired of starving hunting dogs running off my barn cats and eating their food. I’m tired of lame excuses that the dogs are “running thin”. That’s not thin; that’s freakin’ STARVING. I’m also outraged that those dogs act like they’re going to be beaten to within an inch of their lives whenever I get near them. Gads, I can only imagine what kind of hell they endure when their owners bother to notice them at all!
I’ve seen and lived it for the last 3 years, and I’m sick to death of it all.[/QUOTE]Thanks for addressing and placing the problems where many of us know it lies - the deer hound hunter. The SAC will be more than happy to take all hound hunting down with the deer hunters instead of suggesting a real solution to a problem that is going to one day be fixed. Failure to identify the sect of hunting causing the most issues won’t make it go away.
[QUOTE=Big-Bird-VA;3466715]
Thanks for addressing and placing the problems where many of us know it lies - the deer hound hunter. The SAC will be more than happy to take all hound hunting down with the deer hunters instead of suggesting a real solution to a problem that is going to one day be fixed. Failure to identify the sect of hunting causing the most issues won’t make it go away.[/QUOTE]
No one sees that by creating new rules and regulations for all hunting dog owners isn’t going to address their issues without first increasing the number of enforcement officers in the areas were the problems are. but both of you quote from the peta handbook.
I hate to say this, but it’s been said time and time again by those Law Biding Pit Bull owners who’s dogs are responsibly cared for, fed, spayed/neutered and trained and who have never hurt a living soul.
You get what you get when you divide yourselves. These law will only hurt those who abide by the law and will NOT put a STOP to those who could care less!
Folks like PETA and HSUS have set out to undermind any and every law biding animal owner; whether that is a dog, cat, pig, reptile, horse, etc!
You own an animal now, let PETA, HSUS, your local Government, and our National Government in your back pocket and you’ll find yourselves without any animals in the future!!
I am not a fan of hunting, especially what they call hunting today? Setting out salt blocks, feed corn, planting fruit trees and SITTING their fat ARSES in blinds WAITING for the deer to walk up upon them.
But I sit back and seperate myself from someone elses right to own an animal, I’ll find myself without mine shortly there after!!!
Anything Wayne Pacelle is involved in will NOT end well for people who own animals rather than live with companions.
*** applause ***
Thank you ! I too live in throwaway-dog hell. I too have “hunters” tresspassing. Here it’s the norm to buy a $99 mechanized deer corn feeder from Tractor Supply, set it up a few weeks in advance, and then “hunt” by sitting next to the feeder out of view. We also have hunters who like to sit in a blind with a huge cooler of beer & wait, and there’s nothing more fun than a drunk guy with a shotgun trying to take down a moving animal. Or gunfire at midnight. Spotlight deer hunting. Poaching. Out of season hunting. Killing merely for fun – trucks here sport bumper stickers “If it flies, it dies!”
At the end of the season, the hunting pack culls may be turned loose, given away to anyone who will take them, shot, or dropped off at the SPCA. My spca is almost all discarded hunting and fighting dogs, and a full shelter means dogs are put down every week.
Sorry to sound so cynical, but I just haven’t yet met anyone locally who treats working hunting dogs much differently. To them, dogs are a tool. And when a tool is too slow or no longer needed, it’s discarded.
Then by that logic, we shouldn’t have any laws of any kind because only the good people will follow the rules. Should we not bother with assault, theft, or molestation laws since those nutcases won’t heed the laws either? Why have any laws then? (see the flaw in logic?)
[QUOTE=MayS;3471886]
Then by that logic, we shouldn’t have any laws of any kind because only the good people will follow the rules. Should we not bother with assault, theft, or molestation laws since those nutcases won’t heed the laws either? Why have any laws then? (see the flaw in logic?)[/QUOTE]
Of course: but odds are there are laws on the books right now about mistreatment of animals, not licensing them, letting them roam at will…and they’re not enforced. If they were, we would not be having these discussions.
Passing laws on top of laws does not fix the problem: if the laws are not enforced the only people who obey them are people who are, for lack of a better term, civilized. The ones who are going to let their coon dogs roam around and fight and get into other people’s property? Pass more laws and those folks will still own unruly dogs.
AR groups, led by people Wayne P. have been very successful getting all sorts of busy body laws passed in the US about dog ownership. In some parts of the US now you can not breed dogs or even own an intact animal. Why? because AR people don’t like the fact that people breed animals. Someone who owns dogs and does not neuter them, is somehow offensive to them. The people who own dogs, and license them, train them, confine them, and ensure that they do not bother other people, are lumped in with the idiots of the world via increasingly tough legislation that fails to acknowledge that there is a difference.
[QUOTE=MayS;3471886]
*** applause ***
Thank you ! I too live in throwaway-dog hell. I too have “hunters” tresspassing. Here it’s the norm to buy a $99 mechanized deer corn feeder from Tractor Supply, set it up a few weeks in advance, and then “hunt” by sitting next to the feeder out of view. We also have hunters who like to sit in a blind with a huge cooler of beer & wait, and there’s nothing more fun than a drunk guy with a shotgun trying to take down a moving animal. Or gunfire at midnight. Spotlight deer hunting. Poaching. Out of season hunting. Killing merely for fun – trucks here sport bumper stickers “If it flies, it dies!”
At the end of the season, the hunting pack culls may be turned loose, given away to anyone who will take them, shot, or dropped off at the SPCA. My spca is almost all discarded hunting and fighting dogs, and a full shelter means dogs are put down every week.
Sorry to sound so cynical, but I just haven’t yet met anyone locally who treats working hunting dogs much differently. To them, dogs are a tool. And when a tool is too slow or no longer needed, it’s discarded.
Then by that logic, we shouldn’t have any laws of any kind because only the good people will follow the rules. Should we not bother with assault, theft, or molestation laws since those nutcases won’t heed the laws either? Why have any laws then? (see the flaw in logic?)[/QUOTE]
Another post by VVAW, they post by the Peta HSUS book. :mad:
http://petpac.net/issues/opposition/ has a good discussion about poorly written animal law. Before you sign on to supporting more restrictions on dog owners, I’d suggest reading it and seeing what that really means.
Hunting-dog owners try to keep opponents at bay
By STEVE SZKOTAK – 1 day ago
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — In a state considered the American birthplace of hunting with hounds, George Washington’s favorite sport has become a target for some Virginia landowners who say baying dogs and their owners are trampling property rights.
Even other hunters object to a Virginia right-to-retrieve law viewed as the most absolute in the nation: Hunters have free reign to chase after dogs that stray onto posted private property.
Proponents are rising to protect their right to hunt, mindful that other Southern states have already limited or eliminated certain forms of the sport because of complaints from property owners.
Courtly fox hunters and down-home bear and coon hunters — an unlikely coalition — contend their heritage is at stake.
“If we have a major defeat in Virginia, I think it would hurt hunting with hounds in every state. Therefore, we will fight it at every turn,” vowed Kirby Burch of the Virginia Hunting Dog Alliance, an umbrella group for 450 hunt clubs claiming more than 30,000 members.
A big part of the friction involves loss of rural habitat due to development. In Virginia, land is being developed at more than three times the rate of population growth, according to “Hunting with Hounds in Virginia: A Way Forward,” a state-commissioned report.
The upshot: More dogs are running on private lands, riling property owners.
Forms of hound hunting have been banned from Washington state to Massachusetts, and Southern states have followed suit — in part because of opposition from animal-rights groups, but also from landowners. Texas banned hunting deer with dogs in 1990, and Alabama, Georgia and Florida more recently have restricted the sport.
Those actions have prompted officials to examine the sport in Virginia, where approximately 180,000 hunters use dogs. Game officials here say they hope to deal with the issue before problems mount.
Some hunters say the criticism comes from outsiders unfamiliar with the sport’s heritage, but that’s not always the case.
“An awful lot of what we consider ‘new people’ are sons and daughters of Virginia but don’t have the tradition of the land,” said Rick Busch, assistant director of the wildlife division of the state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. “It’s not necessarily Yankees piling into our Southern states.”
Hunting with hounds in Virginia dates nearly 400 years ago to the founding of Jamestown, America’s first permanent English settlement. Dogs are used to hunt bears, deer, fox, raccoons and rabbits.
Washington and Thomas Jefferson were among its earliest enthusiasts. Congressman John Randolph, who represented Virginia in the early 19th century, was known to enter the House of Representatives with a pack of hounds at his heels. The sport flourished among the Southern plantation culture and spread to Appalachia with Scots-Irish immigrants.
That was back when the same land supported far fewer people. Hunting enthusiasts and opponents alike wonder whether there’s still enough room for the specially bred, high-priced dogs to run.
On Oct. 23, the Board of Game and Inland Fisheries is to consider proposals that seem to satisfy neither side. The proposals do not, for instance, recommend changes to the right-to-retrieve law, disappointing property owners like Ben Jones.
He became so weary of hunters traipsing after their dogs on his 165 acres about 40 miles southwest of Richmond that he billed the state $4,750. The bill was ignored.
“The Constitution says government can’t take property from the private sector and place it in the public sector without JUST COMPENSATION to the property owner,” Jones, a self-employed contractor, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
The dog retrieval law is especially contentious when it comes to hunting deer, because such hunts can cover thousands of acres. Wildlife biologist Ben Fulton, a member of a state advisory committee that has studied hunting with hounds, said deer hunters with dogs disturb his own hunts on his 200 acres in Cumberland County. The right-to-retrieve law, he said, is an open invitation.
“All you have to do is go on somebody’s property and just say, ‘I’m looking for my dog,’” Fulton said. “I would like to see the law changed to where they had to gain permission.”
Burch, of the Hunting Dog Alliance, said that alternative surely would be more irritating.
“Do you want me knocking on your door at 3 a.m. in the morning and saying I want my dog? C’mon,” Burch said.
David Birdsall, 68, lives on a 500-acre farm in Gloucester County and has hunted deer since the 1960s. He also shows his Black and Tan Coonhounds.
“To hear these dogs run and chase is what it’s all about,” said Birdsall, a retired veterinarian.
When he hunts these days, he moves up Virginia’s Middle Peninsula near Chesapeake Bay to a less populated county.
A little common courtesy, he said, goes a long way.
On the Net:
Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries: http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/
Virginia Hunting Dog Alliance: http://www.vahda.org/
[QUOTE=Hokieman;3549512]
“The Constitution says government can’t take property from the private sector and place it in the public sector without JUST COMPENSATION to the property owner,” Jones, a self-employed contractor, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.[/QUOTE]
:lol: Nice try, Mr. Jones. But a physical intrusion onto private property has to be permanent before it rises to the level of a compensable taking. Somebody needs to get over himself.
I’d be happy to have Mr. Jones’s problem. Custom around here dictates that the landowner takes the hound to the local roadhouse and puts it into the pen erected out back for just such a purpose. Which not only means the landowner is out the gas to ferry the hound to the holding pen, but one always feels obligated to stop by again and again until the hound’s picked up. Since this isn’t the sort of establishment one normally frequents, it’s a hassle.
So I generally just give the hound supper and a place to crash and, if I can’t get close enough to read the collar, I wait on the owner to come looking.
I don’t understand how prohibiting owners from retrieving their hounds promotes responsible ownership.
Well, being a native born Virginian - and having to deal with those STARVING SKELETAL hounds on my farmland, chasing our cattle and horses, attacking - yes attacking - my dogs; killing my cats; having cows SHOT (because black angus look so much like deer); having had my dogs shot before; heaven forbid they shoot one of the horses… AND being verbally abused by hunters who decided to carry their guns onto our property while “looking” for their dogs (oh, boy - did they EVER regret that decision - I was only 14 at the time, but I called the sheriff’s office, then blocked their vehicle in with a tractor… by the time they came out, my dad had gotten home & was waiting with the deputy for them to come back to vehicle - ha ha ha ha ha!!!). I’m over 40 now - some wise*** hunter pulls that crap again - they won’t get off so easy…
I’M ALL FOR STOPPING THE INSANITY
It has nothing to do with the right to own animals and everything about being responsible.
Now - we do allow certain hunters on our property (sans dogs) and they are always courteous and considerate. And funny how they don’t need dogs to find deer. My BIL hunts with both bows and black powder, but no dogs… and again, he’s successful AND feeding his family (not just killing for sport)…
So if those can hunt successfully without hounds - that says it all for me.
Oh - and if one of your hounds chases my livestock, it will be shot (and I’m a major animal lover - but not at another animal’s expense).
Have you called and made a complaint to DGIF about all of your problems with Hound Hunters. If not I encourage you to do so. Let them come out and investigate your complaints.:lol:
