by Lee Hall

Created on: April 17, 2008

Is hunting animals a legitimate sport? We could leave out hunting and insert a myriad of sports asking the very same question. What defines a sport?

For someone who has hunted since the age of eight I have asked myself that question many times in the last twenty years. I must admit that I too don't find a good reason to hunt but then it has become a matter of economics and location. What we used to do as a means to supplement our larder, now has become a billion-dollar enterprise. Let us look at some of the similarities in many of the sports.

About the owners of the team. Many ranchers have turned from raising beef, hogs, etc., to utilizing their ranch for hunting. It is profitable, you don't have to buy stock, just maintain and limit what is taken while allowing the heard to expand. No vet bills, and little extra feed enhance the desire to convert. The hunter can expect to pay (at least in my neck of the woods) fifteen hundred dollars or more for a season that can last anywhere from five months too just a few weeks depending on the area. You have to provide your own feed, blinds, weapons, ammunition, clothing, transportation, food, drink, and the list goes on. It wouldn't be unheard of to spend roughly three to four hundred dollars before the season begins; you would spend an additional amount for each trip to the hunting sight. There are also the fees to the shooting ranges to sight in your weapon(s). So enticing a patron to spend a hundred, even thousands, just to come visit and play; sounds an awful lot like any sports franchise.

Checking out the competition. You trod more than five hundred, a thousand if your lucky, acres and become intimately familiar with the terrain. You scope out possible sites for blinds, feeding habits, watering holes, buck scrapes. You lay awake planning how, when, and where you will have to be in order to just catch a sight of that buck. You will spend hours before the season, if allowed, to watch for your buck. The owner put restrictions on how many, which types, and the size of the buck that you are allowed to kill. I know of one rancher that is over run with deer, but a minimum of eight points and a twenty-inch spread is the only type of buck you are permitted to shoot. Much like fish you have the small ones which can be culled, and the very large ones can be taken while the mid size breeders have to be left to continue to expand the population. How many times have you heard about some head hunter going to games to find a possible

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