Private Land, Public Resource
THESE DAYS, you have to knock on a lot of doors in the hopes of getting permission to hunt private land. From absentee landowners to leased ground, the barriers to publicly accessible private lands are high and numerous. And other hunters aren’t doing us any favors. When private lands become locked to previously open public access, it’s often for a good reason that’s hard to argue. Other hunters ruined the resource by littering, trespassing, off-roading, poaching, and otherwise trashing land they were lucky to have access to in the first place. The more I talk to farmers and ranchers about hunting—or read admittedly anecdotal reports about landowners locking up land that was once enrolled in a walk-in or other public-access program—the more I hear how horrible hunters really are. And it’s…