blab-blab -blab.
You can write on and on. It's still chicken-****. You can
rationalize for days but it still ain't hunting. It makes real
hunters look bad and no one with any pride or self esteem would take
part in it.- Hide quoted text -


I've hunted pheasant farms a couple of times in the past. In my very
limited experience a certain number of pen raised birds are released
into the area you are assigned to hunt. The last time I went with a
friend to a pheasant farm over in Idaho, the birds were released into
a brushy creek bottom area about 3/4 of a mile long. The birds were
released about 1/2 hour before we were to start. We could shoot as
many birds as we wanted to pay for, as long we stayed in our assigned
area. I think we payed for the released birds and we payed for any
birds shot over the number of birds released.. Some escape, most sit
tight, some sat so tight the dogs caught them before they attempted to
fly, some move into another hunters area. Pheasant hunting it isn't.
It is a great way to get a young bird dog some training in how to hunt
birds, which is the reason we went to the farm I mentioned in Idaho,
both of the guys I went with were training bird dogs. The only other
time I did the farm raised bird thing was because I was training a
bird dog. I don't think its much different from catch and kill
fishing for stockers.

It looked to me like there were two basic categories of clients for
these farms- folks like my friends who were training dogs for pheasant
hunting (It's not legal to use dogs to chase pheasants around out of
season, so keeping a dog trained over nothing but wild birds is next
to impossible). And then there is the big shot corporate exec that
don't know jack about hunting or guns or dogs who wants a day in the
field. If a guide took his "sport" out in real field conditions,
well, it just wouldn't be pretty.

JH