To Bait, Or Not to Bait

This time of year, everyone seems to get their drawers knotted up over whether it's okay to bait for whitetail deer. Some say it's not Fair Chase. Some folks say it's okay. One of the things that's missing here is whether or not hunting over bait is even all that effective. They started letting us hunt over bait a few years ago in Ohio and KY. It's not been a huge success. A study of MI hunters years ago suggested that deer tend to visit bait at night, and not during normal hunting hours.

I've seen field baited with corn cobs, I've seen piles of corn, I've seen feeders. When I hunted in MI, I would see huge piles of pumpkins, carrots, etc. None seemed to get the deer all that worked up. It has never been a miracle hunting method. It may look like a cheat, but it is more of a detriment. Places like TX that have a sincere paucity of browser are a different story. However, if you are trying to compete in a browse-rich environment like the hardwood forests of the Greater Ohio Valley, forget it.

One thing it does do is crowd deer into a small area and make them feed on the same pile of food. That is not a good way to keep down the spread of CWD and other communicable diseases. KY may have blue tongue on the rise. The last thing I want is that spreading in my area.

You can also make the case that bait is far more expensive than food plots and other methods that encourage natural browse to grow. You can probably do a lot better cost-wise by spending your dollars on fertilzer, seed, etc. or doing other things like selective mowing, strip disking or cutting of timber to open up browsable areas in woods.

I'm not going to castigate anyone for hunting over bait, but I don't personally bait and I don't reccomend it.


I don't bait , but I do use salt licks. In many years of salting, I have only seen one deer actually come to salt during season. If I was hunting in July or August, that would be much different. However, by October the salt licks are being visited infrequently. The salt does two things: it gives me a chance to add trace minerals to their diet, and it habituates the deer to a given area. The travel patterns of the does bends a bit, so that they come closer to the area that's salted. When the bucks show up in November, they travel closer to the salt as well.

Does baiting or salting tame deer? No more so than a watering hole tames African game. The deer I've seen are not tame by any stretch of the term. They will either run from you or run around you endlessly snorting to tell you that you stink.

Is it hunting? If a man goes out in the woods with a gun and a bag of carrots and sits on a stump thinking the deer will run him down for his bait, he is a very ignorant hunter. However, the stores are full of various concoctions this time of year that cater to this sort of hunter. In a place like Michigan this time of year, the only thing more readily available than beer and broasted chicken are deer carrots, turnips, and pumpkins. I am sure that MI hunters are heartened when they come to their blind and they see their bait has been worked over. When they get a shot, they attribute it to the bait, when it may be that they got the shot in spite of the bait.

Fair Chase? I do all my fair chase long before season. I scout all year round. Season comes in around Sept 5. In October I start hunting. By then, I've got my deer named. The fair chasing is over, and it's street rules from there on out. I know where they are, I know who they are, I know what they had for dinner-- and they still confound me at every step!

Fair Chase? I'm sorry, guys. To me, Fair Chase came about as an answer to shooting game in a pen. The sad thing about it is that shooting game out of a pen is still going on, and some people still call it hunting. However, with Whitetail Deer in the Greater Ohio Valley, unless you put them in a very small pen, or chain them to the ground you are not going to have all that much of an advantage. That's why I devote my life to my little 200 acre plot, and play this year-round game of chess with my food.