'Fair chase' makes a better hunt

This article was first published in my email newsletter in July of 2024. I've added it to my website, because I think the information is useful in general, not just for the month it was published. If you'd like to keep up with the latest hunting information, including my open dates and available hunts, you can subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of this page.

In my last newsletter, I talked about the ranches I hunt, and I mentioned that my ranches are ‘fair chase’ ranches. I promised that I’d write more about fair chase, and that’s what I’m going to do here.

I’m going to explain fair chase: what it is, where it comes from, and what it means to you as a hunter.

The key thing I can tell you is that fair chase hunting is ‘real’ hunting, and real hunting is the kind of experience that I always aim to deliver.

Keep in mind, I can also provide hunts for beginners or for hunters who have physical limitations — after all, my hunts are custom; they’re designed around the experience you want — but my default hunts are ones that depend on your skills and capabilities as a hunter.

WHAT MAKES A FAIR CHASE HUNT

I can define a ‘fair chase’ hunt by saying that it meets all these criteria:

It’s free range. We don’t hunt animals in a pen. They’ve got the opportunity to escape and evade us. My ranches vary in size, but the smallest one is 3,600 acres, and that’s all open space. I don’t take you to a big ranch and then make you hunt in a 500 acre pen.

The animals are native. When we hunt on a ranch, we’re hunting animals that were born there, herds that go back multiple generations. They’ve been there for eighty or ninety years. They know the land, and they haven’t been pen-raised somewhere, gotten accustomed to humans, and then released on a ranch they don’t know.

We use spot and stalk. I can always set up an easier hunt for a beginner or for a hunter with physical limitations. But other than that — except for Texas whitetail — my hunts don’t use feeding stations and blinds. We find the game where it lives, and then we use good hunting techniques to stalk them and get close enough for a good shot. (It’s different for Texas whitetail, which are traditionally hunted from blinds here in Texas. For a spot and stalk experience with whitetail, I organize Carmen Mountain whitetail hunts in Mexico.)

We don’t use anything that gives us an artificial advantage. We don’t chase in a truck, we don’t use spotters in airplanes. We hunt using traditional spot and stalk methods. Admittedly, our rifles and optical gear (and our boots and sunscreen) are a lot better than what hunters used two hundred years ago, but that’s it. We depend on skill and experience, not technology.

WHERE FAIR CHASE COMES FROM

Fair chase, believe it or not, traces back to Teddy Roosevelt.

As you probably know, Teddy Roosevelt was both a hunter and an early conservationist. As a president and conservationist, he established national parks, national forests, game preserves, national monuments, and the National Park Service. As a hunter, he co-founded the Boone and Crockett Club. You might know Boone and Crockett today for its big game scoring system, but back in Roosevelt’s day, it defined the concept of ‘fair chase’ and has promoted it ever since.

Roosevelt and other hunters like him were concerned that unfair hunting methods were driving game animals to extinction, and that those methods were pushing those animals out of land that was accessible to most hunters. They introduced the concepts of conservation and fair chase so that animal populations could be stabilized, could reproduce themselves, and would be there for the next generation of hunters.

BOTTOM LINE

Fair chase has a history that ties closely into conservation. But from my perspective, it hits closer to home and to my day-to-day experience. I love hunting for the outdoors, for the comradeship, and — most importantly — for the way it challenges and rewards my skill as a hunter.

And that’s what fair chase does.

As I’ve said before, my aim is to give you a ‘real’ hunting experience, and fair chase is part of that.