Baitfish, no offense taken, my friend. Let me explain a little about the sport in our state, and maybe it will help you understand the local's side of the story.
We may be the only state that still allows dog hunting, most never have. The terrain here is unique due to the thick swamps and bays. Many years ago, compared to modern days, the land was undeveloped, roads were few, and deer were also much less numerous. People spent most of their daylight hours trying to make a living from small farms, and the most efficient method of hunting was to use dogs to drive the deer from the thick cover. This has been a tradition in South Carolina ever since, and the hunters enjoy it just as much as fox hunting, raccoons, or anything else where dogs are used. It is as much a social event as it is a need for meat.
We are blessed these days, thanks to game management and outdoor license revenue to have an awful lot of deer, however, the population growth has infringed on their territory, but the influx of out-of-state people and the numbers of people who don't hunt, causes problems, too. They don't want Bambi eating their expensive shrubbery in their overcrowded housing developments, but at the same time they don't want the deer thinned out through hunting practices. They don't understand why when they call DNR about the problem, very little gets done. Trapping and relocating doesn't help either. The farmers are having lots of problems with over-populated deer destroying crops. The actual harvest has fallen in the state, but the deer population continued growing, although it appears to be stabilizing some according to some information I've read.
Large land owners are hesitant to allow dog hunting on their properties due to liability issues caused the some of the things stated in an earlier post, so the dog hunters are slowly running out of large tracts of land to hunt on. Dog hunting isn't a good thing on most small tracts, because the dogs don't know where boundary lines are, which creates more problems with adjoining land owners.
I don't dog hunt any more either, because of the problems mentioned above, but I do realize it is a tradition here, and many people want it to stay.
As an individual, I can harvest more deer annually through still hunting than I ever did when I dog hunted, but I choose to harvest only what I can use or give away to friends, therefore the property that I hunt has too many deer, especially does. I need to thin them out to improve the quality of the herd, but I won't do it unless I can put the meat to use, and I'm working on that.
