and the animal rights groups scream bloody murder every year when DNREC further opens hunting season and removes even more restrictions from the farmers for getting rid of them.
They may be beautiful - and they are - but they are a royal pain in the you know what!!!!!
Farmers have had a couple of hundred acres of hay ready to mow and bale. A couple of hundred thousand geese fly in the night before and eat all night. The next day just a lot of alfalfa poop and no crop.
A friend and I were got lucky on an antelope draw hunt in one of these counties. The public places had no antelope and some of the ranches had thousands of lopes eating the alfalfa.
So my friend and I went up to one of the farmers and talked to him. He wanted a $100 apiece for hunting privileges. I looked at him and laughed and said that he should pay us. We could miss a lot and drive the herd off of his land.
He let us hunt for free and drove us down to the biggest herd. I let my friend drop one, and I fired a clip into the ground around the dead lope. Suddenly about 500 to 1000 were running around. I found a good sized one and put in a new clip. Dropped it and fired the other four shots into the ground.
By this time all you could see was their white bottoms bounding over the rancher's fence and back onto the desert. The rancher took us over to our lopes, we tagged them. Then threw them on the back of his truck. He then took us to one of his secure barns so we could clean them and hang them.
While we were cleaning them, a fish and game guy came up and checked them out and the tags. Then, he said "You guys fired a lot of shots for two lopes?"
I said, "Yep, we were just two city slickers who couldn't shoot straight.!"
Somehow the farmer, his son, his wife and we kept a straight face. When the F&G drove away we laughed. The wife invited us to a great dinner that night.