BAITING IS NOT A DIRTY WORD
Baiting is a complicated concept in the South, but where legal, is a legitimate and popular deer hunting tool.
Nonhunters may perceive it as merely shooting deer over irresistible treats. Purists disdain it because they consider it corrupt and lazy.
According to an Arkansas Game and Fish Commission survey, 89% of deer hunters in Arkansas bait. I’m one of them. I consider it an art and a science.
Basically, baiting is a means to attract deer to a specific location. It enables us to use remote cameras to inventory the deer that regularly visit baiting stations. In this way, we are able to identify individual does and their offspring, especially yearling bucks that we can follow through their maturity cycle, as well as older bucks.
From years of examining remote photography at baiting sites, I have learned that different deer frequent different baiting sites that might be fairly close together. One group of deer frequent one baiting site. A different group of deer frequent another site 400
