Quote from: Woodsman4God on January 08, 2012, 08:48:30 AM
If you aren't getting the opportunities you are looking for you have failed at some part of the hunting process.
Sometimes achieving success means realizing that an area doesn't have the caliber of animals you are looking for and concentrating your efforts on securing new ground elsewhere.
If you're going multiple years between tagging the quality of longbeards or bucks you're looking for, harsh reality is that a failure occurred somewhere in the process.
[/quote]
The point that alot of people on here seem to miss because they have more options for quality deer or turkey is that some areas just dont produce "quality" deer or turkey as well as others because of habitat and PRESSURE. a quality deer where I hunt and across most of Michigan on public land is 2 1/2 years old. Buck or Doe.
Not being able to devote alot of time because of having a family to raise is somehow being unprepared? As for the oppurtunities I am looking for is to fill my freezer and has little to do with racks and beards.
I've met alot of goood hunters on here that cant travel all over the place to kill birds who are relegated to hunting in one state for minimal days who do as much as they can to prepare and still get skunked at times. Getting skunked or not getting a shot doesnt always mean failure to prepare, one of the guys on our team in the turkey contest last year put in a ton of time trying to get his bird and it just didnt work out, doesnt mean he wasnt prepared.
[/quote]
You asked the question, not I. Asking such a question is soliciting a response and that doesn't guarantee that you will like what you hear.
I never questioned who you or anyone else is as a person or a family man. That has nothing to do with the hypothetical scenario you posed.
Furthermore, you never stated that you were just out there to fill your freezer. Your question created the impression that you, or the hunter in it, has some type of standard that supersedes meat hunting.
If the hunter was just hunting for sustenance, of course he would shoot the animal with little regard to its maturity.
However, if the hunter was a trophy hunter, or hunter with some type of personal standard for judging an animal, then yes, he has in fact failed. He did not achieve the goal to shoot his desired animal.
Lifestyles are a choice. Family obligations are a choice. Hobbies are a choice. Additional miscellaneous responsibilities are a choice. Educational opportunities are a choice.
The way I see it, we all make choices and we all go into the woods with aspirations and goals, which should be established based on the locality in which you are hunting (not all areas have 140" deer, and not all areas have a lot of 3 year old gobblers; I'm well aware of this). However, If you conclude a season without achieving them, you have failed and I maintain that the best way to prevent that from recurring is from admitting failure and identifying why it happened.
And once again, since puregold seemed to interpret my post as a personal attack, I'll highlight that this question is in the context of hunting and there is nothing personal in saying, "you failed." We have all failed and will continue to do so. The value in failure is learning from it; not in denying and personalizing it.
I, clearly, have a different perspective on failure and success.
