It’s funny about turkey hunting. However, when I wrote The Role of Personal Ethics in Hunting , I was wearing my deer hunting hat. Now it is getting on towards turkey season, and I went back and read it again, and I realized there were a lot of things that had reversed themselves in my brain. I do not mean to say what I wrote back in January was wrong. It just does not fit turkey hunting.

In turkey hunting, there is a lot of stuff that gets turned on its head. Deer hunting is a pretty wide-open thing. You go out and try to shoot a deer. Deer are pretty sturdy creatures, but they are not that hard to hunt. They also respond pretty well to regular thinning. Turkey? Turkey are darn near impossible to kill if you follow all the rules.

Before the advent of modern seasons, turkey were a lot easier to kill. You could just walk under a roost before sunup, or put out a pile of feed. They were easy to shoot at a reasonable range with a rifle. The problem was they were too easy to kill. Now they have all these restrictions on how you kill a turkey. Some of them are state law. A lot are just local custom. One of the chief concerns with turkey hunting ethics is knowing the difference. What is so upside down about hunting turkeys is we spot them a bunch of rules to make them deliberately hard to hunt. That right there is kind of goofy when you think about it, but those are the rules and we are bound to live by them.

I would recommend the piece I wrote on deer as a starting place.

The Role of Personal Ethics in Hunting

By comparison turkey hunting is filled with a lot more Thou Shalt Nots. . .

Thall shalt not stalk
Thall shalt not bait
Thall shalt not kill a roosting bird . . .

. . .As you work your way down into the weeds, it gets a little thick.

Thou shalt not use decoys– in some states, it is illegal. In some camps, it is readily confused with Divine Law.
Thou shalt not use a blind — this is not a state proscription– anywhere!. It is just a matter of taste.

In some venues, turkey hunting gets positively Byzantine. I made the mistake one year of crossing the Ohio River into Kentucky with 2X6 Remington duplex loads, only to find they were illegal in that state. Kentucky allows decoys, but not electronic motion decoys. It really helps to read the rules every year. You will be amazed what you find.

. . . then we get to this one: “By calling alone.” The idea here was to keep hunters from stalking each other. If followed to the letter, it would mean that once you heard a gobbler, you would have to sit down and call him to you. That is a bit ridiculous. Some gobblers can be heard well at over a half a mile. However, there is considerable disagreement as to exactly how close you can close. The point here is that, whatever the distance, you should sit your self down and let the gobbler come to you. If you go trying to stalk the gobbler, you will probably fail. More important: this is the situation most likely to produce a mistaken-for-game shooting incident. If you are doing the stalking, you are more likely going to be the shooter than the shootee. You do not want that on your conscience, so sit your butt down and get out that call. That’s it. That’s all that means.

It does not mean you HAVE to call to a turkey. If one jumps out of the weeds and stands there, it is okay to shoot them. It also does not mean that going somewhere turkeys like to go on a frequent basis is a bad way to hunt turkeys. Some call it ambushing and think it is a terrible thing. Other people, like me for one, think it is a perfectly reasonable way to hunt turkeys. We call it woodsmanship.

The question in all this is what is driven by safety, what is driven by Unfair Advantage and what is really just a matter of personal taste? That has to be made clear in your own mind before you start judging your own hunt and especially before you go judging the hunting of others. Turkey hunting muddles this up and turkey hunters themselves do more of the muddling than anyone else.

I have previously opined that I owe my turkeys nothing except a quick death. I’m not inclined to shoot out beyond 40 yards, but that is okay– the turkeys usually do not start to cooperate with me until they get inside 20 yards. However, I know that is mix of terrain and personal taste. I do not use decoys much anymore, but the issue was not ethics as much as the low pay-off I had experienced over the years weighed against all the hassles. If you want to use a decoy, have at it. Just do me a favor and don’t wear your decoy on your head as a hat. I used to have a brain-dead buddy who did this. This is not taste, this is safety. See the difference?

I have heard a lot extreme opinions on what constitutes ethical turkey hunting.
Camo vs. no camo
Facemask vs. bareface
lead vs. hevi
Calling vs. ambush
mouth calls vs. box calls

. . .and almost none of it has anything to do with state law or safety or the health of the turkey population. I have seen people go off the deep end and liken one alleged abomination to sodomy and another to abortion. Adolf Hitler usually enters into these discussions at some point. As a fellow who had a great  uncle who knew Adolf Hitler before he made his big splash, and another great uncle who was a district hunting manager in the Black Forest in those days, I can report that there was never any turkey hunting going on in post-WWI Germany. Adolf Hitler was not a turkey hunter. There is no link between  shooting turkeys from the prone position and the National Socialist movement. None.

Midway Phoenix

What do I really think of all this hoo-haw? Let’s take one example, hunting blinds. I have a pop-up blind that I bought to hunt turkeys and deer when the kids were little. It was great for keeping the little nippers penned in, but that was 10 years ago, and the little nippers are now wearing 2X hunting clothes and one is taller than me. As for the blind? I did not like it, because I always felt hemmed in. I am a big guy and I do not like a roof over my head unless it is raining. My answer?  Try this on for size.

I only use it for turkeys when it is raining. Yes, I have shot birds out of this. It is not my favorite place to hunt turkeys. What is my favorite? My favorite turkey blind is this barn. The hens come in to dust themselves. The gobblers come out to strut in the pasture in front. I like to go there for a mid-morning nap and then pick up my shotgun after the first hens start arriving around Noon. There is probably someone out there busting a blood vessel right about now, but that is okay. I really do not mind.

Where is the truth? Allow me to illustrate with a religious example. I am a member of the Methodist Church. In order to be a member of the Methodist Church, I had to get up in front of the congregation and admit to believing the Apostle’s Creed. The Apostle’s Creed has 12 basic tenets. They are:

1. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth;
2. And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord:
3. who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary,
4. suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried;
5. the third day he rose from the dead
6 he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
7. from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
8. I believe in the Holy Spirit,
9. The holy catholic church,the communion of saints,
10. the forgiveness of sins,
11. the resurrection of the body,
12 and the life everlasting. Amen.

Now, back when I was considering becoming a Methodist minister, I read somewhere that you could take the Apostle’s Creed and selectively agree or disagree with each individual tenet and create 2^ 12 or 4096 different apostacies. Some would be somewhat ridiculous– like agreeing that He died, but was not born. If you throw those out you might get it whittled down to a thousand or so. Still, the point is that in order to be Methodist you had to kind of take this all as a package deal. At the same time, you have to recognize there is a lot of variation in belief in this world. The next guy may not believe all 12 tenets or he may want to cut them up a slightly different way. I’m going easy on y’all here, because the Methodist Church accepts either the Apostle’s Creed or the Nicean Creed, which has a bunch more fine points in it and given the same treatment would yield somewhere north of 256,000 potential apostasies. Most folks opt for the Apostle’s Creed, because it is easier to learn, and gets your confirmation over and done with before your neighbors get bored and go looking for a cup of coffee in the youth hall.You get the idea.

I always did say turkey hunting was like having a second religion, so it makes sense that some of the same rules would apply. If you start setting down your own personal creed and it start getting out past a good dozen statements of true turkey faith, you need to be aware that there are at least a thousand other guys out there that probably don’t believe you should saddle up your gobbler and ride it back to camp or that anything other than a 28 GA double is an unfair advantage. Furthermore, when you go onto online forums, you should expect at least some disagreement.

I’m just saying.

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