bobt said:
On our shoot we always see 3-4 in one spot and another 4 or so in another,
Bobt,
In my opinion they probably are not the same deer. That 3 you see might well be a Doe and two young and next year it maywell be the same doe but 2 new young. during the winter they will form into groups and headonto the fields and be a bit more visible but very often it will be different deer as last years young are expelled into thier own territories.
as for poachers....
they are also committing crimes like burglaries and diesel thefts whilst theyare on you.
Unfortunately there are not the amount of rural police patrols that once there was. We, decent people, are part of our own problem. I speak to many people who have poachers but never report it to the police because they say (often rightly) "nothing gets done, whats the point?"
The police is like everything now, it is demand led. so if there are no calls for service from the rural areas, nothing is happenning. However there are lots of calls for service from the towns from people who report far more minor incidents. They don't feel the same "the bobbies are busy enough....." as many rural people do.
so when it comes to staff planning meetings it is very dificult to deploy 50 % of your staff to the rural areas when only 5% of your crime takes place out there.
So the onus is back on us. When you go out on your ground and you see tyre tracks, phone it in on the non emergency number. When you find heads and feet, phone it in on the non emergency number. But tell the call taker "we have had deer poachers on the ground overnight" not just that there are tracks on my field. --- each type of crime has a searchable classification code. so we need to do our best to make sure it goes into the right code box.
If you have guys lamping (illegally) on your land and you see them call 999. tell the operator if you suspect it is a gang of men with firearms poaching your deer. remember that thier experience of poaching may have been reading Danny Champion of the World.
This way the demand is there and the inspectors can refer to the incident numbers when they bid for more staff.
It will seem like nothing happens, but if it is logged and you get an incident number then you can be sure that it will counted for resource allocation purposes.
swampy