One often sees references to "cull hunts" here. A lot of hunters, mostly those that are also very good marksmen, wish to go on a "cull hunt". It is quite impossible to go on a "cull hunt", but a "cull shoot" is another story!

But can you, who wants to go on such a cull shoot, really handle and face all the blood & gore? Think of the pile of guts created on this one night! Think of the heap of heads!






Try estimating the amount of lower legs cut off and disposed of. Being involved in such a cull shoot is not everyone's cup of tea at all!

But be assured that it really IS something to experience! Anyone interested in being involved in such a shoot, or a scaled down, or even very scaled down, version of what is shown here, can contact me at andrew@mclarensafaris.com

In good hunting.

Andrew McLaren

Andrew,

If possible, can you quantify a"cull hunt" vs a "cull shoot"?

How many animals in a cull hunt? How many in a cull shoot"?

Some folk consider culling as just plain killing. I understand a cull hunt as hunting for less than trophy game; the hunter still walks & stalks, no ethically questionable (per individual hunter) hunting methods. It is used as a means of: propagating higher quality game animals & controlling game numbers that can be sustained by the land. Sounds like conservation!

I am not sure if this is in response to a "cull hunt" I posted but I will reply. (It is on the outfitters offered hunts)
My cull hunts are just that. It is a hunt. I need to cull some of my herd. You are the only one on my ranch. All animals shot or wounded are followed up. My staff do all of the meat processing. You can take any of the skins you want if you pay for the taxidermy and fees.
No shooting on my ranch is allowed from the vehicle. You can use blinds, or stalk the animals. Often the animals are confused and allow a second or third shot, especially if you are hidden and shoot well. There is no difference from a trophy hunt. You must select your trophy carefully as there is a big trophy fee if you shoot a trophy.
It is a chance to improve your hunting skills and marksmanship. All animals are harvested and processed the same as they would be on a trophy hunt. Typical hunters shoot 25+ in 7 days.
As the owner of the property I must manage the herd. We are having a dry spell and I want the new young to be well nourished. To do that I need to reduce the herds so adequate forage is available for the next generation. I think using hunters to do this is the proper approach.
Camshaft

Boltshooter
What Camshaft is offering is the opportunity to go out on his property as you would on any hunt and hunt animals, the difference being that you don't have a limit on what you shoot other than the species and age. In this way if you are presented with more than one target fitting the profile you are able to take it. This is a vital part of the game management process and shows that effective management is being practiced on the property.

With a culling operation where a team comes in and shoots, like in the picture posted by Andrew, this is not a hunt at all but as mentioned a shoot. The goal is to shoot as many animals as quickly as possible and get them back and loaded in the meat trucks. This is conducted normally at night and from the shooting bench on a pickup. It is not hunting but it does require good shooting skills and provides for some enjoyable challenges in managing your abilities as a shot.
Having taken part in both forms of the cull I can honestly say that each has its merits, and to the conservationist each is equally enjoyable.

Andrew, to put forth my opinion on those that would find it distasteful, I would guess that they are generally the "trophy hunters" who have never hunted for food or as has been the case with people I have met, have never gone further than pulling the trigger and posing for the photo.
If you are one of the guys who has hunted for the pot and skinned and gutted an animal then one head is no more disturbing than 30 or 300. When you realize that you are performing a vital duty as a conservationist I think it is something to be proud of.

Camshaft, I think it is a great idea to offer these hunts to foreign hunters. They get to experience the country, burn some powder and take part in what is a very exciting event.
Good luck and I hope it goes well.

Ian

Camshaft
I just saw the pictures of your ranch. Now I can honestly say that anyone not considering what you have offered is a fool at those prices. It looks fantastic there. You have the all the benefits of the open plains on one side and the rolling bush veld on the other and all within the same property. Its like combining the Freestate and Limpopo into one hunt.
Good luck
Ian

Cam,

My posting was triggered by receiving the photo e-mailed by a friend, and it was made without knowing about your offer for a cull hunt.

For the record, I did thereafter read your offer, and it can be considered as the second best offer ever made in that particular forum. [The best being the Free Hunt offered by myself some months ago! ]. Even from the original posting, and as further elaborated above, you are offering a 'multiple animal HUNT, and I would not call that a 'shoot' at all! I can only wish you the best of luck and hope that you get a few very good shots, like ChetNC is, to make sure that most of the shots taken at your excess game results in DRT carcasses!

As boltshooter remarked: This is true hunting, but for numbers of animals, rather than for trophy size.

Just to set all minds at ease that my posting was not intended to stir any pot: I do myself do 'cull hunts' with my clients. Younger males and females are hunted in an ethical manner; but the main objective is to reduce numbers, and get a more balanced male/female ratio in some herds.

The posted photo was taken after a large number of springbuck were shot at night. Not hunted, just shot! Now I agree wit the saying that; "Ethics are in the eye of the beholder". Personally I can never equate or call the shooting of hundreds of animals at night with the aid of a spotlight 'hunting' at all.

If the management situation of a fenced game area requires that a large number of animals need to be shot, like in the photo, the stress caused by daytime cull hunting, such as offered by camshaft, will very adversely affect the herd. As camshaft indicated, typical daytime hunters miss just about as often as they hit. The herd would soon be so skittish that even a very good hunter will not succeed in harvesting more than a few animals in a day. That may be fine for the hunter, but the game owner needs to cull a few hundred! That would take hundred days of every-day hunting to accomplish that by cull hunters. Simply not good enough! Then the only logical alternative is to shoot them at night with the aid of a spotlight. In South Africa such teams are generally called “harvest teams” and game owners speak of “harvesting their game”.

Such cull shooting, of which I have done my share, is generally cold, very cold and hard work that requires good a team of shooter, driver, light-operator and pick-uppers that function as a unit to achieve the number of cleanly head-shot carcasses that makes the cull economical. It could be very rewarding financially; for the game owner, the actual cull-shooter and the export abattoir to which the cleaned carcasses are generally sold. For the cull shooter it could also result in a damaged vehicle; mostly from tire-cuts and rock damage to springs, shocks and underside of vehicles.

In good hunting.

Andrew McLaren

Vlam,
Thanks for the comments.
Your comments on the cull hunt as opposed to a cull shoot are spot on.
This is a hunt in all aspects of the word.
Camshaft

As a one time hunter to Africa (regretfully) I heard about cull hunts in my one month stay. The cull hunt was for elephant (no, not me) and my own PH had been doing cull shooting. (BTW, using a cartridge you might guess from my user name) This was at a time when the US media was full of stories about the "endangered" elephants. (On the very day I arrived in Africa and staying overnight in Johannesburg, I found myself reading a story in a local newspaper in my hotel room that the Zimbabwe Ministry of Parks and Game (maybe the name has changed since)was awarding contracts to contract hunters to cull elephants -then reported at some 85,000 (as I remember- I certainly saw an awful lot of "mzou" {hope I remember the word correctly} thereafter -and not even hunting for them) I have a bad feeling that cull hunts will be over before too long in Africa -except to wipe out some lonely critter that kills an occasional cow or a few mzou that go tramping through a cornfield. Gee! Ain't progress grand?

quote:

Some folk consider culling as just plain killing. I understand a cull hunt as hunting for less than trophy game; the hunter still walks & stalks, no ethically questionable (per individual hunter) hunting methods.

all plains game culling i have done has been at night with a spotlight from a vehicle , we were set a quota and were paiud accordingly , in the cae of impala it was 100 per night per team and three teams out at a time , in the case of wildebeeste it was 25 etc etc ...in south africa many springbok culls are done with helicopters and i have been involved in blesbok culling whjer they had been driven into a boma beforehand and we killed them with .22 magnums in the boma .

elephanst are (when culled correctly) done with spotter planes and radios ..

hippo culling is done by building a tower at night in the main ppol and then sleeping there , when daylight breaks and the pod is in the pool , the group is culled .

culling is population reduction , the methods chosen are the most efficient and humane methods possible and usually could not be called hunting . this i see as very different to management hunts which is the elimination of sub standard trophies and some excess breeding stock on a relatively limited scale .

i agree with andrew there is no such thing as a cull hunt.

In a true cull hunt (shoot) shouldn't a certain percentage of each animal classification be taken? For eaxample (and the numbers are simply random), 50% female, 40% young/immature young males, and 10% mature males. Or, do you classify trophy hunted males to be a percentage of the cull; therefore, no others need to be taken? And, I understand the want/need to leave those trophy males during the culling to be taken at a later date as a trophy with an attached trophy fee.

Here is how I manage it for my ranch:
I engage a professional game manager to help me do a complete count of all my animals every year. This is the only way to truly manage a herd in a closed property. My property is 10,000 acres and it takes 2 days to do the count.
We then set quotas for each species, both male and female. Most hunters want to only shoot trophy males so I wait until the end of the season and then try to bring down the overall number of animals on the property to a management agreed on level before the young are born. For example this year I needed to reduce my blesbuck herd by over 100 animals. If hunters do not achieve the desired levels I will bring in shooters to go at night and achieve the same results, but I do not sell those hunts. They are paid shooters.
You can see almost all of the above comments fit in here some place.
Hope that makes sense.
Camshaft

A cull shoot would be right up my alley. I like volume shooting. Prarie dogs, squirrel,etc. The gore isn't that bad, one or ten. I just would hope I didn't have to clean ALL of them! Not that I am any fan of Joseph Stalin, but when it comes to game, I like the quote he made regarding the T-34 tank when they were rolling off of the assembly line and lookded as rough as pig-iron, he said,"Quantity has a quality all its own"

Well, Stalin is also credited with the observation that"one death is a crime; one thousand is a statistic.", or something to that effect. I too, would consider culling as a shoot rather than a hunt, something akin to slaughtering animals at an abattoir.

email sent to you Andrew.

camshaft....You have a FANTASTIC PRICE and SUPERB OFFER!!!!

I am all for this type of hunting as well!!!!

To me a cull 'hunt' is a selective pursuit of certain types of critters. A cull shoot is whacking just about everything encountered. I have done both.
In the outback of Australia we shot every donkey encountered and they wanted the entire mob taken out so not to leave any 'half hunted' smarter ones behind. By actual count our 'record' was 67 donkeys in one group. The shooting went on for nearly 1/2 hour. Our two-man tally was 606 donkeys in 4 1/2 days. On an island in Hawaii we shot every pig and gone wild sheep encountered and the body count ran into the 100's. Those were simply 'shoots'.

In Africa we went out to take out x number of a certain species of a certain type for meat purpose. Neat shooting was a requirement. The commercial meat harvesting as depicted in the photo at the beginning of this thread is a very professional operation requiring professional level shooters.

Bryan Chick:

I am with you in those sentiments -but be prepared for a lot of "hunters" who don't agree with you.

quote:

Originally posted by Bryan Chick:
Well, Stalin is also credited with the observation that"one death is a crime; one thousand is a statistic.", or something to that effect. I too, would consider culling as a shoot rather than a hunt, something akin to slaughtering animals at an abattoir.

quote:

Originally posted by Gerrypeters375:
Bryan Chick:

I am with you in those sentiments -but be prepared for a lot of "hunters" who don't agree with you.

It all depends, I guess.

When a state has an overabundance of whitetail deer, often the first thing they do is establish liberal doe limits. One buck per season, but one doe per day.

Is that a cull hunt or shoot?

Either end of the hunting ethic spectrum is pretty easy to identify. The closer you get ot the middle, the mudder the water.

Culling is not hunting, it's the outdoors version of a slaughterhouse. The game has no dignity in death, and no meaning to the executioner behind the rifle. We place value on things in an exact inverse proportion to the effort required to acquire them. The reason we have to have game laws and seasons is due to the inordinate numbers of poor white (and other colors) trash allowed to not only exist, but reproduce in this country and the rest of the world.


Rich

quote:

Culling is not hunting, it's the outdoors version of a slaughterhouse. The game has no dignity in death, and no meaning to the executioner behind the rifle. We place value on things in an exact inverse proportion to the effort required to acquire them.

I have culled donkeys as discribed above by Matt Norman and I can tell you there is or was little or no dignity in life for those animals. Many of the ones we checked close up were wormy, infected, under nourished etc. The distruction they wrought on the land was worse.

The dignity came in the form of a swift and thourough death and the "meaning" (purpose and satisfaction) for the executioner was defined by this swift and exacting measure.

As to the exact proportion of effort required, Sustaining rapid, high volume and exacting fire, with high powered rifles, in high temperatures in diverse and spontanious enviroments can be quite inverse to the degree of effort expended on a variety of "Trophy Hunts"

For me; Shooting vs Hunting is symantics much the same as culling or harvesting.

Your friend afield
Mike O

PS: Camshaft please send me a link to your posting at it sounds like a great opertunity

http://forums.accuratereloadin...2100588/m/1881075611

Hunting Forums under outfitters offered hunts here on AR

Camshaft

madabula,

did you take lots of pictures to show your friends what a "quality experience" you had and look at having the hides tanned and a head mount or two made? My younger brother worked as a floor mechanic at a slaughterhouse for a year. He got sick of the smell and quit. The difference here is that you are out of doors, and some sorry money-grubbing a--hole wants you to pay him for the experience.

Rich

Culling is an absolute necessity in some situations in different parts of the world. Perhaps not so often in North America. If there is an over-abundance of say, antelope in the Four Corners/Mule Creek Junction area of eastern Wyoming, then the Game & Fish releases a bunch of cheap doe/fawn tags and hunters pay to shoot some extra critters.

But if some million acre stations in the Outback of Australia have 30K plus donkeys to get rid of, plus they really muck up waterholes and the cattle gathering process, they have a cull. The donkeys have no predators, are an introduced species, reproduce 1/3rd their numbers per year, and there is nobody that wants to eat them and no market for their meat. Plus the Aussie gubmint tells the land leasee get rid of them or we'll come in with helicopter gunships and take them out and send you the bill. What are you going to do? How about find some blokes that will pay to come shoot them, kind of like 400-pound prarrie dogs. That's a cull shoot.

Or the Namibian rancher that has about 200 excess to need gemsbok (or springbok). He's had as many trapped/captured and sold off at game auction as he can. But he still has a bunch of broken horn/lesser critters left that won't draw much attention at auction. So he opts to let paying hunters whack an extra five or six (very selected) of them each and sell/trade the meat to the local meat shop. You are stalking and shooting a selected critter and neat shooting is mandatory. That's cull hunting.

Unless you've done it or at least see the big picture, don't get on your high horse and talk bad about it. That I've opted to pay to do it (cull shooting and cull hunting) does NOT make me any less of a trophy hunter also. I have my record book stuff too.

i agree with matt norman cull hunting/shooting in some areas is a absolute must in some areas with out game populations would skyrocket and it would have a terrible impact on other native speices.

Maybe I'm misreading the posters but this thread seems to be turning into a circular firing squad of hunters. I always thought that the prime purpose of cull shooting was to reduce populations of animals within a given area in order to allow for a healthy general population -because, otherwise animals would begin to starve and also result in a general stunting of the whole group. BTW, doesn't cull shooting prove an argument for sport hunters that sport hunting never wiped out any game population?

Rich:

I did take some photos but it is hard to capture the challenges of a 565 yard shot so I settled for the vastness of the country, the dry bare earth overgrazed pans, the newly developed savanna areas where every tree was dead having had the bark stripped off. I also took a few of the herds.

I even wrote a couple articles about it!

pest control down under style part 1

pest control down under part 2

A lot can be said about the fellow I hunted with but I did not find A-hole to be a major one of his many notable characteristics! And having been there I beleive it is safe to say the cost would have been far more had I opted to do it on my own if you consider time as even a small factor in the equasion!

I've also spent a good number of days in Argentina culling/harvesting or just plain shooting doves. And spend a week or so each summer taking some kids on their first prairie dog safari. (Yes it is quite an "adventure" for a young lad from the east!)

None of these are anything like the stalk I made last week on a Big Buck Muley up in Alberta but all ended up with animals dead, me proud of my shot or shots, and great experences and fond memories of some time outdoors!


Best regards

Mike O

I think somebody forgot to take their meds today. Culling is necessary for the preservation of the animals being hunted. The herds uf you will can not be sustained at the current population levels. So you take out enought to get back to the desred carrying capacity of the area involved. It prevents over grazing. It benefits theentire ecosystem in this regard. The animals that are left will be stronger and healthier. There will be less disease and problems from malnutrition. Culling is also used to keep popultions in check where there are no ornot enough predators to keep the population in check. It can also be used to totally eliminate an alien species introduced accidently or intentionaly into a system. Lots of reasons to cull and just as many tpes of culls. Some require precision shooting. Some require hunting in all of the traditional sense. Some are a shoot but require lots of sustained shooting over the course of days. Last there is just plain killing for meat production or any of the aforementioned reasons. Still necessary and for the greater good. Still requires precision shooting. I have been on many culls where the animals are just left to rot. why? The animals still have to be taken out. There is either no market or no viable way to get them to market. The local population can only use so many. Even the donkeys in Australia show this. You are not going to take the time, effort and expense to transport the meat. If it costs you $10.00 per animal to do it and you can only get $2.00 per animal what makes sense? Large numbers of animals, high cost. why not get someone to pay to shoot and improve the cash flow. Take out what is needed and not go bankrupt. I have culled everything from camels to deer. Deer populations in parks outgrow the carrying capacity so sharpshooters are brought in. Look at what is going on in Kruger right now with the elephant population. The overpopulation is destroying the habitat for every plant and animal there. The park has exceeded its carrying capacity several times over. Needs to be culled. Do you spend many thousands of dollars to pay someone to do it? Or perhaps you get someone to be in charge and get some folks to pay to participate and actually make money to put back into te park? Now elephants are an extreme example. Elephant culling is not like culling other animals. In that regards it was probably a poor example. I just used that to show the extremes of what goes on.

I almost forgot 2 more things after my little disertation.
I dont know who might have had a bad experience but I have not dealt with any Aholes offering cull hunts. All have been top notch. Lots of trigger time for less than a trophy hunt. serves a needed function as well.

Slaughter? Yep! Absolutely is but that is the idea here. Need to get to the end result.