But since I am not a hunter would anybody care to explain to me the restrictions imposed?
I may understand the dog thing, but why having to use buckshot? Why shotguns at all? Plenty of varmint ammo out there.
By Miguel.GFZ
Semi-retired like Vito Corleone before the heart attack. Consiglieri to J.Kb and AWA. I lived in a Gun Control Paradise: It sucked and got people killed. I do believe that Freedom scares the political elites.
Never heard of hunting coyotes with dogs everyone I know uses thermal scopes. I would guess the dogs are to run and tree bobcats like cougars. Don’t know about the buckshot though sorry.
Would the buckshot be for range & not being absolutely certain what’s behind it?
Right. Remember that you are hunting at night, which means that you are guaranteed to be shooting in situations where you are not absolutely confident of what’s distantly beyond the target if you miss. Shotgun-only deer hunting is fairly common in states or counties where there is a patchwork of woods and subdivisions. Fully jacketed ammunition is also generally prohibited for hunting. In fact, if you are hunting in Tennessee, it’s illegal to carry fully jacketed ammunition. It’s also illegal to hunt with pistols after dark.
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What’s interesting is that night and thermal vision are allowed. These are generally disallowed in Tennessee for night hunting.
Coyote hunting is generally for varmint control not sport, so I’d assume that’s why thermal scopes are allowed. Not sure about the dogs though, I wouldn’t have thought the chances of multiple night time hunters in the same area would be high enough that they’d be shooting at each others dogs by mistake.
Thank you everybody for the explanations!
Dogs are traditional for pigs and in Kansas they use Greyhound packs to run down coyotes. There are some videos on yt where they use dogs to bait them in and then shoot the coyotes. The guy that does thos might be in Missouri
In Oklahoma where my family ranch was, coon hunting was popular. We’d have dogs running all over the place yapping all night long. Many a time I’d drive home late from work and see all sorts of people wandering up and down those country roads following dogs and armed to the teeth.
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When I lived in tidewater Virginia, a *lot* of people hunted with dogs. The thing that blew me away was that a lot of the dogs had transponders attached to their collar. I’d see this dog running along the river bank with an antenna sticking up. It was the damndest thing. In Virginia, those dogs had special protection. A hunter can go on your property without permission to retrieve a dog even if you don’t allow people on your property, and fox and coon hunters can follow their dogs across your property without permission — though they can’t do it in a motor vehicle.
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When I first moved to Northumberland County, VA, I remember driving down a local highway. This was daytime. At almost every intersection, there was a guy there with a pickup, a shotgun, and a dog. I started to get worried. I was afraid someone had escaped from the prison in Warsaw, VA. So I stopped and asked one of the guys what was going on. He said this was an annual deer harvesting hunt. All along the the road, people lined up, and then they all walked east to the Chesapeake, driving the deer in front of them. When they reached the Bay, they would have killed hundreds of deer. They harvested it all — sending most of it to food programs in the area. In spite of that huge hunt, there were still lots and lots of deer around the rest of the year. I don’t know if they were not as efficient as they thought or if the deer came in from the surrounding counties.