While the spring turkey hunting season is already over or will be soon just about everywhere in these United States, it’s never too late for a reminder about what’s right.
Let’s just cut to the chase: It’s easy to bait and kill turkeys.
For all of their guarded and finely honed survival instincts, the wild turkey is a sucker for about any kind of grain you dump out on the ground. If you think about it a little, it just makes sense.
Most wild animals spend a lot of their time just roaming around, looking for food. When turkeys get on a steady food source like a feeder, they quickly get dependent on it and will visit it most every day. The unscrupulous hunter simply has to set up near the bait site and shoot whatever turkey he wants that comes to the feed.
People have been baiting turkeys since before the Civil War, so it’s not something new. Back in the day, before game laws were an issue, it was probably quite common and most people thought nothing of it. It was just a good way to put roast turkey on the table, and this is one of several reasons after we went into the 1900s, the eastern wild turkey disappeared from much of its range this side of the Big Muddy. Market hunting and habitat destruction were big factors, and for a while it seemed like the eastern turkey may even become extinct.