Remember, these suggestions are to keep people from stealing food off your table. Make no mistake about it, poachers are criminal deviants that are coming into your house and stealing money out of your kid’s college fund. If selling Kentucky deer hunts is what you do to help pay the bills, then this person is a terrorist. I’d much rather be engaged in a gun fight then have someone sneak into my bank account and steal my money. With that said, I don’t have an issue with a poorer family shooting the occasional doe to put meet in the freezer. It’s when these idiots who thinks shooting big horns is a trophy out of the window of their truck. It’s the same as going to the store and buying yourself a bowling trophy. What losers!
#1) The best tactic to keep your trophy Kentucky whitetail hunts safe from these thieves is to take a chainsaw and cut down lines of big trees making it impossible for common paths to come into your property. I had this problem because land used to be cheaper and Kentucky deer hunts weren’t really seen as something valuable for many years, so trespassing and in fact, simple permission was given to almost anyone. People going across your property to get from A to B just wasn’t a big deal 50 years ago.
#2) It doesn’t hurt to put those ugly and cheap trespassing signs at common entry points.
#3) I hang one of my old military outfits on a trees or on a gate pole. It get’s nailed right to the post. The message of course is I’m crazy, have PTSD and will kill you if you come onto my property. If you want to gamble with that, go ahead and roll the dice.
#4) Set up a few cameras and set up some bait for these criminals. I’ve done it and caught people on camera. I then blow their photos up, put in on a billboard at the road with the title “Thief Caught on Camera”. It sends the message to everyone else to go ahead and try.
#5) I like to put a chain across my entry with a lock on it, but I leave the chain draped on the ground across the driveway. It gives the allusion someone is present instead of advertising that someone is gone.
#6) Fake cameras are ok for a small-time deterrent. The hard-care Kentucky deer poachers will probably only shoot at them.
#7) It’s always fun to buy those signs that say, “We don’t dial 911”.
#8) The only way to enter my property from a road is a long driveway. If you can create pinch points, then at least these terrorists will have to be committed to breaking the law and hurting you.
#9) If you have a back entrance with a gait as I do, I like to spray chemical and kill all the grass up to the gate so it seems like I’m always using the property.
I can never suggest to hammer 3 inches nails into a 2X8, turn it nail side up and burry it in the ground. Any sort of intentional acts to put someone in danger puts you criminally and civilly liable for all injuries that occurring on your Kentucky deer hunting property. Realistically, any efforts like that you make to “get even” with these terrorists ultimately come back on you; you’re the one that hit and fall into these traps designed to deflate 4-wheeler tires.