Because it is the easiest way to draw deer into your property to get the desired result. Not all properties are equal, some the carrying capacity to hold deer is almost nill. So if I add 50 pounds of shell corn I might get to bloody my knife.

Actually if you must know, I'm a terrible hunter

I love this topic, to me it is so simple, baiting is not needed in MN. We get over 100 days to bow hunt, 9-16 days of rifle,shotgun,muzzleloader, another 16 days of Muzzleloader hunting, they have to survive cars,trucks,semi's. Winter is always an ace up the sleeve, we are so do for a bad one, wolves, poaching, fawn mortality, unknown causes, my grandpa's haying equipment have gotten a few, and roughly 1/3 of all of our deer are recycled each season. I think Minnesota is doing fine, about 1 out of 3 tag a deer every year, those are pretty decent odds. If we all got a deer within 2 seasons better check my math but they would all be dead. Is there about 550,000 rifle season hunters ? Roughly 50,000 bow hunters, same about maybe more now for muzzleloader season with rifle hunters able to buy a musket tag if unsuccessful Times 2 just rifle hunters and you get 1.1 million and we have about 1.1 million animals in MN. Of course does would have fawns but I think we better be careful what we wish for, we decimate the herd too much with a nasty winter and ...........oh boy. Sure this is hypothetical, but we better leave well enough alone. When I uncork a bottle of wine grandma comes runnin, when I feed the cows they come a runnin, when some people bait deer they come a runnin, we have enough things helping the average hunter nowaday, lets leave a deer's stomach out of it and show other legal baiting states that we are trying to cling to some form of ethical hunting, if you are a baiter I would guess you cheat at checkers or cards or whatever you can scam away with, it's just the nature of the beast, to illegal MN baiters I bet your deer are wondering hey, what happened to the corn that was surfacing in my woods, now I have to travel great distances to fill my tummy in the cold woods, thanks a lot, and hey why are these gut piles so close to where you used to feed us ? Couldn't you have the decency to drag us off a ways further from the pile ? LOL, Take care all and shoot that smoke pole straight, new forum but I saw a musket hunter coming out to the road and I thought what he just unclipped a scope off his gun, how many are doing that ? How accurate is that gun doing that ?

Nice post Musky I feel the same way, legalized baiting would only make things worse. I think most of us agree that baiting is not what we want in our state. Some people like to blur the lines between baiting and food plots so part of this thread went in a different direction but I am very happy to know baiting is illegal here and they are starting to crack down on it.

I think a little to has to do with urban sprawl and rural sprawl. In 1983 we hunted many areas, now some of these are homes, black top and asphalt. We all have areas we used to hunt that are no longer huntable, the old school dairy farms many have been busted up into smaller parcels for hunting mainly, everyone is more clustered together and we have 5.2 million people now in our state, wisc. has 5.6, N.Dakota 640,000, S.Dakota has 800,000, Iowa has 3 million people. Now a lot of us have lost grandparents that taught us the ropes and they are being replaced with people that didn't grow up with hunting being the most important time of the year. Of course this isn't true for everyone. Like a deer in 10 feet of snow, they will travel the easiest path, same with some hunters, in our high speed fast easy free world, they want to travel the easiest path and that is called baiting. Forget everything else that goes into hunting, scouting, weather, pruning shooting lanes, setting up an extra stand because once pressured you catch glimpses of deer in the super thick cover, analyzing the section you hunt in for where the likely food source(s) will be once November hits, wind direction and how to approach your stand, analyzing rubs,scrapes,trails, every little trick you can use to increase your chances of success, when I used to hand feed deer at the walker deer park as soon as I turned the crank for corn the animals came a runnin, good luck musket guys !

To answer the original question, baiting is illegal because of an arbitrary line drawn in the sand by lawmakers and the DNR.

In Minnesota, you can chop out an acre in the middle of a pine forest, plant corn and put up a fence around it. You can remove the fence a week or two before the season begins and legally hunt over it. But, if you pick a couple ears and take it 100 yards away and drop it on the ground, you're baiting.

IMHO, "hunting" is different for everyone. What is ethical to some, may not be to others. Laws should be grounded in sound biological practices with an emphasis on managing the resource, not dictating ethics. As long as recreational feeding of deer is legal,it's hard to push the idea that baiting for a couple weeks is harming the resource.

Further, I don't think anyone sitting in an enclosed heated stand, over a 1 acre plot of turnips and rapeseed should be pointing fingers at anyone. If the state is not going to legalize baiting, it should be treated as a nuisance with a small fine, not hundreds of bucks and the loss of a thousand dollar rifle.

exactly my point peatmoss. The guys who sit in elevated insulated and heated box stands are at a big time advantage to those who hang from a tree in their stand like myself when its frigid out. but they spent the time and money on them, so so be it. just like i spend the time and money on food plots. seems like a lot of people on this thread are ripping guys like myself apart limb by limb for having food plots out there. probably the same ones watching tv, making soup and coffee, or reading a magazine in their heated stand until they have to open a window to take a shot.

Well stated peatmoss.

My 75 year old brother uses a heated stand. No TV, and usually only on days like the windy opener this year, or when it is 25 or colder. Does that make him a bad hunter?? In my opinion, only warmer. We have yet to see a deer during the season near the food plots, and they are set up along trails between the woods. 12 deer there all summer long, and then only one even close to the food plot when the season opened. It could be that there are years when some hunters just are not supposed to see deer. Baiting is illegal, just like driving 80 mph is. Some will do it, just because they can.
Does that make it right, not really, but they will get away with it, for awhile.
The next question should be...how much bait would you put down if it was legal??? 10 bushels, a dump truck full?? What if the neighbor puts down oats, do you put down apples and corn?

I'm sure it will never be legal to bait here in MN again but if it were I am sure also that there would be restrictions placed concerning the amount of bait that can be used. So the answer to the above question would be, the most allowed by law.


So, is the answer to the original posters question that baiting works too well and therefore too many deer would then be shot? I could live with that answer.

That is the answer Dave, especially if allowed for bow,gun,musket seasons. Baiting would get ugly and so would the slaughter, especially during a colder than average gun/musket season where they would really be on the pile. Here's all the proof I needed. Neighbors 160 acres, 80 is standing irrigated corn, 80 is woods/willow/swamp. I can rifle/musket hunt the land alone and have for 10 years. A group of 4 guys bow hunt till rifle and then again inbetween and after the musket season. I took a different route from my lone ladder stand in the swamp to look for buck sign around Oct. 15th, found 3 of the bow stands and 10-15 yards from each was about 50 pounds of shell corn within about 50-100 yards from the standing corn field. I thought I'm thankful there were no gut piles. Uptown I saw the one guys wife, I said how are the guys doing bowhunting ? She said excellent like the past few years, she said they have got 9 so far with 11 tags to go, I am aware they have taken more off the corn piles as I saw them 4 wheelering out another deer just after rifle season and how many have they shot so far on the bait ? 10 for sure and maybe more and I bet their rifle stands 10 miles away on their own property are baited as well. Now why did so many deer go to the bait piles over irrigated standing corn ? I guess that's the question at hand. What stunk is my conscience wouldn't let me hunt that baited land so I went elsewhere this year. These baiters are extremely prominent citizens in our community and reveered bow hunters, what do ya do ?

Why no gut piles, they don't want to attract any attention to where they are baiting, they drag them to the gravel road with 4 wheelers and gut them in their closed down garage doors and dump the goods later. These are people that own a meat company, why would they want that many deer ?

Which leads into some would bait for the shooting part of it and others for the meat. It's hard to speculate but I think baiting would still benefit the have's and have nots. If you have quality land with a good deer carrying capacity you'd just be hogging up the deer anyway and they'd travel less off your property to others with average land meaning you know how good some woods look until the leaves fall off, then it's too thin to hold deer. The have's could really control deer movement even more with bait. My previous bow story really opened my eyes to what baiting can do even with a prime standing corn field so close, yet the deer chose the already shelled variety.

Makes perfect sense.....

Less digestion = less energy used!

I'am still hearing about people around my property baiting/feeding deer. So far it's been three people that I know of, one of them got caught (thank you game warden) the other two didn't.... YET. Next year I WILL go out of my way to turn in anyone that is using bait or feeding deer.I have hunted this land for 8 years and let every little buck go just so these people could put out their bait and shoot them! I'am so pi$$ed off I would like to put out a steak and shoot the baiters that come into it! Friggin wanta be hunters!