A lot of the big city types will pretend to hunt - by that, I mean that they'll book a hunting party at a farm with a hunting lodge (the farm next to my brother's is one place like that). The owner of the hunting lodge farm will set out piles of corn near the deer blinds to attract the deer during hunting season - all the city-slicker hunters need to do is sit back and wait for the deer to show up, then the entire hunting party can shoot at once.



As soon as the first shot is fired, any deer not hit will be terrified and scatter to the wooded areas on nearby farms to hide. My brother (and other local farmers) will do real hunting, but that's made so much more difficult by the fact that the deer are so terrified that they're hiding in whatever brush there is in the wooded areas. Before long, they're hungry and heading back to where they know there's plenty to eat though, only to be shot at and scared away again. Rinse and repeat during the entire hunting season.



There's not enough deer overall removed by the hunting parties to protect the crops - but the way the hunting parties are conducted also makes it much more difficult for other farmers to remove enough to thin the herds to any worthwhile degree.



The saddest part about this is that since the city slicker hunters aren't hunting for much needed food, they're partying the entire time - sitting around and drinking beer until everyone in their party has finally bagged a deer, even if it takes all day. Meanwhile, the deer they killed is sitting around in the back of a pickup truck all that time. It's hours and hours before they ever take that deer to be properly chilled and processed (the city slickers certainly don't know how to butcher it themselves). This is why venison so often tastes "gamey" - it's not that it's a wild animal, it's that it's been allowed to sit around without proper chilling for far too long, and it's half spoiled by the time it's processed.



DB knows better - when he can manage to get a deer, he immediately takes it to be processed, and that meat is VERY GOOD.