I know I’ve been writing about turkeys a lot lately, but it’s the middle of the spring and I don’t have anything else I want to talk about, so just bear with me. Plus, as you well know by now, I’m a turkey hunting expert. If you have any questions on how to kill one you should just email me and ask. One hundred percent results are guaranteed. However, there is a turkey hunting tactic that I’ve never discussed in my column so I figured we could spend this week debating it.
When I first heard about reaping turkeys I had to go look it up. Honestly, I was scared to type it in my phone because it just sounded bad. Some of you may be in the same boat as me, so I’ll give a quick rundown of what it is. A clinical definition of reaping is an aggressive hunting technique where a hunter hides behind a strutting-tom decoy and crawls toward a gobbler in open fields. A layman’s definition is a hunting method that involves a man with suicidal tendencies trying to trick a gobbler by acting like a gobbler with a gobbler’s fan while at the same time trying to avoid being shot by another hunter.
There are two main questions regarding reaping turkeys that I’ll do my best to cover this week. Is it legal and is it ethical? Seeing that legality is probably the most important thing to ask yourself before trying this method, let’s begin with that. If you’re a turkey hunter in Mississippi, yes it is technically legal to do. However, there’s an old saying: just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. While legal in our state, it should probably be kept on private property due to safety concerns. What concerns you might ask? Well, for one, if you try reaping turkeys on public land there’s probably a decent chance that you’re going to get shot by another hunter. Turkey hunting on public land in Mississippi is already dangerous enough with the amount of trigger-happy fools we have in the woods. Crawling behind an open fan only increases your odds of visiting your local hospital with TSS lodged in your body. Wouldn’t that be a waste of a $25 shell?
There are some other states that have banned the practice of reaping turkeys. Alabama, Michigan, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania have had total bans on reaping for several years now. South Carolina and Tennessee have banned reaping turkeys on public lands. One of the things all of those states have in common is dense forestland and hunter safety has been used as the main driving force behind those bans.
The next burning question gets a little trickier, is it ethical to reap turkeys? I’m not sure if there’s a right or wrong answer to this question, but it’s a hotly debated topic in the fanatical world of turkey hunters. I think the best way to look at it is how I look at most outdoor topics: what do you want to get out of it? For the sake of the argument, let’s use Mississippi, a state where reaping is still legal, as the state where you hunt. Now, there’s the question of ethics. Will reaping, also known as fanning, help you kill a turkey? From everything that I read on the matter, the answer is “yes, it could.” That’s not saying that you’ll definitely kill a bird using this method, but it certainly entices a gobbler hung up with hens in a field to come to you when they otherwise wouldn’t. Now, is that really fair to the bird and the sport? That’s up to you to decide. Some would say that using a decoy isn’t fair chase, and I wouldn’t argue with them. That’s their opinion and I’d respect it. I can see both sides of the argument.
But reaping isn’t exactly the same thing as using a decoy. It takes it to an entirely different level. To hear some turkey hunters talk about it, they’d attribute it to using dynamite to catch fish. I’d say if you’re hell-bent on killing a bird and that’s the only thing that matters to you, then do what you think is necessary to kill the bird. On the other hand, there’s the argument of what is best for the sport of turkey hunting and the future of turkeys. It’s not a big secret that the turkey population has been declining for some time now. Do we really want to employ a technique that makes it that much easier to kill them? To me, it seems irresponsible to put the future of turkey hunting at a greater risk than it already is. And not only putting the future of the turkey at risk, but is it worth putting your own life at risk to seal the deal?
My opinion on the matter is that it’s not worth it. It took me a long time to kill my first turkey, and it was a painful wait at times. I spent a lot of days driving home feeling empty, but that’s okay. When it recently finally happened, the wait was worth it to know I’d done it the right way in my mind. My advice to anyone that has a tough time killing turkeys is continue to be patient, continue to keep going out there, and continue to do it in a way that challenges you the most. At the end of the day, I’d personally rather go home with nothing than go home knowing I took the easy route to kill such a majestic bird.
