>>1413288Totally this. My family has land in west TX that won't grow much of shit without a lot of work, and this is a complete moneymaker. You can get sikha deer, fallow deer, zebra, gazelle, even some more exotic stuff as actual surplus from B-grade zoos dirt cheap, and once you've got them they breed like rabbits. We picked up 100 fallow deer for free from one zoo that was closing, and they threw in six Grant's zebra for our driving 250 miles with trailers to get them. Most all of them were raised in a "petting zoo" area which is kind of sad, but oh well, when people pay to see critters and then stop paying to see them, they gotta go somewhere. Completely legal, they just would rather it not be publicized because average people (not just anti-hunters) have a shit fit about it.
So you get a bunch of petting zoo deer and zebra and whatever else you can find on a big piece of unproductive land in an unregulated state like TX, put a pump out to a seasonal pond to make it a year-round watering hole, put up a couple of feeders at the perimeter because the land is too shit to graze really; take some photos and set up a website and yeah, it's dentists and doctors mostly, coming out to a 2500 acre farm and since they can't see a fence anywhere past the gate it's like the wildest of Africa to them. Take them out at sunrise (because they think it's like magical to hunt then, truth is what they're shooting at would walk up to us on a day when we had a bale of hay on the truck, but they're a little spooked by us being out there so early and act "wild".)
Make hundreds to thousands per harvested animal off of the guaranteed hunt, plus a local pro taxidermy shop gives us a 25% cut when they ship the finished product to Mr. Dentist, and the meat is usually sent to the local game processing guy who grinds it into burgers for the local jail, and the county gives tax writeoffs to our farm and his business.
Really is a win-win. It's basically paintball for semi-rich guys.
