When country singer Troy Lee Gentry shot a black bear in Minnesota he created quite a stir. Sources say he purchased the mature bear from a fellow who raises game animals, then arrowed it in a relateively small enclosure. Sounds weird. I’m not going to get into Gentry’s behavior, but the incident brings up the subject of fair chase.

There are a lot of gray areas in what constitutes fair chase. Since I’ve traveled to hunt a bit and seen how things are done in diverse places, I thought I’d share some of the practices and let you decide for yourself. It’s not always easy or clear to determine whether fair chase is being practiced across the broad range of hunting arenas worldwide.

Just to confuse things from the get-go, note that the Pope & Young Club says that any enclosure violates fair chase, and thus eliminates an animal from entry in that record book. Pope & Young however does not discriminate in the case of baiting. Is baiting fair chase?

In Texas you can find whitetails on ranches with nothing more than a simple cattle fence, as well as ranches with high fences to keep their animals at home. The size of the high-fence enclosures varies widely, but both free-range and high-fence places hunt over bait, the standard practice, though not all animals are shot over bait. Baiting deer is also common in Michigan, North Dakota and Saskatchewan, though enclosures are not.

More and more high fence operations are cropping up in the U.S., the result of people wanting to keep their trophy animals in and out of harms way, rather than wanting to make things easier. There are, of course, exceptions; small places built as nothing more than killing grounds. On the other hand, consider that 600 acres constitutes a square mile. That’s a lot of ground to cover if you’re bowhunting with a 30-yard effective range. In Hawaii, I know of a hunting area just this size that holds axis deer, and I’ll give you a dollar for every deer (not actually) you can see in the chesthigh grass there on a typical day’s hunt. Though dense with animals, they are as elusive as mice in a wheat field.

In Africa, enclosures get larger, much larger, because labor is cheap. Of course some places don’t use them at all, but most want to keep their animals safe from poachers and within the bounds of their properties. My first hunt, in Namibia, was within an enclosure of approximately 20,000 acres. That’s an area of more than 33 square miles. Is that fair chase? Within 50 miles of where we hunted was another enclosure of 100,000 acres or 167 square miles. I’ve also hunted African properties that were only a couple of thousand acres. They weren’t my favorites because the wear and tear of animal use and human use was too obvious, but the animals weren’t easy. I’ve also hunted migratory animals in no-fence areas in Africa.

In New Zealand, red stag are almost exclusively hunted in enclosures, many in the thousands of acres. One-hundredpercent of archery stag trophies we see come out of such places. Most of the stags are raised in pens, then released. Yes, you must hunt to find them in large tracts, but they are not truly wild. Think about a whitetail buck that is pen-raised and somewhat acclimated to humans. If released into the woods, what would his reaction to you be? He’s likely to stare rather than run. He’s not truly a wild animal. I’ve hunted free-range red stags in New Zealand and I consider them among the wildest game on earth.

Fair chase resides in the eye of the beholder. If it feels wrong to you, it probably is. Just ask Troy Lee Gentry.