A hunter said he was sitting in his stand when another man fired from the road toward the direction he was hunting, then tried to argue that he had a buffer before he was technically trespassing.
The story came up in a Reddit thread about trespassers, poachers, and rogue hunters, where hunters were trading stories about people who ignore property lines and act like private land is theirs to use.
In this case, the commenter said the incident happened about 10 years earlier. He was in his stand when he caught a trespasser shooting from the road toward his stand. That detail matters because this was not a simple case of someone stepping over a line while tracking a deer. The man was shooting from a road in the direction of another hunter’s position.
The hunter confronted him, then called 911.
Eventually, he was told a game warden would call him. The situation did not just end with a warning at the gate, either. It went to court.
Once they got in front of a judge, the road shooter apparently tried to defend himself by claiming he had 60 feet before it counted as trespassing. It sounds like he was trying to lean on some kind of right-of-way argument, as if the land along the highway or roadway gave him space to shoot or move before he was actually on private property.
The judge did not buy it.
According to the commenter, the judge quickly told the man that the 60-foot idea applied to the highway right of way, not to the county land or private property situation the man seemed to think it covered. In other words, he could not just invent a magic distance from the road and treat everything within it as fair game.
The hunter made his position clear in court, too. He told the judge he knew the man was not the first person to trespass on his land, but he was the first one he had caught. Then he said he would be back in that courtroom every time he caught someone else.
That line pretty much summed up the frustration a lot of landowners and hunters deal with. It is not always one person making one mistake. Sometimes it is years of people cutting corners, slipping over property lines, shooting from roads, sneaking into stands, or assuming nobody will bother taking it further.
The dangerous part here was the direction of the shot. Road hunting and trespassing are bad enough. Shooting toward someone’s stand adds a whole different level of risk. A hunter sitting in a stand is not always visible from a road, especially in timber, brush, low light, or rolling ground. If someone is firing into property without knowing exactly what is downrange, they are putting other people in danger.
That was a repeated theme in the larger thread, too. The original poster in that discussion said his elderly neighbors, who owned a hay farm, called him because someone appeared to be hunting their stands. He and his son had permission to hunt the property and also helped caretake the place, so he drove over to disrupt the illegal hunt.
He said after he made noise and checked the stands, he saw movement and believed the trespassers were leaving. Then, before he even made it back to the truck, two shots were fired. He clarified they were not fired at him, but the situation was still serious enough to scare anyone thinking clearly.
He said the same people had been a problem for years. According to him, they had previously shot a steer belonging to the farmers. Not a deer. A very large steer. He later said the animal weighed around 1,800 pounds and was left in the field to die. He also said there had been other ugly signs of poaching in the area, including deer found with backstraps removed and fawns shot out of season.
That context made the older courtroom story feel less like a one-off and more like part of a bigger problem rural landowners keep running into: some people are not confused about property lines. They simply do not care unless there are consequences.
The road shooter’s claim about having 60 feet showed the same mindset. Instead of admitting he had no business shooting toward someone’s stand, he tried to carve out a loophole. The judge shut that down, and the hunter used the court appearance to make it clear he was done ignoring trespassers.
That may be the part that matters most for anyone dealing with this kind of thing. A property line is only as strong as the landowner’s willingness to enforce it. Signs, paint, fences, and gates help, but some people will still test them. Once a trespasser realizes nobody is documenting, calling, or following through, he may get bolder every season.
In this case, the hunter did follow through. He confronted the man, called 911, went through the process, stood in court, and made it clear he would keep showing up every time someone crossed the line.
The comments in that thread leaned hard toward documentation and escalation. Several people told the original poster to stop framing the issue only as poaching and start reporting it as armed trespassing, especially when shots were being fired near homes, farms, or neighborhoods.
A few commenters said game wardens can be helpful, but if the issue involves armed trespassers, the sheriff or police may need to be involved too. One commenter put it plainly: call law enforcement, provide evidence, and go up the chain if nobody responds.
Trail cameras came up repeatedly. People suggested hidden cameras on entry trails, cellular cameras that upload images immediately, and cameras placed high enough that trespassers could not easily reach them. Others recommended documenting gates, signs, purple paint, tire tracks, and any repeated access routes.
There was also a lot of bad revenge advice mixed in, as there usually is online. Some joked about blocking trucks, messing with vehicles, pouring scent into blinds, or making stands unusable. Other commenters pushed back and warned that those moves could turn the landowner into the one facing charges.
The more useful advice was to build a clean case: make sure the property is posted correctly, catch faces and vehicles when possible, report armed trespassing in plain language, and keep pressing until someone with authority takes it seriously.
