Hunter says his trail cam on public land was gone within a week — and it looked like somebody hacked the cable or tree with a hatchet

A hunter in r/Hunting said he learned the public-land trail cam lesson the hard way. In the thread, he explained that he had cable-locked his first trail cam to a tree, thinking that would at least slow somebody down or make the camera more trouble than it was worth. Instead, it vanished within a week. What he found afterward made the whole thing feel even worse. He said it looked like somebody had hacked at either the cable or the tree with a hatchet to get the camera off there. That detail alone told the story. This was not somebody casually unbuckling a strap and walking off with it. Whoever took it wanted it badly enough to start chopping.

He did not write it like a man still shocked by what happened. He wrote it like somebody who had already accepted the reality of public land and adjusted accordingly. After losing that first camera, he said he quit bothering with expensive ones and started buying cheap cams instead. Then he changed how he put them up. According to his comment, he now brings a climbing stick, places the cameras about 8 to 10 feet high, and shims them so they angle downward. That way they are harder to notice and even harder to reach without effort. It read like the kind of routine a guy builds after one theft is all it takes to stop trusting people around his gear.

The thread started because another hunter asked how people keep trail cams from getting stolen on public land, and the replies made it clear this was not some rare horror story. One person said to skip the factory strap and use tie wire so a thief needs tools and time. Another basically said the best protection is to assume anything easy to spot is easy to lose. Nobody in there acted surprised that a camera disappeared. The whole conversation had more of a resigned tone, like this is what happens, and the only real question is how much money you feel like risking before you start hiding your cameras like contraband.

That is probably the part that sticks with you most. The guy did what a lot of hunters would do the first time around. He locked the camera up, tried to make it secure, and figured that might be enough. A week later it was gone, and the tree looked like somebody had taken a hatchet to it. After that, the lesson was pretty simple: on public ground, if somebody can see your cam and reach your cam, there is always a chance they are already figuring out how to leave with it.