A hunter in r/Hunting shared a story that felt like the kind of thing family landowners know can go bad fast. He said his cousin had already been a problem before, enough that he had not been allowed to hunt the property for four years. Then he got another chance. According to the post, the family had a deer management plan in place and one rule was clear: do not shoot immature bucks. The cousin knew the rule, knew the expectations, and went out there anyway.
The part that really burned the landowner was how avoidable it sounded. He said his cousin was in a box blind with good optics, had plenty of daylight left, and had already seen six does before deciding to shoot a young buck instead. From the way he wrote it, this was not some rushed last-minute guess in bad light. It sounded like somebody looking right at the rules and deciding they did not matter.
Then the story got worse. The poster said his cousin gut-shot the deer with a .300 Win Mag. That detail changed the feel of the whole thing from frustrating to embarrassing. It was not only that the wrong deer got shot. It was that the shot itself was poor, on top of the fact that the man pulling the trigger already knew better. You could tell in the post that by then this was not about one buck anymore. It was about trust getting burned again.
The comments came back hard. One person called it blatant disrespect. Another said the cousin was fully aware of the rules and simply did not care. A few people pointed out the same thing the landowner was clearly wrestling with: this was a man who had already shown who he was years earlier, and giving him another chance only made the lesson more expensive.
What made the story hit is that it was family land, which always makes these things messier. A friend might get cut off and never invited back. Family has a way of sticking around and making every bad decision last longer. By the end of the thread, the feeling was pretty simple. The cousin got one more shot to do right by the property, the deer, and the people letting him hunt there. He wasted it almost immediately.
