[Times photo: Daniel Wallace]

Dave Cock eats breakfast as his dog Feather watches before the hunting day begins. During his time on the plantation near Crestview in late February, Cock rose at 5 a.m. to start hunting by 6. He hunted most of the morning, napped after lunch, then headed back out later in the afternoon and hunted until dark.

By DAN DeWITT
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 20, 2003

Florida, teeming with deer, has relaxed its hunting laws. That gives people like Dave Cock, whose life is tied to the pursuit of game, more of a shot at controlling the species.

CRESTVIEW -- Dave Cock sat in a plywood deer stand above a power-line easement as an automatic feeder dispensed corn with a sound like a coffee grinder.

"Deer, deer," he whispered, nodding toward two brown silhouettes at the edge of the woods.

"That's a big doe. A third one. Four deer. Five deer. Six deer."

He put his rifle to his shoulder but paused as the line of does and immature bucks crossed the easement and vanished into a patch of small pines. He would get a better shot when they re-emerged at the feeder, he thought.

They never did, though, and Cock guessed that it was because at the time, the end of February, they could find budding blackberry bushes and other fresh sprouts in the forest.

"There are no guarantees in this game," he said once the gray sky turned too dark for safe shooting.

Though Cock missed that opportunity to bag a deer during a recent hunting trip to the Panhandle, he'll have plenty more chances because of a changing view of the species and the way it is managed.

The ever-lengthening deer season now extends to early spring in parts of the state. Hunters such as Cock are permitted, even encouraged, to violate the decades-old taboo against shooting does and to use bait to attract them. People who devote their lives to killing wild animals, as Cock does, have plenty of support for their claim that the environment needs them.

[Times photo: Daniel Wallace]

The opportunity to kill a doe lured Cock from his mobile home near Brooksville to a 640-acre pine plantation next to the forest.

This is because "the North American continent has never seen so many damn deer," said the University of Florida's Ronald Labisky.

In 1900, an estimated 300,000 deer lived in North America, said Labisky, a professor of wildlife and range sciences. His best guess of the species' current population is 24-million, probably several million more than when European settlers arrived.

Deer have been blamed for denuding Eastern forests, invading farms and gardens, and causing thousands of car accidents every year.

Though in some highly populated areas, sharpshooters have been hired to kill deer or dart them with contraceptives, the best way to control the population may be to lift some of the hunting restrictions that revived it in the first place.

That mainly means killing more does, which the New York Times recently advocated in an editorial titled, "Bambi's mother in the cross hairs."

[Times photo: Daniel Wallace]

Cock tends to one of his dogs that has an injured paw. He and his wife, Chris, have 19 dogs living on their 14 acres.

Bragging rights

The opportunity to kill a doe lured Dave Cock, his wife, Chris, and five of their dogs from their home near Brooksville to a 640-acre pine plantation next to the Blackwater River State Forest.

"I'm looking to put a doe in my freezer," Cock said.

"You get that nice 3-year-old doe, she's going to be tender. Bucks don't eat as well."

In Florida, the deer population has climbed since the early 1960s from about 50,000 to roughly 800,000, not enough to demand the killing of does but enough to allow it. Last year, the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission extended what it calls the "antlerless deer season" from two days to seven.

The state also issues permits for shooting does on large parcels of private land, including 15 for the pine plantation. But most of the hunters who share the property and stay in the pine cabin aren't interested.

They stalk large-antlered bucks because of the urge to collect trophies that, Cock said, is just as common in nonhunters.

"Why is a Corvette important? Why doesn't everybody drive a minivan? Who the f-- needs a Humvee?" he said. "Everybody wants bragging rights around the campfire."

[Times photo: Daniel Wallace]

Cock cleans his .50-caliber muzzleloader after dinner at an old cabin near the Blackwater River State Forest in North Florida.

Cock's trip started promisingly, with several deer sightings on the first day. A few minutes before sunrise on the second morning, the moon was bright enough that he could clearly see a deer when it wandered out of the woods and into a grassy alley about 50 yards in front of the stand.

Just as it began feeding, though, a loud snort came from the direction of the cabin. The deer lifted its head and slipped back into the trees.

The sound had come from a large buck that smelled something alarming, possibly one of Cock's dogs, he said.

He wasn't planning to shoot the deer by the stand anyway, he said. It was a "button buck," one just starting to grow antlers. Sparing him now meant the possibility of shooting him later, when he will have grown a large, impressive rack.

"Even I want bragging rights," Cock said.

She's a vegetarian

Later, when the deer had settled down for the day, Cock clamped his rifle into a portable vice and aimed it at a target drawn on a piece of cardboard 50 yards away.

He fired several times and adjusted the scope after each shot, trying to correct the skewed sights he blamed for a missed shot the day before.

The gun is an awkward hybrid of new and old. It's made of stainless steel and carbon fiber but loaded by sliding preformed gun powder pellets and the slug into the muzzle. It fires with the sound of a cherry bomb.

Its only purpose is to allow Cock to take part in the final weeks of a deer season that began with bows and arrows in the southern part of the state in September.

"Muzzleloading season" was created for hunters who like to pursue game the way their ancestors did. It has spawned an industry in the kind of equipment Cock uses.

"I'm not here to do it the old-fashioned way," Cock said. "I'm here to take advantage of a different season."

Including this trip, Cock has spent more than two months since the fall hunting deer. He dedicates several more weeks each year to pursuing hogs, turkeys, ducks, doves, fish and scallops.

Cock believes he is responsible for no more carnage than anyone else who eats meat. He chooses to do the killing for the same reason he raises free-range chickens and enough organic produce to feed himself and Chris, who is a vegetarian.

"I do like to eat what mother nature grows," he said. "Especially when I can't trust what the feedlots are putting into the cows."

Deer are plentiful. Hogs are an environmental menace that the state wants to eradicate from natural land. The only objection to killing such animals is a misguided tendency to personalize them, Cock said.

"If you get hung up on the individual, you'll never save the species," he said.

[Times photo: Daniel Wallace]

The hunter in his element: “I hate it when I have to go home for my birthday,” Cock says of his trips. “It aggravates me that Christmas comes in the middle of hunting season.”

Goals beyond killing

Success in this kind of deer hunting depends on choosing the right stand, and Cock scouted out several before the afternoon hunt.

Wearing full camouflage and walking with his rifle on his shoulder, he looked as much like a commando as a hunter. A former high school football player, he is still powerfully built at 46. His head is shaved closer than his face.

Deer are attracted to the pine plantation for the same reason they generally like semideveloped landscapes: a preference for feeding on the edges between forest and open spaces.

It helps that the plantation's open spaces, a maze of unpaved roads, are planted in rye that stays green through the winter and is one of the few grasses tender enough for deer to eat. The stands are also placed near feeders, inverted barrels filled with corn. A label on one brags: "We make the game hunt you."

Picking the right spot this day was easy. Numerous deer prints made the sandy soil around one of the feeders look like the aftermath of a beach party.

Unlike the elevated plywood box where Cock spent the morning -- and whispered almost continually about environmental outrages, his favorite books and different rifles' firing characteristics -- the closest stand was a steel platform draped with camouflage.

After climbing onto it at 4:30 p.m., Cock maintained a silence so complete that creaking boots seemed like a jarring interruption. The only diversions were the sights and sounds of nature.

While the day was still light, Cock pointed out a golden-crowned kinglet and a brown thrasher. With the sunset came a period of activity that, from this perspective, seemed universal to every species.

A few mosquitoes appeared. Frogs began to croak from the beaver pond across the road. A crowing rooster could be heard from a farm about a mile away. Mourning doves, cardinals and rabbits visited the feeder. But no deer.

Cock held out until the first star appeared, then climbed down and walked a few hundred yards to meet Chris, who was waiting with the truck and the dogs. They spent a half-hour looking at the brilliant night sky, which development has started to steal from them at home.

"I can't say that my whole goal is killing that deer," Dave Cock said. "My ultimate goal is to see what's going on out here."

[Times photo: Daniel Wallace]

In their 20 years together, Dave and Chris have shared a mobile home and 14 acres with dozens of hunting dogs. Their only shower is outdoors. “We don’t live like most people, darling,” Chris says.

Living with nature

That is Chris Cock's only purpose when she joins him on his hunts, as she usually does.

She did not complain about the cabin, with its bare mattresses, bottles of liquor and floorboards that recently collapsed under the wood-burning stove. While her husband hunted, she read, watched birds or walked with the dogs.

"I'm extremely fortunate that Chris is a self-entertainer," Dave Cock said.

In their 20 years together, they have shared their mobile home and 14 acres with dozens of hunting dogs and a succession of semiwild hogs. Their only shower is outdoors, and if a rat moves in, "we just feed a rat snake into the wall," Dave Cock said.

"It may take a week, but one night you will hear a thumping and a squeaking."

"We don't live like most people, darling," said Chris Cock, 52, once the assistant curator of zoo education at Busch Gardens.

Mostly, she accepts her husband's arguments for hunting. But she has never been satisfied that a person can love wild things and want to kill them.

"It's a conundrum to me, everything about it," she said. "I hate the idea of killing another animal. . . . I hate the moment when the lights go out."

A personal record

Dave Cock wasn't born into hunting. He was raised in Brandon. His father was an electrical engineer, as is his younger brother. His uncle introduced him to it, and he developed a passion for it that sometimes surprises him.

"I do seem to have a taste for it," he said. "I do have a craving to kill."

This overrules his misgivings about using dogs and baited stands to hunt deer, and about shooting animals -- ducks, for example -- that are not especially plentiful. He left his position as assistant curator of birds at Busch Gardens and supports himself with intermittent construction jobs, partly because he wanted more time to hunt. Hunting tends to crowd out what are landmarks in most peoples' lives.

"I hate it when I have to go home for my birthday," Cock said. "It aggravates me that Christmas comes in the middle of hunting season."

In a few days during the late February trip, he saw fresh deer tracks on the muddy creek banks and on the red clay road that splits the property. Two deer dashed in front of his headlights as he drove to a stand before dawn.

But he spent two straight mornings and evenings sitting in a stand without seeing a deer, an unwanted personal record, he said.

[Times art]

Though his mood never soured, he began to talk less about how he enjoyed just seeking deer and m

ore about why he hadn't had a chance to kill one. The theories included the sprouting vegetation and the deer's wariness after a long season.

"We're hunting the educated ones," he said.

On the last evening, he went out in a heavy rain, which usually keeps deer and hunters under cover. Though he saw the six deer, he never got off a shot. He returned to the cabin to repeat what, in the last few days, had become a ritual.

He informed his three-legged pointer, whom he has trained to follow a blood trail, that he had no deer for her to find; Chris greeted him at the door and consoled him with a kiss.

"Everybody thinks it's all kill, hurt, maim and slaughter, but its not," Dave said as he walked inside.

"Unfortunately."

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