Of course. But you can't fit every turkey hunt in a box either. Seems the most adamant against them hunt a certain which they believe is the only way...
It's certainly not the only way
They run and gun on big blocks of timber which is why the have they feel so strongly decoys are stupid because in that situation they are. Same for Dave Owens types because they hunt from South FL to Washington, Why would they sit and wait behind some decoys? Some guys have the only 100 acre family cattle farm with 13 trees to hunt and running and gunning with no decoys is not really the best option. Sure you can do it but you bump the birds to the next county.. If they want to blind hunt with decoys I got no hard feelings toward them.
I will be in AL the 31st with no decoys in hand.
I hunt massive tracts of land. All public. Heck I think one of my places is over 60,000 acres. This is active coal/timber land, and killing birds over decoys would be laughably easy. Our birds routinely congregate in log landings or reclaimed strip mines. It would cheapen what makes our mountain hunting so special and difficult by riding a 4 wheeler to one of these places and staking out a decoy.
I cut my teeth hunting huge ag fields in Alabama. Some as big as 500 acres. Decoys were illegal then, and we learned to hunt field turkeys. Sure we got our asses beat most days, but we also got decent at killing those field birds with just a call.
When I moved back home after college, all I had to hunt was small farms and never messed with decoys because they were taboo to the turkey hunters I crossed paths with in Alabama.
I firmly believe that's the difference, people who have hunted turkeys for a long time are far less likely to use decoys than the new hunters. Old school versus new school. Traditionalists versus Kill at all costs no matter the tactic.
I also as stated earlier. Firmly believe decoys are one of the main reasons for our dwindling populations. It makes it too easy, too many dominant birds are killed, and it is effecting nest initiation