Drones

I saw someone post pictures of turkeys they took from a drone on the MI Turkey Hunters FB page and it got me thinking. What does everyone think about the use of drones for hunting purposes (scouting/patterning etc.)?

Owning drones is legal but MI law says you can’t use them to “aid in the taking of game” or to “harass animals or other hunters” but I wanted to see what others thought about use of them as it seems the specific intel they could provide could be seen as very unsporting/borderline unethical.

For example, I could use one to track a specific animal back to its exact bedding location in the morning or roost location in the evening.

Using them to aid in the taking of game seems like it could/should encompass use of drones for off-season scouting as well as the tracking animals example I mentioned above but this person claimed his use of a drone was fine because he was using it to “look at his blind” and “if he saw turkeys during that flight so be it as he wasn’t planning on hunting that same day”. He also mentioned he used the drone for scouting in the off-season for deer and turkey on many occasions.

I highly doubt that if a CO saw him out there flying the drone that day they would see it as “fine” considering it is still turkey season and he had clearly used this drone to take video of game/scout on several occasions but I would love to hear everyone’s opinion on this topic.

Seems to me that the people that own drones and hunt would be very tempted to use them unscrupulously at some point and there would be a ton of ways to abuse them to gain an unfair advantage. In my opinion use of them for any type of scouting/hunting intel really toes the line of what should be considered ethical or fair chase but I’d like to hear other viewpoints on the topic.