Out of interest, who owns the land people hunt on in places like Pennsylvania?

Here in Scotland large parts of the country are privately owned sporting estates and shooting is not a cheap sport!

It's often public land. State or national forests, which are gigantic portions of the US, are generally hunting areas (though state or national parks are usually no-hunting zones).

Hunting is licensed by the states, and is usually relatively inexpensive for in-state residents. People from other states usually pay considerably more for a license. Big game or rarer animals may require special "tags" which come at larger fees and may be limited and awarded by lottery.

There are private game reserves. Georgia and other southern states have massive hunting preserves that can be a mark of old money, for instance. There are similar ranches in the west. And hunting clubs that anyone can just buy their way into.

And, to be honest, there's a lot of what is technically poaching- hunting on the private land of others without permission. That sort of thing isn't all that well policed, though state fish and game authorities are generally pretty tough on completely unlicensed hunting.

Many (most?) state and national forest lands are open to hunting. There's other publicly accessible lands too (but those two are the big acreages).

Here's a symptom of the cultural prevalence of hunting in the U.S.:

http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/sta...

Most states will have such a listing.

There is also plenty of private land kept for hunting, which as you might mean to imply, is not cheap.

"Hunting" in the UK usually referes to chasing about with horses and dogs, "shooting" to pheasants, grouse etc. and if you tramp about mountainsides after deer it is "stalking".

Interestingly enough, in Scotland although most wild areas are privately owned everyone has a right of access - you can wander about pretty much anywhere that isn't explicitly private or where you would cause harm.

My extended family has a modest-sized plot of land in west Pa. where they do farming. It also encompasses some forest though, and occasionally the deer get a little too curious and then my family will get to have venison for dinner for the following month or so.