On our ranches you need to have permission, end of story. We have caught all sorts of people on our lands or even pinching our land doing anything from poaching, dumping, steeling livestock, metal detecting, dredging, offroading, camping, mountain biking.
It depends mostly on what cowboy catches the violator, we have some who are not exactly very friendly We have ranches in several countries, all staff are allowed to hunt, fish and MD, and nearly all of them do, but we also lease out hunting as well and we allow them to camp, stay in the hunter cabins, fish and MD. Even have a few hunters who like to dig through our old trash dumps for bottles and other odd ends, they like to decorate (so to speak) the hunter cabins.
Point is, just on the 21 North American based ranches we have a little more than 400 workers and about half of them are live on workers with their families, many third and second generation staff; they do not share with any outsider and act like it is directly personal when they catch violators.
We have a Justice system, any violators caught will have a chance to explain their situation in accordance with the law.
Personally I have never actually caught an MDer on any of our properties, caught all sorts of other violators though. Did have the property own neighbouring our land in Switzerland reach out to me once through his lawyer. He had claimed he tried everything to contact me with no luck (I can believe that) because months before he was MDing on his land and got a target on our property line that he says he just had to dig and it was a 6.8 gram nugget. He want me to be aware and thought it would be best if disputed ownership, he had even reported him self to local authorities.
Me I was just so darn happy for the fella because my best nugget for that entire country is like 1.2 grams, heard of bigger, but never actually seen one. Basically from what he showed me was that he dug it on the property line, but he claimed that since it was like 18 inches down and the accuracy of pinpointing with the MD is not perfect that when he saw what was in the hole he just grabbed it in a panic of joy without looking to see if it was over the property line.
That is the story he tried to sell the police who would not even entertain him until he threatened their station with a law suit if they did not at least file a report. Now I have only known the man for about 25 years or so, but at best see him once a year. We allow him to raise bees during the season on that property; and from what I have seen with him is that if something is up to interpretation that he directly caused then he will step forward and claim fault.
But knowing him and how he is I just showed him what our leasing contracts look like in every country our family owns a ranch in and explained to him that even though we do not have a contract for bee keeping, if we did then like all other contracts the fine print does mention activities such as camping, fishing, hunting, MDing, gathering firewood for personal use. He was cool with that but did ask for a contract to keep his bees on our land, which we made sure he got.
The man totally killjoyed his own find though; I did tell him that if someone from not around those parts decided to MD the shoulder of the road and got a target on my fence-line between the shoulder and my land, that as far as I am concerned the nugget would belong to that person and I would congratulate them just same. He did not exactly agree with me on that, but who cares.
