A significant percentage of us are opportunistic poachers; head out with every intention of hunting legally, but then: see a legal animal within shooting distance of the public road on private land; see a legal animal in the headlights after dark; see an animal on the closed side of the boundary; see an animal - legal or otherwise - next to the road on the trip home, etc. - and give in to the temptation. The likelihood varies depending on how confident the observer is that they are "safe" from being caught. These are the types most likely to be caught during an in-season decoy operation, or by an officer who saw the same situations described and decided to pull over and see if someone falls for the temptation.
I ran video and electronics on numerous decoys when I worked in Wyoming. The first several were close to town, and compliance was high; I started getting a warm fuzzy about how legal and ethical the hunters behaved. Then I worked several that were in very remote areas - many miles from the nearest small town, often more than an hour drive after leaving the pavement - and the reverse occurred. One particularly memorable day in the Bighorn Mountains, we started around noon on a Sunday midseason. While half of the vehicles passing didn't see the decoy (a standing 4 point mule deer full body, 100 yards from the road, broadside but not silhouetted), everyone who saw the decoy shot it illegally. After sunset we moved it to where headlights would shine it on a bend in the road, with reflective tape on the eyes - and everyone who saw it shot the decoy, until we finished up around 1 am. At the time, it was a record for the region for the most big game violations written in a single day.
A very small percentage of us are deliberate poachers - heading out with every intention of taking an animal illegally. These are the rut and winter range poachers, the spotlighters, etc. Usually these cases start out as a tip from someone tired of their activity - a fair number of the tips come from relatives, coworkers and wives and girlfriends. These cases often take months or years to build. These serial poachers can put a severe dent in a vulnerable local resource.
Thrill killers are the dipsticks who tend to go on sprees with .22 rifles, and shoot and leave to rot anything they see. They usually get caught eventually. They tend to be either high school boys, or adult male losers using mind-altering substances.
Nobody knows how many actual meat poachers there are who are genuinely feeding the family. The consensus of officers I've worked with is detection rates on them are the lowest of all poacher categories, and they rarely get caught. I've known of two occasions where officers did have opportunity to bust "subsistence" poachers and chose not to do so (nether was in Washington). In both cases they were families in dire straights literally struggling to survive, no possible way of paying fines, and would be destroyed by having a parent in jail. In one of those cases, the officer purchased $100 groceries and delivered it to the family, along with a list of assistance resources they could obtain legally.
