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Originally posted by slakjaw
TURE
Nebraska has not sold out on deer permits for several years. Here in Minnysoder, they were giving away doe permits with the perchase of a buck permit. On top of that 1 permit would get you up to 4 or 7 deer depending on what area you hunted.
Private land is a big issue. Farmers have found they can make money by leasing out the "hunting rights" on their land. You have 1 or a few guys who can hunt a huge amount of land, and the rest of us are SOL.
Younger kids just are not into hunting anymore.
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The leasing of hunting rights on private land will kill the sport as we know it today. It will become the sport of the moneyed upper class, just as in Europe and the U.K. My Opa, who was an avid hunter in Germany between the wars and after the second world war, warned me of this before he died. He was pushed out of the sport before I was born due to the expense of acquiring hunting leases, or joining clubs that had.
With the rise in stature from the sport of the common man to the sport of the upper class comes a great deal of change, and none for the better. The most profound is the lack of support from that common man, who can no longer hunt. But he can still vote. When hunting rights issues hit the ballots, he no longer has an interest in voting to support them. Look at fox hunting in the U.K. for a great example.
We have been seeing "trespass fees" here in Washington for some time now. Farmers and ranchers have learned that access to their land is valuable monetarily to some; fees go up to a couple of grand a year, per head. There is starting to be some backlash on this.
In Wyoming, public land grazing rights are tied to free public access to ranch land. Ranchers actually place a container of some sort on each gate, in which hunters deposit stubs from their licenses to prove access. No stubs, or not enough stubs coupled with complaints from hunters, and sorry; no public land grazing next year. Granted, the really big land owners don't have to care, but it seems to work well with the smaller ones that rely upon public land.
Years ago one of our bigger and more popular mule deer areas had its ranchers' association get into a tiff with our game department. The ranchers ended up closing their land to hunting that year; virtually one and all. Their only problem was they weren't astute enough to round up their cattle and secure them on their land. They vastly underestimated hunters' reactions to this imprompeteau closure. I was seeing dead cows everywhere; shot by hunters. I bet losses ran into the millions of dollars. They never tried that again.
Yes, this private land access issue is getting bigger every year. Our game departments don't seem to be addressing it in an effective manner. There is no easy answer, either. I'm not comfortable with schemes to force access upon land owners, but I am comfortable with providing them attractive incentives to allow public access. If they don't want to allow access, in the end it should be up to them. Most, however, do get some kind of government funded assistance, incentives, tax breaks, or whatever. Tying those to playing nice with the hunting public seems a viable answer; Wyoming's version of it seems to work for them. No public access? Fine. No public help.