It will be very interesting to see how that all plays out. If "Joe Public" catches wind of it, there will be outrage for sure. Just another one of those "unintended consequences" you spoke of. What is the other alternative though? Allow the deer on the overpopulated private land to totally decimate the landowners habitat until the deer eat themselves out of house and home and are forced to move on to the public land to find a food or bedding source? Catch 22 for sure.
Impossible to control and monitor.
Buck tags are valid anywhere and many hunters hunt on both private and public lands. Asking someone to declare if they are a private or public land hunter is unreasonable. Asking someone to choose private or public for a specific tag is reasonable.
I understand what you are saying but consider this. Private land guy wants public land doe tag. He declares himself a public land hunter to get to the front of the public land doe tag line and then uses his "public hunter" buck tag on the private land he hunts anyway.
Yes and the new doe tag system has the hunter purchasing either a private land or public land tag. There is no effective and reasonable way to issue public land doe tags to public land hunters first and then private land hunters seeking a public land doe tag second. Just because you are a private land hunter should not limit your ability to obtain a public land doe tag which in some cases may be for a completely different zone than where that private land hunters private land is even located at.
bueller, you can certainly speak for "my" area.;)
Unfortunately what you say here is true and if there was an effective way, I do feel strongly that those private landowners should not have the same ability to get a public land tag as a strictly public land hunter. What you are saying is part of the problem on public properties all around our area bueller. I have lived and hunted there all my life and I can tell you firsthand that many of the private farm owners south of Mauston and New Lisbon that I know personally have refused for years to shoot does off of their own overpopulated farms yet they will drive up to the Refuge and go on a doe killing spree every season to fill their freezers. It is wrong and a bunch of BS, IMO. Especially now that the DNR has a means to restrict this type of behavior and force those guys to harvest the overpopulated does that they like to claim crop damage against each year. The underlined area in your quote is exactly why this should be the case. If you own a farm you should have to harvest a doe off your own place before you are allowed to harvest a doe off of public land and take that opportunity away from a hunter with no land of their own. Sounds harsh I know, but it is the reality of it. The only exception would be that if there were no antlerless tags available in the zone that your private land is in. Would all of this be a logistical PIA, sure. Impossible, not with todays computer systems.
Again, I personally know many farmers who would purchase the public land doe tag and not even bother with a private land tag, because they have no intention of ever harvesting a doe off their own private farms.
Unfortunately bueller, yes it does. I'm not sure if what you are saying really applies though. In the case of a non-landowning "private land hunter", that hunter should know well in advance if the landowner will allow antlerless harvest on his property. In that case, he would most likely first purchase a private land tag. In the event the landowner didn't allow doe harvest, he would still fall under the guidelines of a non-landowning public land hunter, as he would have no land of his own to hunt. His buck tag is good either way. Not to mention that you can only purchase 1 tag per day regardless of Zone or land type. If the non-owning hunter purchased a certain tag and then missed out on the other tag, that was his prerogative to choose to purchase the tag that he originally bought. The biggest issue I see in implementing something like this would be the landowners who own 2 acres of "paradise" in a Castle Rock subdivision, how do you filter through whether or not a persons land is "huntable" land, and what guidelines would constitute a piece of property as being "hunting land"? Acreage could be considered, but it would have to be awfully small, as we know there are plenty of guys who harvest deer off less than 10 acres and not all areas(subdivisions) allow hunting regardless of the property size. Very dicey and for sure a gray area. It will be nice to have the tag numbers on the public lands limited, regardless of who ultimately gets those tags. They could always go back to a draw system like they had for the "Hunter's Choice" tags years back if they have to many complaints? Again, with the computer systems they have now it wouldn't really be that big of a deal.
Maybe in the future it would be a good idea to have a lottery system for an area in which less than say 200 tags are available. In IL a lottery system is utiilzed.
