I drew an archery deer tag in NV last year. A landowner deer tag in that unit goes for about $17k. I could apply for NV for the rest of my life and not spend even close to that much, so in my case it was worth it.
My next question was to ask if trolling is legal there. Makes a lot more sense now. Trolling and using Livescope for paddlefishing are both illegal here in Montana.
That is wild. How were people catching them there before Livescope? Is there structure that concentrates them enough that you can reasonably expect to catch them by blind casting?
Yes. You can choose to only keep the elk portion. When that happens, the deer portion gets allocated to someone else (referred to as "orphaned" deer tags). Before this year, FWP was allowed to sell 5000 of those orphaned deer tags. The 2500 NR deer tags that were cut this year came out of this...
The only thing I remember from my class is the instructors would randomly pass around fake wood rifles and you had to make sure it was unloaded and avoid pointing the gun at anyone while passing it around. If you forgot to make sure it was unloaded or you didn't handle it safely, you had to go...
Maybe it is quality then. There's still thousands of deer tags available. I just can't imagine someone thinking "there's 2500 less tags, so its not even worth my time to apply."
I didn't realize it was $900 for deer alone. That seems crazy steep to me considering that's over twice as much as some states I've hunted that have much better deer hunting.