Incidental harvest by pronghorn hunters in the western part of the state is a non issue, I am of the opinion that mule deer will be more impacted by elk hunters than pronghorn in much of region 7. For one the better mule deer habitat and the better pronghorn are not the same place. It is hard to be in two places at the same time. Can you do a combo hunt for mule deer and pronghorn, sure, you could hunt pronghorn in the morning and mule deer in the afternoon. Good luck finding a nice buck that is beaded down for the day on a warm Oct day. It can be done, but it is not easy. Elk and mule deer, are in the same place.
There are close to as many elk hunters below the Yellowstone as there are going to be pronghorn hunters with a season one tag. When you figure in all the hunters helping the rifle bull tag holders, the 1400 with cow tags and all of the hunters hunting elk on a general and then figure that resident hunters chose whitetails, it is likely a wash on elk to pronghorn, except that the elk hunters will also be hunting the best deer habitat.
How do you stop people from hunting both season. Poachers are going to poach. I would start with stiffer penalties and more enforcement. No matter what happens I would hope we could all agree on that. The same could be asked of LE. How are we going to stop people that do not draw from hunting anyway. LE its self is not going to stop a poacher. I was just reading about a group that was archery hunting 380 without the proper permits. I wonder how many people hunted the recent LE units in region 4 that did not draw the tags?
@bigsky2
I hardly think that opening up archery a week earlier is going to ruin elk hunting, The vast majority of elk hunters are not going to save their vacation for the middle part of Sept. I can even think of quite a few places where hunting early give a hunter a better chance of catching a bull before he leaves public for private land. Think of the Felix bull.
Not sure where you are getting that we will be hunting mule deer four weeks before elk hunting starts. I see less than two and a half and in the western part of the state with at least half of hunters choosing season two and the ones that do chose season one likely using their vacation when they can hunt both mule deer and elk, that first two week and a half week of the season is going to be pretty quiet on the mountain.
The biggest hurtle for LE in not going to come from MOGA, it is going to come from FWP. Hard to say how LE will effect MOGA members without any numbers. Set the quotas high and MOGA will be smiling all the bank. To really start to hurt MOGA members in the bank account, you are probably going to have to set quotas low enough that residents are also feeling some pain and that is if Montana can some how avoid some form of landowner tags in the next legislature. Without details "putting residents first" is just a platitude.
If people pushing LE don't feel it is necessary to provide some details, they should not be butt hurt when they are not taken seriously. They will have earned the Trolls sniveling bitches nickname.
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