Here's an example from Sunday's paper of what hunter involvement can accomplish. This is regarding a topic I posted a couple of weeks ago about landowners trying to increase their share of tags in CO from 15% to 30%. Notice that the protest started as soon as hunters got wind of the proposal. They didn't wait for someone to make a decision before acting.
Plan to increase landowner tags stalls in tracks
By Charlie Meyers
Denver Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 14, 2004
A proposed increase in landowner preference licenses for Colorado big game hunting has been shelved, at least for now.
"I made the decision we won't propose any changes to the legislative license status," Division of Wildlife director Bruce McCloskey said Friday. "Landowners agree with me on that decision not to push forward."
Landowner preference for deer, elk and antelope tags became the hottest topic in the recent history of Colorado wildlife when it was revealed on these pages late last month that the DOW had entered into discussions with representatives of the Colorado Cattleman's Association and the Farm Bureau, along with prominent ranchers.
Originally begun as discussion to ensure family-hunting rights in eastern Colorado, where an overwhelming preponderance of land is private, the campaign escalated into a proposal that would have guaranteed landowners statewide up to 30 percent of all limited licenses issued through the draw process. This included the heavily restricted game management units for which hunters now must wait as long as 15 years to draw a tag. Under the landowner proposal, a public hunter might never be able to obtain a permit in those areas.
The proposal met with a firestorm of protest that caused proponents to temporarily abandon the plan.
A new approach, McCloskey suggested, will be to put together a discussion group that includes landowners and sportsmen to produce an agreeable document to the 2006 session of the legislature.
What angers public hunters most is that landowner permits are issued as vouchers that can be transferred to the highest bidder. They often are sold to outfitters, who then parlay the tags into a service package worth many thousands of dollars. Equally noxious to public hunters is the tags may be used anywhere in the GMU, including public land. At a recent series of public meetings, crowds decried a creeping commercialization of the hunting process, ranging from landowner preference to Ranching for Wildlife to private-land-only licenses. Hunters angrily accused the DOW of fostering a system that increasingly squeezes them from licenses and access.
Responding to this most recent threat, they flooded the DOW, the Colorado Wildlife Commission and politicians with a wave of correspondence that, for now, stopped the preference push in its tracks.
