I only read the first page of this thread, so forgive me if I digress from the current discussion.
I spent the last 9 days in the mountains with a friend, hunting a tag that took me 18 years to draw. I didn’t kill anything. I saw some really, really cool shit.
Mid-morning today when it was clear I was probably going home empty-handed for this round of the hunt, I turned to my buddy and I said “it doesn’t take a tag to do any of this.” I told him that I have thought often recently about selling all of my hunting gear and hanging it up. Because it doesn’t take a tag.
I have been a pretty hardcore (sometimes to a fault) wild sheep advocate for about 13 years now. The hardest thing about making more wild sheep advocates is the fact that it is very difficult to get a tag, and that sheep hunting has a well-deserved reputation of being a “rich man’s sport.”
I think it’s important to think about how the base of advocacy shrinks when people are priced out of the game. I may sell all of this crap in the garage some day, but I will continue to advocate for the resource I love. But I’ll be honest (to a fault) and say that when that day comes I will no longer care about the hunting aspect. It will be solely about the resource. Because it doesn’t take a tag.