On Wed, 1 Jun 2005, Blake Sobiloff wrote:
> On Jun 1, 2005, at 8:18 AM, Ron Crandell wrote:
>> I would like to see the deer population get down to a number that
>> makes it a lot more rare to see them around.
> http://www.caranddriver.com/article.asp?
> section_id=22&article_id=4394>, there were around 10 million deer in
> the US during the 80's. Today, however, there are more than 25 million
>
> Clearly there's room to increase the number of hunters and the limits
> to bring the population down and reduce the deer population.
Makes you wonder what has happened over the past 25 years, doesn't it?
Actually, I can tell you what happened: Timber companies figured out that
they could make money off of their land by leasing out the hunting rights
to hunting clubs. Back before the 1980's, they basically allowed anybody
to hunt on their lands. Nowdays you must belong to the right "club" to
hunt on their lands, and these clubs have exclusive membership (i.e., you
can't just join them).
The basic result has been a severe reduction in the number of hunters who
are hunting on timber company land, which is most forested land in America
outside of the national forests. So even though states have drastically
increased and revised their limits in order to reduce the population (when
I was a child it was illegal to shoot a doe, now it's encouraged in order
to remove breeders from the population), there just aren't enough deer
being killed to outweigh the number being bred due to the sharply reduced
number of hunters.
The sad thing is that while these hunting clubs are doing this so that
their members have a good chance of bagging a deer (the more deer and
fewer hunters in an area, the easier it is to bag one), they are also
basically committing suicide, since the next generation of hunters is not
being created due to the expense of joining a hunting club and thus, like
ham radio operators, hunters are on the way to being a dying breed.
Eventually the fact that these clubs are not properly managing the deer
herd on their leases is also going to come back and bite them, because
it's virtually inviting state intervention to force them to properly
manage the deer herd on their leases, and as the number of hunters
declines further and further hunters will no longer have the political
clout to stop such state intervention.
Alas, I have no solution other than to allow this process to come to its
logical conclusion, where the regulatory excesses of the government end up
so onerous that hunting clubs can no longer afford the costs of managing a
deer lease and where timber companies, unable to lease out their lands,
end up re-opening them to the general public for hunting and thus bring in
a new generation of hunters to cull the herd back to its proper size. In
the meantime, all we can do is watch for deer, and hope they jump the
other way rather than in front of our KLR's.
_E