Gerald Martin
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2009
- Messages
- 8,685
I read it, Gerald. I don't think u will shock them off the private with a 2 week cow season when 200k people are running around looking for mule deer. Just my opinion. Even with pick your unit and species.
Just for clarification, 200k people are going
to be split between Oct. mule deer and Nov. whitetail across seven different regions.
Not everyone is going to chase mule deer.
As far as your opinion that an October cow season won’t shock them off of private, I am sure that there’s going to be enough variation in results in different locations to support anyone’s opinion whether it will or won’t.
Having said that, since the issue of private land sanctuaries harboring elk is primary an effect of those elk selecting private land as a response to hunting pressure on publicly accessible lands, it stands to reason that changing the time and location of pressure would influence elk to select other areas during the cow season.
Those areas might be private lands that allow no hunting. Nothing that can be done about that since those landowners don’t allow access. But in areas that contain large amounts of public land where cow hunting is limited to Nov. harvest with limited B licenses I think it reasonable to expect that elk will transition to public if there’s less pressure there than on private.
FWP is under legal pressure from the Legislature to keep elk numbers at objective. Their strategy to reduce elk in over objective units has been increasingly liberal bag limits and liberal B license allocations. Most of the hunting pressure then is concentrated on publicly accessible lands targeting the elk that are there during hunting season. Hunters end up killing the “good” elk and pressuring survivors to find sanctuary.
FWP can point to the ways that they are increasing opportunity to satisfy the legislative requirement of managing to objective but the on the ground reality is that in many cases the “problem” elk herds are increasing while the “good” elk herds are decreasing on public.
The October cow season would give FWP a better tool to target elk in the areas most likely to need herd reduction rather than the areas where higher numbers of elk are more tolerated.