Montana Mule Deer Mismanagement

[Carnage2011]

There is some big differences in landowner preference we have in Montana and landowner tags.
I can understand the issues people have with the landowner preference draw, but comparing it to transferable landowner tags is apples and oranges.

Kind of. The 454 tags are basically guaranteed in most units and they can get multiple for one ranch. I believe Wilks got 8 for the N Bar the first year. While Wilks can’t sell them I believe they can give them to whoever they want.

With landowner preference we are basically giving 10% of the original quota plus an additional 15%. With the loopholes of the 454, I wouldn’t say they are far from transferable landowner tags.

I’m with @Big Fin though. I think I’d accept transferable landowner tags for PRIVATE LAND ONLY in exchange for 3x higher elk objectives!

Anyways, back to the annual Hunttalk mule deer rant…

 

[Irrelevant]

From asking a couple years ago, the main reason that FWP hasn’t gone to mandatory reporting is because mandatory reporting creates a number of problems for inference. First, it is likely to be biased because there is no statistical way to make inference from those who reported to those who did not. Second, there is no way to measure precision in a mandatory reporting framework because there is no sampling design. Finally, mandatory reporting provides delayed answers. If you have to wait for incentives or penalties to get response rate up, decisions will need to be made before data are available. So, unless you get complete reporting quickly, mandatory reporting is almost always a step backwards.

On FWP’s harvest surveys:
- They talk to a large fraction of hunters to make estimates, but get to decide which ones they talk to using the laws of probability.
- They sample ~60% (or up to 100% for limited licenses and permits)
- They can make estimates of harvest and be very clear about how certain or uncertain they are about those estimates (i.e., generate confidence intervals)
- For the species they conduct their random survey sampling (elk, deer, antelope, UGBs, turkey).. the first point is that these are much, much larger and common hunts. They are not as memorable as say, a bighorn sheep or mountain goat hunt (in which FWP does have mandatory reporting for). Hunters may have multiple opportunities for these species and/or the majority of licenses and permits sold for these species are not tied to a specific area (i.e., general licenses) so it is more difficult to tie where hunting effort/harvest occurred, especially when some hunters don’t remember what district or districts they hunted in.
- They worry about the cost of implementing mandatory reporting for large hunts in MT, especially because they have more licenses and permits issued than most other western states. Compare MT and ID (which has mandatory reporting and comes closest to the # of hunters): MT - 286,315 DEA hunters, 455,885 DEA licenses, $210K. ID - 232,381 DEA hunters, 254,785 licenses, $400K. (These numbers were from a couple years ago.. maybe 2020 or something) So… maybe $800K?
- Other states have referred to enforcement issues/compliance issues with mandatory reporting
- It takes time to process data once it's accumulated, and these estimates are needed by biologists for recommending quotas and season adjustments. Bios need to have these recommendations in with plenty of lead time prior to the draw.

Why imperfect compliance with mandatory reporting is an issue:
- If 80% respond (some states that implement mandatory reporting don't even get that), they cannot say what happened with the other 20% in a mandatory reporting system.
- Put in context of a quota change proposal to decrease the number of permits in an area: with FWP’s sampling system, a biologist can say that even with their uncertainty in harvest estimates they know that the harvest has increased in an area and is putting pressure on a population, vs. with a mandatory reporting system they can say that harvest has increased, but they are not certain how accurate the harvest tally is without assumptions based on compliance rates or a follow-up survey (and assuming they get harvest reports in time).
- In the first situation, they can enumerate the reliability of the estimate, in the second, we cannot.

Mandatory reporting works well in situations with
- small hunts that are relatively rare for hunters - they can remember and want to talk about it - i.e, sheep and goats (on a side note I think moose should be in here, too), bears, lions, wolves (some also on a quota)
- are limited to specific districts, so there is less information they need from hunters about their hunt
- law enforcement to make sure people report what we need them to report by the time biologists need the information
- small numbers of hunters so that the cost of implementing the program is not so great
- Some of the species they survey fit this, and they have mandatory reporting for those. Think about other states and the opportunities offered--most have more limited or specific opportunities so the hunts are probably easier to remember and obtain the information on.

Survey sampling of hunters works well in situations with
- large hunts that are not in focused geographic areas - so memory and timelines become issues when using this information
- compliance rates that will never be close to perfect - so they can quantify and control their uncertainty
- species with large numbers of hunters so that implementing the program would be costly. This is all akin to MT general deer/elk license holders. As stated above, MT does attempt to get all of the LE license holders.

Food for thought, I guess. I’ve also attached a peer-reviewed paper a biologist sent me a while back about harvest sampling strategies.

So what flavor was the kool-aid?

 

[BuzzH]

You have much to express regarding this issue. Have you provided input to FWP?
What is your background and source of seemingly extensive perspective?
Are you a Montana hunter?
Where are you from for reference (upper right hand corner of identification name and number posts?)

Not trying to hack your privacy; it's relevant to know those things.

I'm guessing a FWP lackey that's drank the kook-ade and defending their crap policy. The first required training class for a FWP employee...BSing the public 101.

Followed by bending statistics and facts don't matter.

For hells sake there's an app for that and the way you tag your game on it, harvest reporting shouldn't be a big deal.

Excuses is what the FWP is best at.

 

[WanderWoman]

You have much to express regarding this issue. Have you provided input to FWP?
What is your background and source of seemingly extensive perspective?
Are you a Montana hunter?
Where are you from for reference (upper right hand corner of identification name and number posts?)

Not trying to hack your privacy; it's relevant to know those things.

I do regularly provide input to FWP, and I am a Montana hunter. I got the above info from FWP’s biometrician who runs the harvest surveys and a UM faculty member (stats-focused and lead author on the paper I attached) with extensive experience assisting multiple state agencies with population modeling and harvest data.

Why FWP doesn’t do mandatory reporting was at the time really confusing to me, as on its face it seems makes a lot of sense. So I asked, and the answers I got make sense to me, who is not a statistician.

 

[DFS]

I do regularly provide input to FWP, and I am a Montana hunter. I got the above info from FWP’s biometrician who runs the harvest surveys and a UM faculty member (stats-focused and lead author on the paper I attached) with extensive experience assisting multiple state agencies with population modeling and harvest data.

Why FWP doesn’t do mandatory reporting was at the time really confusing to me, as on its face it seems makes a lot of sense. So I asked, and the answers I got make sense to me, who is not a statistician.

Doesn’t make much sense to me, mandatory means everyone does it. Be a lot less confusing if Montana nailed down their hunting seasons/districts instead of the free for all. Instead they blame crunchy snow on low harvest, that’s certainly a new one. Excuses is all they have and I’m not sure why the people in charge aren’t raising the flags. Everyone else can see it.

 

[SAJ-99]

From asking a couple years ago, the main reason that FWP hasn’t gone to mandatory reporting is because mandatory reporting creates a number of problems for inference. First, it is likely to be biased because there is no statistical way to make inference from those who reported to those who did not. Second, there is no way to measure precision in a mandatory reporting framework because there is no sampling design. Finally, mandatory reporting provides delayed answers. If you have to wait for incentives or penalties to get response rate up, decisions will need to be made before data are available. So, unless you get complete reporting quickly, mandatory reporting is almost always a step backwards.

On FWP’s harvest surveys:
- They talk to a large fraction of hunters to make estimates, but get to decide which ones they talk to using the laws of probability.
- They sample ~60% (or up to 100% for limited licenses and permits)
- They can make estimates of harvest and be very clear about how certain or uncertain they are about those estimates (i.e., generate confidence intervals)
- For the species they conduct their random survey sampling (elk, deer, antelope, UGBs, turkey).. the first point is that these are much, much larger and common hunts. They are not as memorable as say, a bighorn sheep or mountain goat hunt (in which FWP does have mandatory reporting for). Hunters may have multiple opportunities for these species and/or the majority of licenses and permits sold for these species are not tied to a specific area (i.e., general licenses) so it is more difficult to tie where hunting effort/harvest occurred, especially when some hunters don’t remember what district or districts they hunted in.
- They worry about the cost of implementing mandatory reporting for large hunts in MT, especially because they have more licenses and permits issued than most other western states. Compare MT and ID (which has mandatory reporting and comes closest to the # of hunters): MT - 286,315 DEA hunters, 455,885 DEA licenses, $210K. ID - 232,381 DEA hunters, 254,785 licenses, $400K. (These numbers were from a couple years ago.. maybe 2020 or something) So… maybe $800K?
- Other states have referred to enforcement issues/compliance issues with mandatory reporting
- It takes time to process data once it's accumulated, and these estimates are needed by biologists for recommending quotas and season adjustments. Bios need to have these recommendations in with plenty of lead time prior to the draw.

Why imperfect compliance with mandatory reporting is an issue:
- If 80% respond (some states that implement mandatory reporting don't even get that), they cannot say what happened with the other 20% in a mandatory reporting system.
- Put in context of a quota change proposal to decrease the number of permits in an area: with FWP’s sampling system, a biologist can say that even with their uncertainty in harvest estimates they know that the harvest has increased in an area and is putting pressure on a population, vs. with a mandatory reporting system they can say that harvest has increased, but they are not certain how accurate the harvest tally is without assumptions based on compliance rates or a follow-up survey (and assuming they get harvest reports in time).
- In the first situation, they can enumerate the reliability of the estimate, in the second, we cannot.

Mandatory reporting works well in situations with
- small hunts that are relatively rare for hunters - they can remember and want to talk about it - i.e, sheep and goats (on a side note I think moose should be in here, too), bears, lions, wolves (some also on a quota)
- are limited to specific districts, so there is less information they need from hunters about their hunt
- law enforcement to make sure people report what we need them to report by the time biologists need the information
- small numbers of hunters so that the cost of implementing the program is not so great
- Some of the species they survey fit this, and they have mandatory reporting for those. Think about other states and the opportunities offered--most have more limited or specific opportunities so the hunts are probably easier to remember and obtain the information on.

Survey sampling of hunters works well in situations with
- large hunts that are not in focused geographic areas - so memory and timelines become issues when using this information
- compliance rates that will never be close to perfect - so they can quantify and control their uncertainty
- species with large numbers of hunters so that implementing the program would be costly. This is all akin to MT general deer/elk license holders. As stated above, MT does attempt to get all of the LE license holders.

Food for thought, I guess. I’ve also attached a peer-reviewed paper a biologist sent me a while back about harvest sampling strategies.

I appreciate the data. I will even acknowledge some of the concerns your source states. However, most of the problems can be solved. Bias is present in all statistical collection. USFWS have been doing stratified sampling, mandatory harvest surveys (HIP) for waterfowl for decades. I will argue the cost estimates you gave seem high. Once the system is set up, the cost of an additional hunter reporting is practically zero. So it shouldn’t matter if 10’hunters report or 100,000. The costs are mostly fixed, especially given it is 2022 and data storage and processing is pretty cheap. And they can easily offset the cost by getting rid of check stations and phone operators.

 

[antlerradar]

Kind of. The 454 tags are basically guaranteed in most units and they can get multiple for one ranch. I believe Wilks got 8 for the N Bar the first year. While Wilks can’t sell them I believe they can give them to whoever they want.

With landowner preference we are basically giving 10% of the original quota plus an additional 15%. With the loopholes of the 454, I wouldn’t say they are far from transferable landowner tags.

I’m with @Big Fin though. I think I’d accept transferable landowner tags for PRIVATE LAND ONLY in exchange for 3x higher elk objectives!

Anyways, back to the annual Hunttalk mule deer rant…

I wasn't thinking about the 454 tags, I stand corrected.
Landowner tags for higher elk objectives is a bad deal even if they are restricted to private land.

 

[SAJ-99]

Doesn’t make much sense to me, mandatory means everyone does it.

Stop signs are mandatory, but not everyone stops. Non-compliance is a legit problem, but it exists in the current system too. They just chose to pretend like it doesn’t. Hunter recall on units hunted with general tag would be better if they could sit at their computer and spend some time determining the number of days hunted rather than getting a random phone call from someone asking the question and trying to remember.

I think they just don’t want to change, because that change might mean a little more work on the data for the first few years.

 

[Mtnhunter1]

I appreciate the data. I will even acknowledge some of the concerns your source states. However, most of the problems can be solved. Bias is present in all statistical collection. USFWS have been doing stratified sampling, mandatory harvest surveys (HIP) for waterfowl for decades. I will argue the cost estimates you gave seem high. Once the system is set up, the cost of an additional hunter reporting is practically zero. So it shouldn’t matter if 10’hunters report or 100,000. The costs are mostly fixed, especially given it is 2022 and data storage and processing is pretty cheap. And they can easily offset the cost by getting rid of check stations and phone operators.

I also appreciate the survey cost analysis PDF provided by @MsMuley. I read the whole damn thing and now know why Montana has no hope for change. As you stated, it's 2022 and the internet and electronic data collection is now ""THE THING""!

But when the excuse to not implement mandatory reporting is the decline in hunter numbers....2006, well, no wonder.....!@&#%$

Clipped from the PDF:



Very sure, as a nonresident, that I could arrow an Idaho bull and then purchase another tag to arrow another Idaho bull in 2006....and how did the Idaho elk license sales go this year??

It's the information age, all my purchased Montana licenses are listed on my FWP's account.....Link a survey to those licenses.....if I don't fill out the survey, I don't hunt the following year! I'm all for that!!!!

 

[SAJ-99]

I’m not sure how to say this and explain myself. Below is what I settled on.

They don’t care about harvest. I have said before, don’t be surprised if after mandatory reporting is implemented, the harvest remains pretty much the same. Their methods now are statistically solid, but mandatory reporting just increases confidence and narrows the interval range. But they don’t try to estimate harvest before the season- EVER- so they don’t care about the level of error. I will avoid discussion on fat tails (Kurtosis) and skew. If you don’t make an estimate of what the model will show, with all your inputs (in this case flight counts, severity of winter, drought condition, fawn survival, all that stuff), you end up never knowing if the error term is accurate.

Put another way, Msmuley said They can make estimates of harvest and be very clear about how certain or uncertain they are about those estimate. I agree. But they can never measure how wrong they are. So they live in a world of make-believe where the model is assumed to be fine and estimates are accurate. At least until they prove they aren’t.

Mandatory reporting would work very well with “pick a weapon, pick a unit” because every population would be smaller, like it is for bear, cougar, or sheep. Without pairing it with other changes, it’s not going to give us anything useful.

 

[DFS]

If you are smart enough to buy a tag you should be smart enough to fill out a survey. If you aren’t you take a break from hunting for a year. We aren’t moving mountains. This isn’t going to fix the problems but at least there is data and we move in the correct direction. It’s becoming quite clear to me where the problems lie with our management of wildlife.

 

[rogerthat]

I also appreciate the survey cost analysis PDF provided by @MsMuley. I read the whole damn thing and now know why Montana has no hope for change. As you stated, it's 2022 and the internet and electronic data collection is now ""THE THING""!

But when the excuse to not implement mandatory reporting is the decline in hunter numbers....2006, well, no wonder.....!@&#%$

Clipped from the PDF:

View attachment 253518

Very sure, as a nonresident, that I could arrow an Idaho bull and then purchase another tag to arrow another Idaho bull in 2006....and how did the Idaho elk license sales go this year??

It's the information age, all my purchased Montana licenses are listed on my FWP's account.....Link a survey to those licenses.....if I don't fill out the survey, I don't hunt the following year! I'm all for that!!!!

Yeah I say let’s waive penalties for poachers as well…don’t want to negatively impact hunter numbers…can’t make this stuff up

 

[Hunting Wife]

From asking a couple years ago, the main reason that FWP hasn’t gone to mandatory reporting is because mandatory reporting creates a number of problems for inference. First, it is likely to be biased because there is no statistical way to make inference from those who reported to those who did not. Second, there is no way to measure precision in a mandatory reporting framework because there is no sampling design. Finally, mandatory reporting provides delayed answers. If you have to wait for incentives or penalties to get response rate up, decisions will need to be made before data are available. So, unless you get complete reporting quickly, mandatory reporting is almost always a step backwards.

On FWP’s harvest surveys:
- They talk to a large fraction of hunters to make estimates, but get to decide which ones they talk to using the laws of probability.
- They sample ~60% (or up to 100% for limited licenses and permits)
- They can make estimates of harvest and be very clear about how certain or uncertain they are about those estimates (i.e., generate confidence intervals)
- For the species they conduct their random survey sampling (elk, deer, antelope, UGBs, turkey).. the first point is that these are much, much larger and common hunts. They are not as memorable as say, a bighorn sheep or mountain goat hunt (in which FWP does have mandatory reporting for). Hunters may have multiple opportunities for these species and/or the majority of licenses and permits sold for these species are not tied to a specific area (i.e., general licenses) so it is more difficult to tie where hunting effort/harvest occurred, especially when some hunters don’t remember what district or districts they hunted in.
- They worry about the cost of implementing mandatory reporting for large hunts in MT, especially because they have more licenses and permits issued than most other western states. Compare MT and ID (which has mandatory reporting and comes closest to the # of hunters): MT - 286,315 DEA hunters, 455,885 DEA licenses, $210K. ID - 232,381 DEA hunters, 254,785 licenses, $400K. (These numbers were from a couple years ago.. maybe 2020 or something) So… maybe $800K?
- Other states have referred to enforcement issues/compliance issues with mandatory reporting
- It takes time to process data once it's accumulated, and these estimates are needed by biologists for recommending quotas and season adjustments. Bios need to have these recommendations in with plenty of lead time prior to the draw.

Why imperfect compliance with mandatory reporting is an issue:
- If 80% respond (some states that implement mandatory reporting don't even get that), they cannot say what happened with the other 20% in a mandatory reporting system.
- Put in context of a quota change proposal to decrease the number of permits in an area: with FWP’s sampling system, a biologist can say that even with their uncertainty in harvest estimates they know that the harvest has increased in an area and is putting pressure on a population, vs. with a mandatory reporting system they can say that harvest has increased, but they are not certain how accurate the harvest tally is without assumptions based on compliance rates or a follow-up survey (and assuming they get harvest reports in time).
- In the first situation, they can enumerate the reliability of the estimate, in the second, we cannot.

Mandatory reporting works well in situations with
- small hunts that are relatively rare for hunters - they can remember and want to talk about it - i.e, sheep and goats (on a side note I think moose should be in here, too), bears, lions, wolves (some also on a quota)
- are limited to specific districts, so there is less information they need from hunters about their hunt
- law enforcement to make sure people report what we need them to report by the time biologists need the information
- small numbers of hunters so that the cost of implementing the program is not so great
- Some of the species they survey fit this, and they have mandatory reporting for those. Think about other states and the opportunities offered--most have more limited or specific opportunities so the hunts are probably easier to remember and obtain the information on.

Survey sampling of hunters works well in situations with
- large hunts that are not in focused geographic areas - so memory and timelines become issues when using this information
- compliance rates that will never be close to perfect - so they can quantify and control their uncertainty
- species with large numbers of hunters so that implementing the program would be costly. This is all akin to MT general deer/elk license holders. As stated above, MT does attempt to get all of the LE license holders.

Food for thought, I guess. I’ve also attached a peer-reviewed paper a biologist sent me a while back about harvest sampling strategies.

I feel much of what you’ve put here is a convenient circular argument for FWP in many ways at this point.

Their argument seems to be: Mandatory reporting is more valid for small districts, but we manage on a regional level (or larger) so it won’t work/isn’t necessary. But when asked why they don’t manage at a more localized scale, it’s because our big region-wide data don’t show any need for that, though it’s too coarse to actually see any issues.

In this paper, the cost seemed to be the largest hurdle to implementing the mandatory reporting. And there is a preconceived idea presented that finer-scale metrics aren't necessary for managers (I’m assuming here that means for managers managing at very large gross scales). I think many people here are saying we want finer scale metrics and management, for which mandatory reporting is justified.

In the 11 or 12 years since the paper came out, numerous states have figured out a cost effective way to do this. We are a decade plus out from that paper and technology has grown by leaps and bounds. I’m not generally overly hostile towards FWP, but on this issue I’m not buying the argument. It seems like a lot of confounding to obscure the simple fact that they don’t want to.

 

[Raisin Bran]

If you are smart enough to buy a tag you should be smart enough to fill out a survey. If you aren’t you take a break from hunting for a year. We aren’t moving mountains. This isn’t going to fix the problems but at least there is data and we move in the correct direction. It’s becoming quite clear to me where the problems lie with our management of wildlife.

I am late to this but agree 100%. Everyone is pretty quick to post their kill to the internet for bragging rights so why can’t we expect the same for mandatory, self reporting within the app tied to the tag you punched?

 

[Raisin Bran]

I also appreciate the survey cost analysis PDF provided by @MsMuley. I read the whole damn thing and now know why Montana has no hope for change. As you stated, it's 2022 and the internet and electronic data collection is now ""THE THING""!

But when the excuse to not implement mandatory reporting is the decline in hunter numbers....2006, well, no wonder.....!@&#%$

Clipped from the PDF:

View attachment 253518

Very sure, as a nonresident, that I could arrow an Idaho bull and then purchase another tag to arrow another Idaho bull in 2006....and how did the Idaho elk license sales go this year??

It's the information age, all my purchased Montana licenses are listed on my FWP's account.....Link a survey to those licenses.....if I don't fill out the survey, I don't hunt the following year! I'm all for that!!!!

Quote from highlighted section

….”This only considers monetary costs for the survey itself, and neglects the social and political costs of implementing and enforcing a mandatory reporting system with extra fees or penalties for noncompliance.”

Here in lies the root of the problem!!! Social & Political instead of biological, logical and analytical with multiple data sets and points.

 

[WanderWoman]

I appreciate most of the feedback here, and personally I prefer Fruit Punch (anything but Grape, really). What I gathered from the paper, is that mandatory reporting systems can get you a small increase in accuracy/precision but is it worth the extra cost when you’re talking about a couple of percentage points for likely several hundred K? Would you rather see that money go towards research or habitat/access? And this is for general licenses with which FWP does attempt to gather harvest at the HD-scale. They attempt to reach 100% of the hunters who draw LE licenses/permits. Although if MT ever went the direction that seems to be desired by some in this forum, away from general, statewide opportunity in favor of everyone picks a species/district/weapon..(?) the conversation would of course be different. And I realize SAJ-99 already made that point.

When SAJ-99 says “they can never measure how wrong they are,” yes, that’s true for mandatory reporting, but with the current harvest sampling they can generate confidence intervals that do indeed suggest how close or far off the mark they are. Although I likely misinterpreted your point there, if so, sorry. Also further up re: “they don’t care about the harvest…. don’t be surprised if the harvest remains pretty much the same.” Other states (like AZ) that have implemented mandatory reporting have said there’s a small increase in accuracy, but is that small increase (i.e., a couple %) worth the added cost and effort? Say we have a district with 100 elk harvested, that’s a 3-5 elk difference. Wounding loss, which of course isn’t tracked, is greater than that in places. And no, I don’t think there are official pre-season harvest estimates outside of taking previous years’ success rates and extrapolating that to tag numbers. That is generally done when determining quotas (i.e., “Success on this tag is generally 50%, we need XX number of animals harvested thus we’ll offer XXX tags). R7 decreased the number of mule deer B licenses to 3000 this season in response to lower deer numbers and based on previous years’ success rates they estimated 1100 does would be harvested this season (or 1 doe per 17,100 acres). I guess we’ll see what actually occurred when the results come out next spring. Also, are we talking predicting population trajectories, which would take into account production, recruitment, winter, drought, harvest, etc., or just harvest? I think population models are helpful but I also think there are so, so many things you can’t predict when it comes to environmental factors/stochasticity and hunting is just a piece of that. And it is apparently a struggle to just get the hunting/harvest part right.

Replying to Doug, one would think that mandatory reporting and its implications mean there is 100% response (I agree it sure as heck should), but this rarely happens (some states don’t even get 80%) and the added effort to re-survey non-responding hunters is costly. To Mtnhunter’s point, the line in the paper re: hunter recruitment is a moot point and I doubt that has much to do with FWP’s decision so far to not implement MR (I thought that’s what pheasant releases were for).

For Hunting Wife, when you bring up localized scale, are you talking about within HD, or just at an HD scale? Harvest surveys as done provide the data at an HD scale, so I’m not tracking you, sorry. As far as numerous other states finding cost-effective ways to do this, looking back at the volume of MT hunters vs. some other states, is it, though? (Serious question—I’m not familiar with what other states spend outside of what I was given above and what’s in the paper, and what are those state agency professionals saying?).

I also asked about this when I was in Great Falls a while back, but there’s something with the app and online tagging where FWP can’t legally get the harvest information with location (due to some privacy law). I know I’m butchering that but maybe one of you would ask and report back. Thus, the app isn’t the be-all-end-all at this point, yet. And we all know how well that rolled out this year, too.

We as hunters ask for science-based management. This paper, whether you like it or not, was peer-reviewed by specialists in the wildlife field (at a broader level than in MT) and deemed worthy of publication. So I don’t trust it per say because I’m full of Kool-Aid vs. the fact that it passed muster according to long-standing scientific method and standards set forth by other wildlife professionals. I would be very curious if other states have truly figured out the missing link in making it statistically-sound and cost-effective, and I also know that states also talk to each other rather than existing in a vacuum, so if someone else figured it out, word would spread. You'd think...

Thanks, all. That is all I have to say, I wish you all a good rest of the weekend.

 

[Straight Arrow]

I know I’m butchering that but

Yes, that and the superfluous redundancy overemphasizes your opposition to mandatory reporting. We get it!

With seemingly universal agreement, there needs to be improved mule deer management in Montana ... and increased and better data is a key to improved plans.
Please consider expressing your lengthy posts in suggesting better ideas, rather than refuting what is considered by most a viable data collection improvement.

 

[FI460]

The new MyFWP app looks very similar to the MyODFW app we use in Oregon. We have mandatory reporting.

If, as I suspect, the app vendors are the same I can't imagine it would be difficult to implement mandatory reporting in Montana.

 

[huntin24/7]

Not sure why mandatory harvest reporting for big game would be any more difficult online than the mandatory HIP reporting before you can hunt waterfowl each year. Did you fill your tag? Mule deer or whitetail? 4 point or more/less? What unit? Etc. Comment section. Then you can buy/apply. Seems pretty easy to me.

 

[Werty]

Mandatory reporting or you don't get next years hunting licenses till you do!