ImBillT
Well-known member
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2018
- Messages
- 3,896
Residents have cow tags, and quite a few very high odds bull hunts they could put as a third choice. There are NUMEROUS 100% draw odds muzzle loader bull hunts, multiple 100% draw odds rifle bull hunts, a 64% hunt I’d really like to go on. Deer are similar. At the resident price and relatively short drive, some of those opportunity hunts are a lot more appealing. I don’t think residents have nearly as much to complain about as NRs. If you’re not hunting reasonably often as a resident you’re being picky.RESIDENTS usually go years between draws. Too many tags to big landowners who turn around and sell them to outfitters. Now, technically, those landowner tags go to "residents", but the bulk of those tags go NR via the outfitter.
As a NR, there aren’t many rifle elk hunts with draw odds over 10%, and when they get much better than that(with any weapon type), those aren’t the hunts NM is known for. I’d have a REALLY hard time driving through CO to hunt some of those. Deer odds are better, but I’ve been on some pretty terrible deer hunts in NM.
Landowner tags exist to compensate the landowner for damage the elk do to their crops etc. It’s technically still legal for landowners to shoot them for depredation, and it wasn’t that many years ago that a lot of land owners shot them up royally. An elk or two is a beef that ranch can’t support, and I hate to think of how much damage elk can do to alfalfa. You have more elk because those landowners tolerate them, and because some of them are growing alfalfa. Has the price those tags sell for gone so high that they are making a lot more money than damage? Probably. Does the system get abused? Yeah. Do I have a problem with the e-plus system in general? Nope.
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