Question on Private land tags

fishnut · May 26, 2016

Okay so I'm looking at the new "Private Land only" tags and it looks to me that there are about 11000 tags that can only be hunted on private land and a lot of those units have a fair amount of public land. What is the deal here? For example, if you draw the wasatch mountain West unit and regularly hunt around Strawberry or Maple Mountain, you wont be able to hunt unless you are on private and have permission from the land owner. Is this a deal with the Devil so land owners can sell trespass fees or what is the deal here? It seems that anyone who in the past has put in for these cow tags will now put in for either a CWMU or an open unit so the odds in those units will go down the hopper.
Thoughts?

elkfromabove · May 26, 2016

The objective is to put enough pressure on the elk that use private lands in order to drive them to (or back to) public lands. Whether or not it will actually work remains to be seen. And how the landowners benefit, I'm not sure, but you can bet they aren't doing just for the love of seeing the elk gone.

fishnut · May 27, 2016

Does anyone honestly think the land owners are just going to open the gates and let people run around thier property? It seems like land owners have had that option all along and this won't change thier thinking. I don't get it at all.