>
LAST EDITED ON Jan-05-13
>AT 00:07?AM (MST)
>
>>If you are suggesting that everyone
>>in Utah wants the whole
>>state to be exclusively about
>>trophy hunting (which by the
>>way is a horrible management
>>tool for building deer herd
>>size), you are quite mistaken.
>
>That is by no means what
>I'm trying to convey or
>imply in any shape or
>form, if that's the legitimate
>interpretation you took away from
>my concern...I hate to break
>it to you but in
>that regard you're the one
>who's unfortunately mistaken. Just how
>many permits "need" to be
>issued in order to kill
>enough deer "sufficient" enough to
>supposedly maintain, sustain and improve
>our states deer herds...I don't
>think anyone in the division
>sincerely knows the correct answer
>because if they did, I
>honestly don't think we'd continually
>be seeing year after year
>a constant increasing of tags
>being issued solely for monetary
>gain. If conservation and preservation
>are genuinely the goal of
>the DWR (which it's not,
>we all know it's revenue
>generation), how in the world
>do they or any of
>us expect them to accomplish
>that goal if they perpetually
>increase the number of
>hunters while simultaneously decreasing the
>number of animals as a
>direct result...make all the automatic
>assumptions you'd like regarding my
>argument, however one cannot deny
>that there's a real problem
>here with our herds and
>
if the cause is not
>exponentially too many hunters in
>the field season after season...than
>what is it???
Your question in bold above is the first thing I can actually relate to in your many posts. As to blaming the DWR for selling too many tags to fill their coffers without regard to our wildlife, well, let's just say I think you are more than way off in that assumption; and since you haven't shown anything to back up your assertions, I will continue to call them 'assumptions'.
Here are some statistics for 'food for thought' for you from the various agencies in the west. I don't include them all but it's a good data base. The UDWR gets just under half their income from tag/license sales.
http://wildlife.utah.gov/dwr/about-us/191-financial-overview.html
Here is a copy of the latest audit of the DWR from the state:
http://le.utah.gov/audit/11_14rpt.pdf
Here is some financial info for Colorado:
http://www.parks.state.co.us/SiteCo...trategic PLan/FINALAnnual Report_04.27.11.pdf
The Colorado main financial page:
http://wildlife.state.co.us/About/Reports/Pages/AnnualReports.aspx
Some financial info on Arizona:
http://www.azleg.gov/jlbc/11app/fis.pdf
Some more on Nevada:
http://ndow.org/about/funding/pdfs/budget_presentation_2009.pdf
And Wyoming:
http://wgfd.wyo.gov/web2011/Departments/WGFD/pdfs/WGFDANNUALREPORT_20110001745.pdf
Notice the size of the budgets, and what the expenditures are. Reference tag/license sales, hunter numbers afield, etc. Lot of information to sift through and compare. Am I saying that game agencies don't have financial issues? Nope. Here is a little tidbit of Colorado's issues:
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_20815910/editorial-colorado-division-wildlifes-messy-accounting
Can there be improvement on how the department spends its funds? Sure. But to blatantly say the only reason they sell "exponentially more tags" is totally false. You keep saying the DWR sells more and more tags, year after year to make more money so the division can fatten up. Nope. Here are some numbers on total tag numbers sold over a few decades. Note the downhill trend in buck tag sales, to its current low:
http://wildlife.utah.gov/hunting/biggame/pdf/annual_reports/11_bg_report.pdf
Lot of info so you'll actually have to do some reading to locate the information and decipher it. It's been pointed out dozens and dozens of times, and accurately so, that killing bucks has has very little to do with the overall health of mule deer herds. The only time it does have an impact is when the number of bucks is too low to breed all the does. Of course, this is all blown out of the water if you don't believe the science and the data, and rely on personal view and emotional rhetoric.
Don't just look at Utah, look at the entire picture, the same thing is happening across the landscape in every state. Mule deer are cyclic and their populations depend highly on weather, which effects their food supply and general habitat. Want some info on that? Here ya go, a simple google search on mule deer population trends, just pick your poison and read:
https://www.google.com/search?q=uta...F-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GWYE_enUS316
Some more? Yep.
http://muledeerworkinggroup.com/index_files/Page1525.htm
And one that is pretty darn relative to your above question:
http://www.muledeerworkinggroup.com/Docs/Mule Deer Changes.pdf
The scope of today's mule deer hunter has changed dramatically over the years, and it continues to evolve. It is our responsibility as hunters (and by that, the largest group of conservationists) to educate ourselves as much as possible so that the decisions we make, the recommendations we push to our respective wildlife game agencies is viable and applicable.
I sincerely hope you and those of your ilk bbentley392t, strive to do that. I know I will.
Sooooooooooo, nope, a few hundred or so youth archery tags will do nothing but good for our sport, at least in my opinion.
www.unitedwildlifecooperative.org