Elk Ant. SFW made a run at that 48 hour trap law with the Trappers, and we lost at the RAC and board meetings - this year.
I have one more idea to try one more time, it would help on coyotes.
Dry, thanks for your response, and for your willingness to have some open dialog and give and take.
I will specifically try and answer your question on the land, and then will offer some ideas about how we can get more done for sportsmen and wildlife.
ON most of SFW owned lands, a permanent Conservation Easment (CE) has been placed on the Deeds of these lands that will remain attached to those lands forever. the CE sates that the lands will never be places for houses or commercial real estate, they will always be managed for open space and wildlife.
By doing this, these lands become essenitally worth less, who wants to buy them, keep them up, pay taxes, and then let the publics wildlfie live on them, you can't generate any money from these lands, they eat money, don't produce money.
Most of these lands are winter range areas. the wildlife is not on these lands during hunting season, they are on the public lands, so it is not like future boards could sell hunting permits on these lands either.
So, there would be no value or reason for future SFW Boards to ever sell these lands.
And as mentioned, over the next ten years we hope to have SFW in a position to have a HUGE bank account that will allow future generations of sportsmen to keep what we have built, and add more in the future. I have pretty much given my professional life to this effort as have others, and we know that without a strong organization and money, a lot of the good that has been done can be done away with, fast. So, if you dedicate your lifes work to someting, at a significant cost, you want to make sure the efforts are protected, and the opportunities will be around for many generations to come.
Does this answer your question on how SFW lands are protected ?
Now regarding the other issue, thanks for your opinion and consideratoins.
Now, i ask you to consider a few things.
SFW has and will continue to do good things for wildlife and sporsmen. that is the SFW mission. That is where the SFW members money goes.
A lot of the animosity on MM is about people with money seeming to get all the benefits and the working man doesn't. I understand that well, as that is exactly how my dad felt about life.
And, if you go back to 1994 when SFW started, it looked as if the only place to get a quality hunt was on a private ranch like Deseret or the Heaton ranch. IN fact, one legislator told me: "don, forget about the public lands, they can never be fixed, if you want to have quality hunting just stay in your engineering consulting business, make lots of money and buy hunts on private ranches."
SFW has worked hard to havef good hunting on the public land, for the public land sportsmen, and now instead of 1,000 really good trophy permits a year, there are over 4,500. the problem is there used to be only 20,000 applicants, now everybody wants a tag and ther are over 240,000 total applicants. That is a good problem to have, hunting isn't a dying sport, if there is a good product.
And, a lot of effort has gone into improving the quality of the hunt for 97,000 general season deer hunters, and turkey tags this next year will be available over the counter.
SFW is growing into other states, more and more sportsmen are geting on board.
SFW has learned a little about marketing over the last 15 to 20 years, the biggest problem with all teh groups is how to get sportsmen involved. The common response is: Why get involved, for $5 i got the same drawing odds as you do in the state draw."
In other words, i don't really want to help make the pie, i just want to eat it.
SFW and all the other groups try various ideas to get more sportsmen invovled. Doing good things for wildlfie and sportsmen just doesn't cut it alone.
We'll keep doing things for wildlife and sportsmen, but we have had some large donations from people who want us to use their money to help grow the organization, and it is nice to have some marketing money as well.
There are some really big JERKS who have money, they think they are better than everyone else, they think they can buy anything, and there money is more important than the volanteers and DWR folks who help make it all happen.
And, that is why i understand why some folks on MM really get mad at the "money" folks. I have had some doosey knock down drag outs with what Karl and I call members of the LSC - Lucky Sperm Club.
But, there are also some very generous folks with money, who grew up without much, and want to share the good life with others. so when they ask to help some folks out, i am NOT going to penalize those who have helped out. When a friend wants to help out a friend, most of my friends are involved in SFW, we spend the majority of our time with people in the group.
Over the years, SFW has recruited a lot of really good members from MM. That is why i spend some time on here explaining things. SFW has also lost some folks because of the lies and BS on here as well.
If Dry further wants to discuss this issue on teh hunts please send my an email at
[email protected] and we can talk. It is a long and complicated issue, and i think with some further discussion it makes sense.
