Doc

That's a great definition for as long as it stands. But we have seen how easy it is to arbitrarily change equipment definitions in bow seasons. You are setting up your own definitions, but you have no legal or authoritative standing to set those definitions and as we have seen, even if you did have such standing your definitions would only hold until the next guy comes along with his ideas of what constitutes legitimate equipment in bow seasons. Let's face it, today it is a free-for-all with an "anything goes" mentality. If someone wants your season, they will have it. It's just a matter of time. If muzzleloaders want to get into bow season, it will happen, and no amount of re-adjusting equipment logic or definitions will stop them.

Yeah people like to "bicker". Like when bowhunters said that bow season should be for bows, there were a bunch of people who wanted to argue with that, basically saying, "were coming into your season whether you like it or not, so move the hell over". Think that's bad, wait until the muzzleloaders say the same thing to the crossbow people. No matter what you may have worked years to set up, there are always those jealous people that come along afterward and want to shove their way in. And then the bickering begins. It is inevitable. There's always somebody who wants what you have. We all know that there are a whole lot of rifle hunters that would just love to have access to the bow season, and someday will be coming for it. And then, once again, you will hear "bickering". Get used to it. I won't end until there are no more "special seasons".

I cannot shoot a gun off-hand worth a crap. Because of that, all my stands have built in gun rests, and I have never really had a problem getting those nice horizontal surfaces to rest my gun on. Everything but the sandbags ..... lol. It's a pretty deadly arrangement. Doing the same with a crossbow would be absolutely no problem. For still hunting with a gun, I have a primos trigger bipod that works great. I can't see it being any more of a problem for a crossbow. But maybe there is something I'm not seeing that makes these things not work for crossbows.

We all have our own theories as to why hunters are dropping out, but not too many theories as to what to do about it. Most sign on to the weak attempts around special youth seasons. We throw our support around that thought and then declare that the problem is solved. I always thought that such programs are marginal at best in terms of effectiveness and instead supported more aggressive plans that in my mind would be a lot more effective. My favorite thought has always been for direct DEC involvement in public school assembly programs, and even school courses that taught outdoor activities including hunting and fishing. What a perfect way to recruit youth. Replies to that thought always involved a fair level of ridicule and comments that basically said that such a thing would never work and could never be accepted and implemented. Well imagine my surprise when I picked up the outdoor section of our local paper and learned that for the past 8 years, West Virginia has been doing exactly that and with an accompanying reversal in new license sales. Instead of the 20% drop in license sales over the last decade, they recorded an increase in sales of 9% per year since the school curriculum included a hunter education class. And apparently 6 other states have since introduced legislation to do exactly the same thing because of West Virginia's demonstrated success. A little out-of-the-box thinking has been applied with real positive and provable results. 17 states have passed laws to create "apprentice hunting licenses" which allows kids supervised by a trained mentor to sample the sport before completing the required 8-12 hour hunter safety course work. Other states have passed constitutional guarantees for hunting rights which essentially is a governmental endorsement of hunting. But here we are in NYS patting ourselves on the back for special youth seasons and then declaring success and walking away from any further thought on the subject. There are some states that are actually addressing the problem of shrinking hunter populations and showing positive results.

That is an excellent thought. In fact one of the best holidays for that is anytime during the Thanksgiving week. The kids have the whole week off and normally it is an excellent week of deer hunting. The fact is that Thanksgiving week usually gives the opportunity to get friends and relatives an opportunity to interface with the new hunter to show the camaraderie and social aspects of deer hunting rather than picking times when all of these people are excluded from participation. When you are trying to pick the ideal situations for hunting introduction, pick a time that is representative of what deer hunting is really all about.

There are so many options available that would be better choices that it really made me wonder about the motivation of putting it where they did. Probably the one thing that bothered me the most was the additional precedent that featured the intermixing of guns and bows. It was just one more step that demonstrated an attitude that mixing the two is no longer a concern. Given the fact that there were other options, the message being sent by the DEC attitudes and choices is obvious. One point of clarification should be made. I do not find fault with how the youth season impacts bowhunting successes, other than some unlikely but possible potential safety concerns that are obvious anytime you combine those two weapons with deer hunting. But the major concern for the activity itself is the fact that many potential mentors are forced to choose between mentoring and their own bow hunting (that can't be of benefit to increasing the available pool of mentors). I am not arguing as to whether that should be a conflict in terms of right or wrong, only a statement that it likely does cause a conflict and for no reason at all given all the other alternative dates.

I would have thought that if their policy was a blazing success, we would have heard that by now. They sure could use the positive PR ..... lol.

I understand where that thought comes from. It is simple..... Many (most?) gunhunters would love to force their way into bow seasons and enjoy the benefits that bowhunters have fought hard to establish over the years. They just don't want to use a bow and undergo all the pain of mastering that particular weapon. They want the bennys without the effort. Well now they have the crossover weapon that allows them to do that. We'll see if we become another Ohio where the bow season is now a "crossbow season" where they happen to allow you to still use your vertical bow. You have to admit that a crossbow is a very attractive alternative weapon for those who don't like all that archery form and discipline crap. So we wind up with a simple re-distributing of hunters from gun season to bow season. All those reasons that so many took up the bow for. The attempt to escape the frenetic party atmosphere of gun season for relative peace and quiet of the bowhunting world will undergo an irreversible change to something that represents a gun season without the bang.

I think that is a pretty good guess.

Hunting becoming a rich man's sport? ..... ha-ha-ha .... Some of it is apparently.

But, where has the news coverage of NYS hogs gone. Word has it that if you have a breeding population in the wild, before you know it you will be buried in them. And yet, we are not seeing any proliferation, in fact they seem to be disappearing. Maybe it's because the new DEC edict of "don't shoot them, let us do it" has worked. Who knows? Nobody in the DEC is making any of their results public. At least not that I have heard anyway.

Ha-ha-ha .... looky here, we have just fought the crossbow battle all over again. We could have saved a lot of time and went back into the archives and copy and pasted the jillions of threads that have already been posted for the last bunch of years. Funny how none of the discussion has changed a bit over all those years. Same old points and insults and remarks. This is an endless argument that really has absolutely nothing to do about the weapons involved. It is really about mind-sets and attitudes and individual reasons for hunting. And since we are all individuals, the debate will go on forever.

That is one thing that makes perfect sense to me. There is no justification for allowing crossbows and then continue to disallow drawlocks for able bodied hunters. They are just two minor variations of the same thing.

It will keep you out in the field during a season that was designed for bows, but you will be playing in a different "game". When you are unable to remain proficient with your vertical bow, picking up a xbow will not mean that you are still bowhunting anymore than picking up a gun would mean that you are still bowhunting. It's a minor point, but just a clarification of what the xbow is really doing for those that have lost the physical ability to bowhunt. I believe it is a common mis-statement when people say that the crossbow allows one to bowhunt past their physical capabilities. It simply allows one to use a different weapon during bowseason. My answer to that scenario is that when I am incapable of bowhunting (as will happen some day) my hunting will rely on my .270 and I will hunt in a season that was designed for that.

There is not one element in your argument that does not equally apply to the justification of guns in place of bows. I know about the "bang" argument, but if we are concerned about the potential for bowhunters not mastering their weapons, then we are perhaps saying that a bow is not a proper deer hunting weapon because there are some people who will not master the weapon. We cannot say that just because a weapon can be used irresponsibly we need to allow more efficient weapons. I think you can see where that logic would lead us.

It's not "completely different" you said you should be able to do something simply because you want to, and it should be your choice. And I am telling you that there are rifle hunters and shotgunners who want exactly the same thing.

And, when you become DEC Commissioner or someone who has the power to mandate such policy, I might even back such a proposal. But until then, I have to deal with the realities of what's on the books and what history tells us is most likely to be our future. Already we have moves toward mixing the seasons. We have muzzleloaders being stirred in and being threatened to be included as well as special rifle seasons being added to bow seasons. I see no indication that your proposal will ever see the light of day. In fact, there is more evidence that people will be (and are already) questioning why there is a special bow season at all.

So now we have to try to fool kids into thinking that all hunting involves nice warm pleasant days watching all the pretty colored leaves and enjoying the solitude of a dead-quiet woods. How long do you think that little charade is going to last when they get a taste of the real thing .... lol. My thinking was that if you really thought a special youth season paid off with new recruits, the attention should have shifted to how we get as many adults as possible to mentor these new recruits. And you don't really do that by placing the season such that mentors have to decide whether they want to do that or go hunting themselves. You never get the maximum numbers of mentors when you are forcing them to pass up a good hunting day. The youth hunt should be a real special season that doesn't compete with anything if you are serious about maximizing the number of mentors.

Expectations ....... The hunting shows on TV and videos set newcomers up for failure. They illustrate typical hunting scenarios as a little slice of heaven where the weather is great, the deer are plentiful and always big. Antler scores are emphasized, and the ease with which trophies are harvested are always exaggerated. Sitting on the couch in the living room never gives any indication of how uncomfortable things can really get. All of this TV representation of hunting makes the realities of hunting hit a lot harder when the newcomer finally sits in that blind and has a few hours to decide he never wants to do this again.

My ability to range distances simply using my own senses varies from one day to the next, but never is good enough that I would risk a bow shot without having done some preliminary ranging with my Nikon rangefinder. I have seen studies that show how terrible humans are at distance estimation. Here in our hunting areas, when using rifles and even a shotgun, distances are usually so close that it doesn't pay to pack a rangefinder (most of the time).

Compared to past years, this is a phenomenal stat. Maybe we should take a minute to pat ourselves on the back a bit. It would be interesting to know just what accounts for this. Is it some huge improvement in hunter safety training, or maybe safety being publicized better, or is it the shrinking hunters, or more blaze orange or any of a number of other things that might influence that number?

If you had the occasion to witness one of these attacks by dogs, you might start wondering yourself just how much has really changed between wild wolves and supposedly domesticated dogs. The behavior sure wasn't typical of the typical lazy dog flopped out on the living room floor. That switch got turned by something from their primal past, and they definitely were not acting very domestic.

Or, maybe he was just using terminology that best describes what happened in laymen terms. I have no problem with describing a situation of killing without consuming as sport killing. It probably is not a term that I would use, but the point made was that the killing that day was not for sustenance but simple killing for killing's sake. That's not "anthropomorphizing, that is simply an attempt to be descriptive. And like I said, I have seen dogs do it and I think that the term "sport killing" might be what first comes to mind. How accurate is that term? I don't know, but it sure does convey the results.

You bet, I have answered this question so many times that there really doesn't seem to be any reason to repeat myself. And never any rebuttal because no one can refute what I am saying. Back in the days when it still mattered and could have made a difference, I was on the wrong side of the compound issue. I was for inclusion of compounds. Like the majority back then, I was not listening to those who claimed that mechanizing bowhunting was setting some precedents that would eventually lead to a changing of bow season to the point where the title "bow season" would lose all meaning and identity. So now we sit back with a little history at hand to provide proof that their fears have been borne out. I can now say that I was wrong and they were absolutely right. The compound did indeed form the precedent for the crossbow. No question about that now. We watched all the pro-crossbow arguments and if anyone was paying attention, "precedent" was always the trump card. And here we are, beginning chapter 2. What will the crossbow be the precedent for as we continue to de-archery bow season. Oh, we have plenty of things coming at us. Already on the horizon is air-guns and air-bows and anything else that technology can dream up. Lines have been so blurred that now the DEC threatens to add muzzleloaders into the season as though it no longer matters that firearms are being introduced. We have rifles already introduced and intermixed into a couple of days of bow season. And why not. That change already has been added to the growing list of precedents. As lines get more and more smudged, the differences between archery seasons and gun seasons get less and less defined. Bow hunting is being evolved right out of existence as more and more people begin to ask, "what is really the reason for a 'special season' and 'special regulations' for weapons that don't really need it anymore?" Is there any reason for special seasons? More and more people are beginning already to ask that question, and perhaps rightly so. Special seasons? ... special rules? is that getting to be an obsolete idea? At one time bow season was a rather benign low impact form of hunting that drew little attention. The idea of some special seasons and rules actually had some necessity and justification. That necessity is being erased a piece at a time ..... one precedent at a time.

There are a whole bunch of rifle and shotgun hunters who WANT to force themselves into bow season also. Should they too be allowed into bow season simply because they want to? Should that be their choice?