Doc

Actually, it is a stakeholder's driven regulation ( http://www.dec.ny.gov/animals/7207.html ). Looking through the listing of potential stakeholder members of the Citizen Task Force that Cornell/DEC have come up with, if you divide these stakeholder candidates into pro-deer and anti-deer interests, you will see it heavily weighted toward those that would just as soon that deer didn't even exist. Yes, they try to put a face on it all that makes believe that it is being driven by biological factors in order to hold down the public outrage. But in reality it is biological decisions being made by business interests. At least that is how it all appears to me.

I too raised two boys, and even though my hunting days are probably numbered, I still have a vested interest in not only preserving hunting for those two sons, but also in maintaining a quality of hunt that will maybe keep them enjoying hunting as I have for all these years. Yes, I want the enjoyment of the hunt to last into many generations beyond me, and while that thinking into a future beyond myself may be being replaced by the "me first" thinking, and the thought that all you have to do is to have hunting last through your own lifetime. I try to take a longer view of things. That may be to you a doom and gloom attitude, but to me it is pulling one's head out of the sand and actually facing problems before they become problems, if possible and not trying to see how many hunters we can regulate out of the sport. I understand that not everyone wants to hear that sort of thing, and that it is a lot easier to simply look out for yourself and the hell with the generations of the future. I can't adopt that kind of an attitude and it is specifically because my sons and their offspring have to live in the hunting world that I hand them. Doom and gloom, or just a realistic view and concern for those that come after me. Well, you have your view and I have mine, but I am thinking that perhaps it is time to listen to your dad. You might just find out that he really does know what he is talking about, and perhaps he also is taking a longer, more experienced view than you are.

Wow!.... Abortion ..... really? How do you morph a fracking topic into abortion?.....lol.

If the problem is strictly lack of access, then there is no rule or regulation that can be placed on the backs of bowmen that solves that problem. You cannot shoot does only in places that you can't even access. That shows even further how poorly thought out this proposal really is.

Actually, this is the DEC's version of an "Earn-a-Buck". You just have to spend two weeks of doe-only to earn your buck .....lol. Oh, but this applies to the nasty "buck slaying" bow hunters only. Actually, if the DEC is so concerned about bowhunters wasting that part of the season, why stop with just expanding crossbow usage. If you really want to knock the population down, let's be more straight-up about it and stuff muzzle loaders in there too. Wait a minute .... why stop there? just extend gun season forward and give the gunners that part of the season too. That'll knock the herd down even better. Does that all sound a bit facetious? Well it is on my part. As far as the DEC is concerned .... they probably would think that was a real good idea.

All right. That's great news. End of problem....right? Go ahead, you can put your head back in the sand now (or whatever place you've been keeping it stuck in).

And once again we are attacking a management problem through a campaign of harassing the very people we are expecting to do the population cuts with new additional rules and regulations. We just love heaping more and more limitations and then sit around wondering why the size of that army of population controllers dwindles every year. Never mind educational efforts or trying to get hunters on the right page of what the DEC is trying to do. No, instead let's just throw more limitations on hunting and then whine about hunters disappearing. We do love our regs, don't we? EAB, ARs, and all kinds of initial programs each designed to take more and more opportunities away, using the blunt force of the regulation stick. I think a little more persuasion, education, and trying to get hunters on the side of cooperation rather than trying to force hunters into buy-in by just throwing new restrictions and limits and harassments at them every year. I'm afraid that all these fancy fad regs is simply going to regulate hunters right out of existence, and the very thing we are trying to do will be driving out exactly the resources that we need to do it.

I don't think I have ever heard anyone say they enjoy the soothing roar of motorized vehicles echoing off the hills of an otherwise serene wooded valley .... lol. Heck, I don't enjoy the sound of chainsaws and skidders and somebody riding a motorcycle down the road. The drone of a tractor off in the distance or a plane flying overhead can be pretty annoying when you are straining to hear if there is a follow-up noise to that twig that you thought you heard snap. But, people do have the right to use all these things. Weed-eaters, leaf blowers and lawn mowers and other similar noisemakers are simply things that we have to accept. And the sound of ATV's have to get added to that list. Usually, when I hear an ATV somewhere off in the woods, I have no idea whether they are engaged in some arbitrary list of acceptable uses that I have developed. And in reality, it doesn't matter. If they believe that they have a want or need to drive that ATV on their property, it probably is no more my business than if they decide that it is time to mow the lawn or run their roto-tiller or whatever kind of noise-maker that they happen to be wanting to use. There has only been one place that I was ever at that was completely free of man-made sounds, and you wouldn't believe the crazy effort of canoeing miles and making long ugly portages required to get in there ..... lol. And then some big-mouthed loon was making an ugly ruckus that messed up all that peace and quiet .... ha-ha-ha. Let's face it, audio stimuli is just a part of life. You can complain about it, but you can't escape it. Not in this day and age.

That last bit of distance to the stand is the most important as far as being quiet is concerned. If you walk in on the deer in the dark making all kinds of noise (ATV motor), they may not go charging out of the area, but it is pretty certain that they won't be wandering around in the area that just got disturbed. So, I agree, it is a real bad idea to drive to your stand. I think when the time comes that I am so beaten down that I have to ride to my stand, perhaps I should re-evaluate whether it is even safe to be out in the woods by myself in the first place.

How seriously can you take this nonsense when the DEC decided to discourage hunters from getting permits by charging for the applications. That is the old case of them talking out of both sides of their mouths.

Ha-ha-ha ...... When it comes to bowhunters, the DEC giveth and the DEC taketh away.

I honestly believe that opening bow season to guns will happen. That issue of an early muzzle-loader season hasn't really gone away yet. I think the DEC regrets putting so much of the deer season in the hands of a bunch of buck hunters. I overheard a DEC person talking to a group of other DEC people call bowhunters a bunch of buck-hunters during a break at one of the public state-of-the-herd meetings. I am sure that the attitude at the DEC is that bow season is a waste of good deer harvesting time that could be used much more efficiently with firearms.

Now it looks like there will be a massive recall on airbags. Why? because on deployment they explode showering the passenger compartments with shards of metal. Imagine that. If the crash doesn't kill you your airbag will ..... lol. Used to be that cars would nickel and dime you to death with piddly little problems. Now they just design them so they kill you outright.

Every year that goes by, I lose a bit more durability. Having already had a stroke, I do wonder about what kind of stress I should be putting my body through. And then there is the fact that we now call the hill a killer because we lost our neighbor, who was younger than me by quite a bit, to a heart attack 1/2 way up the hill. The fact is that I actually walk more ground because of the ATV. Rather than using all my energy just getting up the hill, I generally park just under the top ridge to keep the sound over the edge, and walk up about 50 yards to the crest and walk wherever I want to from there. It means that I can hunt quite a bit deeper in than I would be able to if I didn't have the ATV. Now, all that sounds like I am trying to justify my using the ATV as a hunting assist. I am not. I used the quad since the early 80's for transport and for dragging deer out because it made sense to extend my distance, and to use the assist for deer dragging. There is no virtue to hunting harder, and no vice to hunting smarter.

As long as wildlife management is looked at as discretionary spending by the state government, and state budgets are balanced by withholding funding from the DEC, nothing can be done about the poaching situation. But I wonder if an agency who seems to worry only about eliminating deer from the landscape are really putting forth a maximum effort in fighting poaching. Apparently we have two competing philosophies at work in the DEC. One half concentrates on how to whack on the deer population while they are also want to give the appearance that they need to safeguard the herd with strict poaching enforcement. I wonder which philosophy is winning out?

I can't believe that they can't remove enough does through the permitting system. Heck, if they are serious about wiping down the deer population, just eliminate the permits completely in select areas and place a daily bag limit like they do down south. I know there are enough game hogs around to knock the hell out of the deer population under those rules. Want to thin them out? ..... legalize jack-lighting. Hunt them with dogs. Open a snare season. Come-on get as ridiculous as you need. Enough of those kinds of rules, and they'll get the herd down to the level where you'll hardly ever see one, which is apparently what they are really after. I mean if you want to eliminate the herd, there are a lot more effective ways of doing it than taking away hunting opportunities from bow hunters (and soon to be x-bow hunters).

Anybody ever wonder if maybe we are asking our cars to do just a little too much for us these days? Yeah, I realize how great it is to have the wonderful long life, high mileage and super conveniences on the modern cars. I do remember when getting a car to go 100,000 miles was almost unheard of. But really, some of these things that go wrong these days are absolutely aimed at killing the driver and occupants. No prior warnings, the car just decides on its own that it is going to take off at top speed? Damn! what if there had been a line of cars in front of her? What if she was just coming into a hairpin curve? What if their was a busy intersection coming up that had a stop light or a stop sign? The ugly scenarios go on and on. It seems that maybe some of the design standards need a bit of tightening. I know that I don't ever want to encounter something like that. I might not be quite as lucky.

Are these all things that you did before turning tail and crawling out of the state in defeat? Did you withhold your payroll and property taxes as a protest before you ran away? Maybe all that stuff sounds so much better as advice for others than as actual deeds for yourself. It's much easier to run away than to follow your own advice, isn't it?

I will guarantee that such a rule will immediately be followed by the biggest buck of my lifetime walking in at 15 yards posing broadside, and then turning around and posing with the other side exposed, followed by a sound that is very much like laughter.

Ha-ha ...... you beat me to it. I just logged on to make the same request. I would like to read the info myself. This is again another slap in the face from the DEC toward bowhunters. It appears that the DEC is developing a pretty standard anti-bowhunting attitude and set of policies. Oh and by the way, those of you that are trying to get full inclusion of x-bows in archery season, you might want to pay attention to this also.

We all understand how thin the DEC's enforcement line is. And I have no difficulty imagining how frustrating it must be to not be able to field every complaint that comes in. But there really is no excuse for not getting back with a complainant with a status, or even an up-front admission that they might not be able to get to every complaint received rather than just leaving those reporting crimes just hanging. If you are serious about promoting citizen involvement in reporting violations, you cannot simply ignore the complaints that people do take the time to report.

I'm curious what system you would replace ours with, and exactly what have you done to make that happen besides scampering away like a frightened rabbit and fleeing the state. I'm not trying to be too critical, but it seems to me that if you have so much to say about how others face up to the problems of NYS governance, you must have some pretty good ideas on exactly what to do to straighten up the system, and a pretty impressive list of things that you have already done. And I do not consider running away from problems to be one of those things.

Actually there are many things to be "worried about". It is good not to get so focused on one thing that you lose track of all the others that are sneaking up on you. Regarding having a drinking water supply that does not poison you or cause a third arm to grow out of your head, it should be noted that we humans really do need a water supply that isn't lethal. That probably sits kind of high on the priority list of things to keep track of. It's certainly not an issue that should be dictated by financial concerns.

Oh, exactly right. There is another subject that has no shortage of armchair experts. You listen to some of the opinions on either side of that issue, and it has you scanning the walls for displayed hanging doctorate degrees.....lol. Everybody is an expert ...... just ask them. A lot of them can parrot back volumes of data that they have carefully sifted and sorted through that represents their chosen point of view.

Unfortunately this is one of the realities of hunting other people's property. Land use is quite an ever-changing thing, and today's honey-hole can turn into tomorrow's housing development. I would hate to say how many prime hunting spots have been replaced by a house, yard and out-buildings and a jillion little screaming kids running all over the place, over the decades. I have had dirt-bikes, and campers take over my favorite stand areas, simply raising the constant level of human activity to an unhuntable state. I see all this "people pollution" as being one of the biggest challenges to hunting today.