As former DNR secretary under Tommy Thompson I think he knows the legislative process better than anyone. Also has anyone read the article Whitetail Nation in the most recent NRA hunters magazine? It's mostly about the problems in PA but also shows just how bad this situation is here with allowing the barstool biologists to run the show.

Wisconsin Wildlife Federation Opposes Legislative Management of Deer Herd

By George Meyer, Executive Director

From past issues of the Wisconservation, you have read about the major battle between the Natural Resources Board and the State Legislature on which body should manage the Wisconsin deer herd. The DNR worked over the course of a year with the major deer hunting groups to restructure the deer season for 2006 and 2007. All except one group signed onto a new season framework that was adopted by the Natural Resources Board in December.

The Association of Wisconsin Snowmobile Clubs objected to that portion of the rule that would have created a four-day firearm season the second Thursday through Saturday in December. The legislature sided with the snowmobile groups over all of the hunting groups and the DNR even though the snowmobile trails north of Highway 8 have only been open two of the last fifteen years. The legislative committees proposed to move that four day December hunt to the first Thursday through Saturday in December north of Highway 8, smack dab in the middle of the muzzle loading season. In addition there were major objections to that legislative change due to severe enforcement complications and that the season would provide insufficient deer herd control. To its credit, the Natural Resources Board rejected that proposal because it failed to provide adequate sound and scientific management of the deer herd.

The latest legislative excursion into deer management is Assembly Bill 1129. The bill basically takes away DNR’s authority to manage the deer herd for two years by prohibiting the DNR from establishing an all-firearm herd reduction season before the traditional nine day November season and prohibits them from implementing any earn-a-buck herd control. The bill also directs DNR to issue a specific number of additional anterless tags for gun and archery hunting. The bill does establish a four-day October anterless-only muzzle loading season with a $24 license with the money from that license going into the animal damage account. Similar to the Natural Resource Board proposal, the bill does establish an October youth hunting season.

The Wisconsin Wildlife Federation, based on past Board of Director decisions, is opposing this bill for two main reasons: First, the bill removes the authority of the Natural Resources Board to manage Wisconsin’s deer herd in a professional manner based on sound science. It basically takes the basic management methods out of DNR’s hands and supplants their professional management with non-professional political judgments. This is a major turning point in natural resource management in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Conservation Commission (now the Natural Resources Board) was created in 1928 by Aldo Leopold and others for the very specific reason of instituting professional natural resource management in the state and removing the pervasive and harmful political management of wildlife in the state that was occurring at that time.

If you are a trapper, bear hunter, duck hunter, walleye angler or trout fisherman you had better be very concerned about this precedent of the legislature taking over the management of any species by setting seasons, establishing numbers of tags and taking other management tools away from the Natural Resources Board. If any non-hunting or fishing group sways the legislature with their political clout and campaign funds, your particular form of hunting, fishing or trapping could be in serious jeopardy. Think of the precedent ten to fifteen years down the road when we may have a legislature that does not hold our hunting, fishing and trapping values.

Secondly, the bill will not work in terms of reducing the deer herd. It supposedly is intended to save deer hunters from the disliked earn-a-buck system. Well, in fact, if this bill were passed, it will result in the state being border-to-border earn-a-buck for at least one if not two years, because the deer season framework established in the bill will not kill enough deer. Why is that?

The deer herd reduction theory behind the bill is that if you give every gun and archery deer hunter two or three anterless tags they will kill enough deer in the nine-day season to reduce the deer population. The supporters of the proposal point to the 2000 deer season as proof that it will work.

However, I can tell you as the former DNR Secretary during the 2000 deer season, that season has virtually no chance of being replicated again and any wildlife manager that you talk to will confirm this statement. Here is why: In 2000 the pre-hunt deer population was 1.8 million deer in contrast to the 2005 pre-hunt 1.4 million deer. In 2000 there were 695,000 hunters in contrast to the current 650,000 hunters. And while there also were many additional tags issued, the 2000 season (in contrast to AB 1129) had both October and December 4-day hunts and 66,000 deer were killed in the October hunt. In addition 99 of the 120 deer management units were herd reduction zones. Lastly the traditional-nine day gun deer season had virtually perfect hunting conditions including snow cover throughout most of the state.

All those conditions will not occur in the 2006 and 2007 hunting season and as a result of the limited AB 1129 herd reduction tools we simply will not kill enough deer. The result will be that after this two-year “legislative experiment” we will need major, major herd reduction efforts through October hunts and earn-a-buck.

Deer hunters should not buy the tempting promises of AB 1129. It simply will not work.