Originally Posted by
Bukmastr
A lot of people "think" our DNR is run by sound decisions by wildlife managers, but thats not true... Its really run by politicians. During Wisconsin's war on whitetails (cwd) We had a Liberal Democrat in office named Doyle who was working with auto insurance companies to lower the deer population. When hunters would not go along with the plan the disease was used to force it upon them. There were people in the WDNR who were fired for speaking up... And the people Doyle put in charge of making those decisions were not biologists, but instead he put his lawyer in as the head of the DNR and hired other friends to force his rule... Now that we finally got a conservative in office ( Scott Walker ) who is also a hunter and avid outdoorsman, he is leading the change to manage the herd on sound advice from biologists and wildlife experts...
Just yesterday the new Biologist for Jefferson county met with me to look at some of the public land I am very familar with and discuss deer habitat improvement...They would not give a guy like me the time of day when Doyle was in office
Certainly was a shift in management when Doyle got in, which was about the time of CWD. But last year and the 2 years prior, I thought there were still too many antlerless tags given up north. And 3 years ago they were practically giving them away free in our zone in unlimited numbers ($2 each as I remember). Perhaps it has just taken a few years to get this straightened out. I know last year in the unit next to us there were no bonus tags at all in response to hunter feedback and deer numbers. Also, last year, the DNR took hunter feedback seriously, as you mentioned. I went back and forth on emails with the state biologist.
Looking forward to some decent numbers again.