Nomercy448

I don't have a problem putting a $17.50 tag on a 250lb buck that generates over 100lbs of meat for my table. I don't have a problem reporting my harvest on one buck per year.

I do have a problem with spending $3 to get about a pound of meat off of a pheasant, and with a daily limit of 4 and an 80 day season... I've gone one day out of many years and only gotten one bird. I've bought a license that entitles me to hunt pheasant, and on some seasons, I might bag out 10 days - that's $120 for this hunter, and 40 harvest reports...

I don't care what your deer to pheasant harvest number looked like, or what your birds per hunter ratio might be - you should know enough to understand that a pheasant isn't a whitetail buck, and that hunters of their right mind won't pay $3 per bird for a d@mn pheasant.

I'm all for thinking outside the box to generate conservation fund volume, but this is nothing but pure gouging. Those 62,000 hunters each year put additional mileage on low traffic volume back-roads, which I'm sure accounts for a sizable proportion of the annual total traffic on those roads - would you promote a user tax on road utilization for hunters?

Would you promote a charge for all small game? Pheasants are NOT big game, nor regulated migratory species. Would you support a tagging fee for every squirrel or rabbit hunted? Might as well start calling it the "king's herd" if we all have to tag up on every animal we kill in a year. Resultantly as well, you'd be looking at unlawful hunting, aka "poaching," criminal charges for anyone that didn't pay $3 per animal to go take their son out in the back 40 and shoot rabbits.

All I'm reading on the page is that you're trying to find some way to gouge money out of hunter's paychecks, then justifying it by saying that a non-analogous animal costs X dollars or that the price of gas is too high...