Originally Posted by
MountainHunter
I just looked at the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and found two new laws that just don't make sense to me. I figured I would post it on Huntingnet, so that hunters are aware of the changes and also to get other hunters' takes on the new laws.
The first one especially affects Bowhunters, since we need to get closer to the deer. It is now illegal in Virginia to use any attractant that uses deer urine or any other bodily fluid when hunting or scouting for deer. The reason is to prevent the spread of CWD in Virginia, which is a good end, I suppose, but this new law is massive overkill. Apparently, the CWD can exist in bodily fluids from deer for a long time, and some doe pee, etc. is harvested in areas that have CWD. OK, I guess that makes some sense, but...
The problem is that this prohibition includes using urine tarsal glands from deer harvested in Virginia (including deer harvested by the hunter using the attractant), which has only had 10 cases of CWD and that from a VERY limited geographic area. It's kind of like quarantining the entire state of Virginia because two towns had 10 cases of AIDS.
The second change with which I disagree is that bear licenses are now separate from other big game. Up until this year, Virginia had one license that a hunter had to purchase that authorized him or her to hunt deer, wild turkey and bear. Now, if you want to hunt bear, whose season overlaps the other two big game seasons, you have to buy a separate license. There are two problems with this, as I see it. The first is that, if the license no longer authorizes a hunter to hunt one species, then the price should be reduced, which it wasn't, and the bear license is almost as much as the other big game license was (and still is). The other major issue is that bear have become more and more of a nuisance species here in Virginia. Bears have been spotted this year in Vienna, McLean and here in the Lansdowne area of Leesburg! Not to mention that my friend's Australian Shepard was mauled by a bear last year. And the annual bear harvest has been climbing significantly for more than a decade. I started hunting bears last year because they are nuisance species (not so much for the meat, which I don't care much for, but can find a good "home" for). We need to incentivize people to reduce the population, not make it more expensive!
Any feedback on these?
Well, I can pretty much bet that you answered your own question there. The HARVESTS have been on the rise so the state saw an opportunity to make some money seeing as you all were seeing many more Bear now (thanks to the conservation efforts that our hunting dollars pay for) so why not make a separate license. Va's licenses have been pretty cheap for a long time. They have kept them low while the cost of managing wildlife and property has been rising. How do you think all that land gets paid for? You don't think the tree huggers and PETA are paying for it do you? Nope, it's hunters dollars that pay for it. Va has some of the cheapest licenses in the country.