What I'm about to say is not new.
If you look at the history of bowhunting in this country, it was our modern bowhunting forefathers back in the 1920's-1950's lobbying for things like the privilege to wear camo, and have an extended month-and-a half long season under the argument that archery equipment was low impact and resulted in a negligible harvest of the animals (while simultaneously allowing maximal hunter satisfaction); and that this would not effect game populations in the least.
Their arguments were valid, and this is what enabled them to win the legal battles required to establish these seasons.
However, these arguments were made before even the advent of compounds. It was all recurve and longbows out there; and that's what the seasons were designed for. As far as I'm concerned, compounds don't even belong in our seasons, let alone crossbows.
The hard truth now is that the only result of allowing compounds into our seasons was a boost in the harvest rate of the animals, along with increasing the accessibility of the field to more hunters (including unethical hunters).
However, across the country, DNR's and DEC's see the boost in harvest rate and accessibility as a positive thing. And this is why they are increasingly willing to allow this. After all, there is a lot of pressure on these organizations by the public to REDUCE game populations. And this is what makes game management in 2019 different than in 1947. Back then, due to lack of management, there was a game DEFICIT. In some places (Indiana for instance), deer and turkeys were completely unheard of.
However, game deficits are not the case anymore. In most regions of the country, the deer population is considered to be "at or above carrying capacity", and that is also the case with bears in the catskills. I have spoken with Jeremy Hurst, and every year they are considering adding more and more counties to the early bear season to boost accessibility and increase the harvest rate.
The fact remains though, that our seasons were never designed with accessibility in mind. In fact, one reason these seasons were allowed in, say 1947, when game populations were at a LOW, was because people who possessed the dedication to become effective bowhunters were few-and-far-between and would not significantly affect game populations:
It used to be that a bowhunter was the most die-hard woodsman out there, with the willingness to dedicate his time and energy to practice year round and spend time learning about and building his own equipment, along with dedicating his time in the field to scouting all year. There were no mechanical bows to circumvent this amount of hard work and thus allow other hunters into the field. In fact, back then, there weren't even trail cameras to provide hunters with an avenue to bypass valuable (now-almost-forgotten) scouting techniques, either.
I would like to see state game management organizations devote resources to recruiting and introducing more (ethical) hunters into the field, be they gun hunters, bow hunters, or whatever. This is more of a long term fix to game management than attempting to use archery hunters as management tools, because frankly, we aren't management tools, and were never meant to be either; and it's not right to keep introducing more and more mechanical devices into our season because we don't harvest enough animals. We are supposed to have MINIMAL impact on game populations. Let's leave it that way. From a management perspective, state conservation organizations should attack the real problem: a decline in hunter numbers in general.
Topic: Trad only season (Read 6892 times)
