The Hydra of commercial big game hunting in Colorado just keeps sprouting new heads, each one uglier than the last.
Consider the experience of two Colorado hunters during the current rifle season. Let’s start with Bruce Bissett of Littleton, who describes his experience hunting with his family in the second hunt segment in what for them was a new area, the Bears Ears northeast of Craig.
“We walked 50 miles (according to the GPS) during seven days all over the area trying to find the elk herds,” Bissett related. “We ran into countless frustrated hunters. Many recounted similar stories of seeing groups of five-plus gunless horseback riders pushing elk herds down to private property.
“One said he had personal experience of once belonging to a hunting club just south of the Bears Ears area that would put the ranch hands out all night long on the fence posts with lights and noisemakers to keep the elk from jumping out of the private property.”
Bissett said he had previously hunted a less popular area in southern Colorado for 20 years and that the visit to the elk-rich northwest came as something of a shock.
“This year was a real eye-opener to see how much money is being made off the public elk herds, and often at the expense of the general public. There is something very broken in the management of this resource,” said Bissett, who said he has no problem with guides who sell their hard work and talent to those willing to pay.
“But when the system itself makes elk hunting less available and more difficult to the general public, and more of a controlled inheritance of the wealthy, then something is wrong.”
Bissett’s plaint came on the heels of a phone call from Joseph McClure, a Kremmling resident who related a similar incident the day before the start of the second season near Rand.
“Ranchers were going up and down on 4-wheelers driving the elk down. That sort of thing goes on all the time around here,” McClure complained. “They do that stuff and then sell the tags for $5,000. It’s disheartening as heck.”
These examples pinpoint the basic issue of creeping commercialism in big game hunting, particularly as it relates to the present proliferation of exclusive landowner vouchers. Under a law passed three decades ago by a sympathetic legislature, landowners presently receive 15 percent of the most desirable deer and elk licenses before they’re offered to the public.
Vouchers then are sold or transferred through what has become a lively brokerage, complete with Internet bidding ranging into the high four figures. Not content with what amounts to free money at the expense of the average hunter, landowners keep pressing for a bigger slice of the pie.
When the Division of Wildlife recently responded to this continued push with a proposed pilot program for a limited expansion – five private and five public bull elk tags in game management unit 10 – landowner groups predictably clamored for more.
Finding no sportsmen to oppose them at a meeting of the Colorado Wildlife Commission earlier this month, ranchers besieged the policy-making body for a dramatic expansion. As so often happens, the commission caved in, instructing DOW staff to investigate a plan that might include every game management unit requiring five preference points.
A proposal to give eastern Colorado landowners 10 percent of all antelope tags for family members mushroomed to include deer. These issues matters come up for a second reading at the commission’s Dec. 8 workshop in Silverthorne, with a possible resolution in January.
But when it comes to more licenses for landowners, no decision ever is final. It’s just another crack in the dam.
