Events last week revealed that Colorado has a serious system flaw, only this one has nothing to do with the foul-ups at the voting booth.
The reminder came with a phone call from an irate hunter whose elk outing in the Gunnison Country was spoiled by an ugly incident that, in its various forms, has grown all too commonplace.
Camped in the national forest just before the opening of the third big game season, he and a companion found themselves overwhelmed by the arrival of a professional outfitter, complete with two horse trailers, several trucks and a bevy of hunters.
Fair enough, the man figured. It’s everybody’s forest. But things didn’t end there.
“They were very aggressive. Even though there was lots of room, they moved in very close to us,” the caller said. “The guy who seemed to be in charge asked what we were doing here. It was obvious they were trying to get us to leave.”
The report came on the heels of two earlier accounts collected from hunters while traveling to sites in different parts of the state during the first two hunt periods. One complained of a landowner attempt to obscure the boundary to public lands; another told of horsemen hazing elk from public land to a private ranch.
Over the past three years, this writer has collected a stack of e-mails big enough to stuff a pillow reporting similar transgressions, all with a common theme: commercial interests trying for some illegal, or at least shady, edge in the hunting game.
The Bible suggests that the love of money is the root of all evil, which may or may not be true. But when it comes to pay-for-play hunting in Colorado, it’s a darned good start.
This should not suggest that everyone who runs some form of commercial hunting endeavor – either on a private ranch, through the Ranching for Wildlife program or as an independent outfitter – operates outside the bounds of law or propriety. Far from it. But it happens often enough to demand that something be done about it.
Trouble is, these incidents seem to multiply in proportion to the steady raising of the stakes in Colorado’s increasingly commercialized big game environment. When you find our most prized hunting licenses advertised on websites or sold to the highest bidder on e-Bay for sums approaching five figures, then there’s motivation for all sorts of mischief.
Most observers believe we plunged off the deep end seven years ago when the legislature passed a bill that allowed landowner preference tags – that 15 percent of all limited licenses awarded for wildlife stewardship – to be used anywhere in a game management unit.
Thus we find a skewed system that benefits ranchers who may own little or no real big game habitat with a fistful of valuable tags to be sold to brokers or outfitters. Likely as not, these high-rolling hunters wind up not on private land, as was the original intent of landowner preference, but as competition to public hunters on the national forests.
It’s an arrangement that drives greedy landowners to push for even more preference tags, always after a bigger slice of the pie. This pattern will persist until sportsmen unite to stuff the genie back into the jar. This can be done only by changing the law to restrict use of the licenses exclusively to the property of the landowner recipient.
After all, it’s only fair that ranchers who actually play host to deer, elk or antelope reap the reward. Those with no animals should get precisely what they deserve, which is nothing.
Since legislative changes are subject to political wind shifts, there’s only one way to find true resolution, and that is by ballot initiative. It’s a laborious and often costly process, but the ultimate benefit in restoring order and honor to Colorado’s big game hunt is more than worth the effort.
It’ll take another trip to the ballot box to fix it. Hopefully, the system will work next time.
