Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting MT Seeks Public Input on Elk Hunting Seasons

Wouldn't mind seeing them work with landowners to get like a youth (15 and under) late season cow hunt.

Without connections or big money just TRY to get hunting access there.

Let our elk eat their private fiefdoms.

None. Zilch. Zero.

Which is exactly what they deserve in return, as opposed to special seasons, licenses, and quotas. The land is theirs - the animals are not.

The landowners, in some cases, not all, but some, want to play hard ball with the public- "It's my land, keep the hell off, and we won't even let you do corner crossings to access public land."
But, they want, like Greenhorn said, special seasons, crop damage reparations, land owner permits, etc.
The public could just as easily play hardball with them- When they are making a profit from a publicly owned resource, i.e. game animals, charge THEM for each animal they take. Also, say if you don't want crop damage, put an elk proof fence around your property, and we'll remove our elk. If you don't fence your property, outfit on your land but don't allow public hunting, we will charge you legally as a public nuisance for harboring too many elk.
But, somehow, I don't see that happening!

That corner crossing deal is pphucking ridiculous.

I agree with that. But if we're talking about getting access for the general public to hunt their land when large herds use it as a refuge to avoid hunting pressure on public land (I thought we were) then it seems fair to give them something in return. Not only fair, but maybe the only way to get them to cooperate.

Take a look at SB-425 and the components of it and you will see that it was designed to allow more hunting opportunities and access to private land without the hunter/landowner conflicts. There are people in the FWP that are guilty of poor management practices that benefit no one. Kurt Ault was involved with the closing down of those late season cow permits, years ago. SB-425 was an attempt to allow more hunting regardless of the land ownership...

This is the last thing Montana needs. If there are too many elk, the land owner should allow access during the ten weeks of hunting season. I would like to see damage hunts done away with all together.

I agree with that but it's not the world we live in now.

With some of the stunts I've seen pulled on both public and private land, I can't blame landowners for wanting to restrict access to their property.

There's lots of great landowners in MT that are great stewards of their land, many of which have outfitting, or little to no public hunting allowed. We all still benefit from these guys. They owe the public nothing. If I owned a large ranch, I would not allow hunting other than for my family and friends.

That said, it's a bunch of BS when some will rub shoulders with their favorite buddy politician (or vice versa) to have some special seasons, licenses, or hunts, to their benefit, and maybe to those happy as a fly on a turd to load up the pickup and gun down cows over the door frame of the truck.

With a ten week season, last thing MT needs is rifle (shoulder) hunts before archery season, or after the season. Would be a shame to be like Colorado someday when we'll have to pick our hunt, one of 6 seasons, each a week long, one weapon. While watching (insert celebrity name here) gun down a big rutting bull on a private ranch on a special landowner license. It's really only a matter of time.

Mule Deer's post above is 100% accurate.

I don't disagree with any of that and I'm not saying MT should be like CO because our season structure sucks. I wish we had a 10 week season, but it ain't gonna happen in my lifetime.

And I'm not advocating any "gunning down cows over the doorframe;" that's not how it's done. I went along on one of those hunts and I'm pretty sure we didn't hunt from the truck, because I remember putting a hind quarter on my shoulder and carrying it a mile. Just another way to thin herds that bunch up on private land.

Landowner tags is a subject into itself, and the politics here are worse than MT. But if a guy has a big spread, he should get some tags to hunt his own land. And if someone wants to pay him 15K to shoot a bull, I figure that's their business, and nobody else's.

Personally, I'd rather hunt public land.

Montana gives landowners a break when applying for tags to hunt their own land, but does NOT provide them tags to sell to other people.

I don't think anybody here is arguing that landowners can't charge hunters a trespass fee. It's their land and they can do that for whatever purpose.

Instead, we're talking about landowners who start whining about too many elk eating and tromping grass or crops, after years of not allowing any hunting. When they then demand some sort of special hunt to solve their problem, INCLUDING the "right" to pick the hunters, then people who've been shut off that land for years tend to get upset.

Part of the problem is that many of these ranches do allow hunting for trophy bulls, for what's essentially a large trespass fee, but don't allow any cow hunting. Which is why elk tend to head there after the shooting starts on public land surrounding those ranches. Taking a few trophy bulls, if done carefully, doesn't push the elk off the land, but shooting more cows can, along with reducing the overall herd to more tolerable levels.

"Tolerable" is a funny word, however, when applied to big game populations. It almost always means "tolerable to landowners," not to anybody else. Hunters find it hard to believe there are too many elk in Montana, and they should be skeptical, because there isn't any area of the state where the ground has been overgrazed solely by elk. Instead the elk-population goals proposed anywhere in Montana are primarily to keep landowners from squawking.

The damage hunt system used now tends to work pretty well if all we're talking about is killing some elk. My wife participated in an early damage hunt last fall, and it did involve hunting, not shooting elk out of a pickup, because the ranch only allowed foot access. The rule was for ONE hunter on the damage roster to be on the ranch for 10 days, or until they killed a cow. Two previous hunters had taken cows, and between that little bit of hunting pressure and hot weather, it took four days for Eileen to get hers. But that sort of limited hunting does not keep herds from growing, and allowing general cow hunting probably wouldn't kill any more cows, because hunting pressure would be so heavy the elk would leave the ranch--and then come back after hunting season.

I have been lucky enough to hunt a couple of ranches within an hour of where we live for bulls, a week or two after the rifle season started. On BOTH occasions I glassed at least three dozen branch-antlered bulls, mostly 6x6's, on one long mountainside park. They were there not because of wolves around the ranches, because on one ranch a pack of wolves had been living there for couple of years. In fact we ran into the pack while retrieving a downed bull one day. The elk preferred staying on the ranch with a few wolves because of the very low human hunting pressure. (This may or may not be true in other places, but in this case that's exactly how it worked.)

Both of those ranches allowed an outfitter to take a very limited numbers of bulls, and one allowed several dozen hunters to take cows toward the end of the season. But the owner of the other ranch didn't allow any cow hunting except by himself, and he rarely took one. I even had a cow tag in my pocket while hunting the place, but could not shoot one, which is why there were "too many elk" on the place.

Now, in Europe or Africa, too many wild animals on a piece of property would be solved by the landowner, professional cullers, or whoever else the landowner chose killing a bunch. This is because the game belongs to the landowner, and can even be sold in supermarkets and restaurants, so becomes a commercial commodity. In fact when a hunter "buys" a hunt in Europe, he often doesn't get the entire animal unless the contract specifically says so. In the Czech Republic, for instance, he gets the head and the guts, but if he wants the meat too he has to buy it from the landowner.

That's not how we chose to have things work in the U.S., but that's essentially how it works out in some states such as Colorado, where the landowner is awarded tags that can be sold to other people. The precise legal system may be not be strictly like Europe's, but the effect is exactly the same--the privatization of wildlife that supposedly is held in trust by the state for all citizens.

So, back to the should season hunts- What are the pros, and what are the cons, in your opinions?

Pro- Special seasons might appease some landowners into opening up their land to more public hunting

CON-Could also be argued that if we have special seasons and they control elk numbers, it might reduce the need for landowners to allow more public hunting

CON Special seasons are an added expense for FWP

PRO-Special seasons give added hunting opportunities, and often easier hunting for the young, elderly, disabled, fat or lazy.

CON-With ten weeks of hunting now, no one needs more hunting opportunities

Anybody got all the right answers here? I sure as hell don't.

Royce

MD, thanks for the explanation, makes perfect sense. Lots of different angles here. Colorado's landowner tag system is slanted toward the landowners so badly it's pathetic. Their landowner tags are good not only for their property, but the whole Unit that their land is in and some of those units take years and years to draw. And they can sell the vouchers. Ag. Is a powerful lobby here. RFW is just a tool to give public land hunters access to remove some cows and put meat in the freezer, one of the few aspects of the landowner system here that benefits the average hunter.

I believe CO just went from a 1:1 public:private tag system to a proposed 1:3 public:private did they not? They did so against the comments and opposition of every major (and even all the not so major) conservation and sporting organizations in the state and nationally that commented, too.

My understanding is, that only applies to RFW, not the landowner tag allocations on the whole, and also that it's just a proposal at this point, not a done deal.

What a load of crap.

"the wolves chased all the elk to private" is usually an excuse used by guys that can't kill elk.

"Wolves did it" is his excuse for damned near everything.

The "wolverine" thread is an epic display of his stupidity, if you're interested.

You'll have to get used to Varmintguys logic- For example, he has explained the reason there are 2000 head of elk on one ranch in Dillon is because the wolves ate all the elk.

Mule Deer nailed it. And the wolf excuse gets ever weaker. mtmuley