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.
