Ben Lurkin;
Good afternoon to you sir, I hope the day down in your section of Utah is going well.
Thanks for the coyote derby story, I was hoping we Canucks weren't the only ones who had folks who'd cheat to win a coyote "derby".
In truth the local Ministry of Environment took a very dim view of our gun club running it, but we felt that when the fur prices dropped and everyone had stopped shooting them, we'd ended up with too many.
Since the ministry said no to a straight up "contest", we came up with the idea to run it over the winter and have folks turn in the tails so we could get a population sampling for mange. Then we'd pass that data onto the MoE and it's be "legit-ish"...
The first year everyone more or less stuck to the rules and I want to say the winner had 7 or 8 over the season and the runner's up were close so it seemed kosher. Then we - the club - paid out the top 3...
Well, next year the top guy had something like 21 when everyone else was down in single digits.
We paid out, but heard rumors and those of us running it smelled Rodentia somewhere, you know?
The next year it was the same thing and we'd heard from a few people who were picking up road kills and giving them to him, so we paid out and shut the contest down - er well the population sampling down I mean.
Folks are funny when it comes to competition, that's for sure. Too bad too but that's the way we humans seem to tend to be.
Regardless sir, I wish you a good remainder of the weekend and all the best this hunting season.
Dwayne
