Being unemployed, I don't condemn any person if they need to take an animal for food. It's the laws of men that say you can't. The laws of Nature don't. The laws of men are far, far from perfect and still a far piece from even right or fair in many cases. There is a huge difference between what is "legal" and what is right. For example, there are rich guys coming here from out-of-state hiring out some-odd thousand dollar guides and going after elk that a poor local resident here won't get drawn for and, therefore, has no chance at. The rich guy is after the head for the wall. The poor guy who won't get drawn needs the meat. But, really, the poor guy can't afford the elk tag in the first place, either. An elk tag here costs a resident $121. A poor guy could barely afford an archery deer tag at $34. Is that right? No, it isn't. When did hunting become a rich man's sport? Given that, if I knew of a guy whose family was barely making it and he got himself an animal off-the-clock and used every bit to feed his family, I'm playing Three Monkeys: See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. I'll turn in a head-hunting poacher and thrill-killers without a second thought. But some guy who needs the meat? Why is that wrong when some rich CEO flies in from Florida only really wanting the head? Remember what Charles Dickens said about the law. I can't print it here.
Now, the flip side of the coin is you can hunt rabbits and jackrabbits here year round and no bag limit on jacks. That's a lot of meat you can garner. But, at the same time, I don't like this re-hash of the "King's Deer" sort of thing we have going on here with elk tags unaffordable to many residents. The truth is, the elk here aren't even native. The native elk were wiped out a hundred years ago. The elk here are impacting the natural order, eating aspen saplings and so forth. Some biologists here say we need to cull more elk. So, really, this isn't a scarcity issue. It's a funding/cashflow issue. If you take a public resource and only allocate it to people based on how much money they have, well, how is that fair and unbiased? We have a lottery system anyway, so it's not a question of more elk tags being generated if the prices were lowered. Game and fish will whine about needing the money since they're funded by license and tag revenues. Ok, then raise the price on out-of-state licenses and tags. If people want to fly in here and take elk, well, let them pay to do so. But things have come to a pretty pass when some shyster bank exec who doesn't live here can afford to hunt here when residents can't. I'm tired of hearing about the SAME out-of-state "Know who that guy is???" rich CEOs getting elk tags here time and again and using this area as their personal hunting preserve with the collusion of our lame state game-and-fish dept. when a poor or working resident can't even afford to put in for the tag he probably won't get anyway.
