Texas Parks and Wildlife says it has to raise the fees to keep programs like deer management by State Biologists on private lands. But you and I can’t hunt these deer that belong to the people of the State of Texas unless we pay exorbitant fees for hunts or leases. If they want to fund wildlife management on private lands let the landowners pay the fee. The whole Managed Land Deer Permits for private ranches is funded without charge to the landowners and they want you and me to pay for it. This program eats up tons of our State Wildlife Biologist’s time and brings in next to nothing in revenues. Apparently the brains at Texas Parks and Wildlife can’t come up with an equitable way to charge for the service. How about by the acre or number of deer per acre or number of deer killed per year. Let me see it took 10 seconds to think of those and I bet if a group spent some time on it they could come up with all sorts of workable solutions. The cost for a service should be paid by those that use or benefit from the service.
Texas Parks and Wildlife keep telling us they want to increase hunting and fishing opportunities and get more people involved in the sport. Yet even with Texas population increases, they are seeing license sales go down and I for one have not seen more hunting opportunities and I would bet that few of you have unless you have spent the big money to hunt managed private land. The State has no business increasing fees again and in this hunters opinion all it will do is drive more people out of the sport as the cost to hunt is outgrowing the working family budget.
Think about it, Wild Ed
5 comments:
Well put Ed...
I 100% agree with you Ed... Please please please take the opportunity to comment. There will be 20 different opportunities to comment in person around the state and I will doing my best to look for volunteers to go comment for the falconry community. When there's an across the board increase in license fees we get a pretty significant hit on our falconry permit fees too...
Dont say that MLDP land owners do not pay, because they do, last year a 2500 acre ranch spent $120,000 on feed in a drought year to keep the states deer alive. They are on pace to spend $250,000 this year. The ranch can not make money on cattle but can sell deer hunts. In other words the land would just be left to go to waste until Wal-mart could move in or some other useless thing. These high fenced ranches are preserving Texas in its natural state. The ranch also brought money into the state from out of state hunters to boost the local economy in their part of south Texas.
Yes and they will charge high dollar for the hunts. They did not pay TPWD anything for the biologist’s work. What they are spending benefits the ranch and their wildlife only. Not one penny goes for public hunting or to provide wildlife for the public as a whole. Yet the public fees are paying for the service that ranch gets from TPWD. JMHO
Agreed. The costs of all the items needed for hunting have all gone up and introducing new hunters to the sport only becomes harder and harder. In my case, if it wasn't for owning some private rural land, I just could not afford it.
Quail hunting has become almost a cult. That is where the big $$$ is. Have you ever seen a trophy quail before ? And they are wild birds, able to fly anywhere they want. No high fence for that.
I remember how I was introduced to the sport which came naturally to me, but you need a spark of passion to begin hunting. For most, the passion is extinguished before it really begins.
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