The Rising Costs of Hunting
I stumbled across this gents column. I was wondering what some of my readers’ thoughts were…
Read the full column here.
Sound ‘n’ fury over fees
The nonresident hunting application booklets arrived in the mail in December and the complaining began on various internet sites. The Wyoming Legislature was a bunch of “greedy S.O.B.s” for raising the price of licenses, and the price of a license was going to make or break a nonresident’s hunt in Wyoming. Hunters were “never going to come to Wyoming again”. Pretty much the same rhetoric has been heard every time there was a fee increase. In the past, hunters have refused to participate for a year, then withdrawal symptoms kicked in, and the complainers began to apply again. All that was accomplished was better odds of drawing a license for those who kept applying.
In the past, nothing was lost, but those who pout and take a year or two off now will be behind in preference points, and only hurting themselves. Once those who don’t apply this year get back into the system, they will have greatly increased the time it will take for them to draw a license. Since there are still more applicants than licenses everywhere except the private lands areas in eastern Wyoming where you pay to play, pouting just makes things better for the rest of the applicants.
To hear some people talk, the 20 percent increase in license fees will price them out of the market. I don’t know why fee increases are a surprise. Once hunting became part of the “hunting industry”, market forces began to dictate prices. When the good ol’ boys making videos hunting private lands and game farms with outfitters began to tell everyone they should expect to kill giant males, preferably fed and/or baited to a place where the trail cameras showed pictures of animals people couldn’t find in daylight, where cool guys could use new equipment to shill for equipment manufacturers, prices began to increase.
At the same time, the price of everything hunters and management agencies use has kept going up. Fuel and vehicles cost substantially more than they did even 5 years ago. When I arrived in Wyoming, gas was 27 cents per gallon. It is 10 times that now. A vehicle that cost $2500 in 1969 is $30,000 now. My nonresident deer license was $50 in 1969, it will be about 6 times that this fall.
Other costs have also gone up. Game wardens and biologists are finally making a little more money than they did in the past, and it’s about time, if for no other reason than hazardous duty pay for trying to figure out how to please whining hunters, landowners, outfitters and politicians without rainfall to improve habitat quality. Demands for management of species nobody hunts have increased several-fold, but hunters and anglers still pay for most of that work.
Every fall, I see hunters roll into the state with $30-40,000 pickups towing a trailer load of ATVs, and/or a $25-30,000 fifth wheel trailer or $15-20,000 travel trailer. Their camping equipment may be worth $2-3,000. In the pickup is a thousand dollar rifle and the driver has $500 worth of camouflage draped over his body. He will spend several hundred dollars on fuel getting to Wyoming and back from his part of the U.S.
Or, he and his party may be hunting on a ranch for a grand or two. Perhaps they’ve hired a guide for a several thousand dollars. And they still try to tell me the price of the license will keep them from coming to hunt Wyoming!
The bad news is the average person, whoever he or she might be these days, may be getting priced out of hunting out of state or only getting to go out of state every few years. The wealthier folks get to participate year after year, a trend back toward the system in Europe that favored the landed gentry and the wealthy, but something that has gone on for 100 years. Only time will tell whether the current trend will kill off hunting, or at least political support for hunting, which is the same thing.
The good news is you don’t have to pay these prices. Nobody has to go to another state to hunt, unless your state doesn’t have a species you want to kill. Unlike taxes, nonresident license fees aren’t mandatory. That doesn’t seem to comfort the folks who are complaining.
Harry Harju, a wildlife biologist, hunter, and angler, has advised hunters and outdoor writers on Wyoming hunting for 27 years. He can be reached by mail care of Outdoors Editor, Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, 702 W. Lincolnway, Cheyenne, WY, 82001, by email, hjharju@bresnan.net
I just think an $80.00 increase in one year is to much. Hope they put it to good use.
March 2nd, 2008 at 12:10 am