Hunting Reserves and Game Farms in Wisconsin's Future? Yes.

I noticed this odd item inserted into the new budget that should concern deer hunters everywhere in the state.

Exempting sales taxes for deer sold to Wisconsin hunting reserves and game farms totaling $300,000 over two years.

This fits right in with what our deer czar Dr. James Kroll wants for Wisconsin; private deer ranching. Funny thing, he's been pretty much off the radar:

According to Wisconsin’s White-Tailed Deer Trustee Dr. James Kroll, people who call for more public hunting opportunities are “pining for socialism.” “Game Management is the last bastion of communism.”
 Kroll is the leading light in the field of private deer management as a means to add value to the land. His belief is so absolute that some detractors refer to him as Dr. Dough, implying that his eye is on the bottom line more than on the natural world.

Kroll, who has been the foremost proponent of deer ranching in Texas for more than thirty years … People who call for more public lands are “cocktail conservationists,” he says, who are really pining for socialism. He calls national parks “wildlife ghettos” and flatly accuses the government of gross mismanagement. He argues that his relatively tiny acreage, marked by eight-foot fences and posted signs warning off would-be poachers, is a better model for keeping what’s natural natural while making money off the land.

In a post way back when, November 2012, I had this great comment:

lufthase: I just happened to catch the DNR's "Deer Hunt 2014" program because it came on right after the Milwaukee Bucks game (ironic programming choice), and I noticed that the host and a number of presenters chose to wear Safari Club International hats. This seemed a bit odd for a DNR-produced program. Safari Club International is a lobbying organization, and a pretty radical one at that-- they promote trophy hunting, canned hunts, hounding bears/wolves, and oppose endangered species protections. Stranger still, DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp appeared on the program wearing a vest that prominently featured the logo of Wern Valley game farm - offering canned hunts for which no hunting license is required (but a $1,195 annual membership is), according to their website.

Here's an edited clip of the show promoting the Safari Club International and the Wern Valley game farm (their ad too). Special thanks to lufthase for the help. This is where we're really headed:

Walker Deer Czar Failure!!! Tough luck hunters...

Pretty much says it all....

Those fearless deer hunting trolls kept telling me they knew so much more than me, trashing my posts for criticizing the DNR's disastrous new maze of rules and unscientific approach to hunting.

Welcome to anther Republican policy failure. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of low information "stand with Walker" backers. It's about time they felt the devastating effects of their own incompetence.  

Walker's DNR turns Deer Hunting into regulatory nightmare of borders and tags.

Sorry to say, but my bleeding heart liberalism no longer extends to areas negatively affecting conservative strongholds and issues. It will be hard to sit on the sidelines watching rural schools die and hunters participate in destroying their own recreational sport, but it’s what conservative voters wanted and I we have to respect that.

And for a party that convulses at the thought of over-regulation, from assistance to recreational hunting, they’ve got no problem with the Rube Goldberg mishmash of hoops and rules to do the simplest things. 

  

Case in point, the following editorial by State Sen. Kathleen Vinehout about the DNR’s new hunting guidelines:

Sen. K. Vinehout-Uppity Wisconsin: Deer hunters taking to the woods in Wisconsin are facing a slew of new hunting rules. Hunters will experience the long-talked-about rules of the Texan ‘Deer Czar’ James Kroll. In the DNR’s words, the new rules change the “season framework, management units and antlerless deer hunting permits.”

Gone are “management zones” setting deer overwinter population goals. Gone are free tags & $2 tags in highly populated or CWD areas; gone are landowner deer tags. Soon-to-be gone is registering your deer at the local bar or convenience store. Next year all registration will be on-line. Tags are more expensive (6 times more expensive), limited, and depend on whether you hunt a private or public area.

Many times Secretary Cathy Stepp repeated, “The rules have changed, but the tradition remains.”

Hunters whom I've spoken with wonder if all we’ll have years from now is the fond memory of what used to be Wisconsin’s very equal deer hunting tradition. Store owners are worried folks won’t stop for coffee and a doughnut if they register deer on-line.

Hunters tell me: change the rules, make it hard to get public tags, expensive to hunt in private land and leave folks on their own to register a deer? Isn’t this asking for trouble?

Here are a few responses to the guy who commented with the picture below, who by the way, said he wasn't a hunter. Brilliant:

Anon: Mark Bye nailed it. All those rural white male voters that voted for Walker are getting what they voted for. They just never cared to understand what they were voting for. Time to let the chickens come home to roost.

Mark Bye: Hell, I don't hunt and even *I* get it.

Steve Hanson: I'm not a hunter, but I own property on which others hunt. I have to admit to being TOTALLY bamboozled by how complex the new rules are. And the folks hunting here are just as bewildered. 

The most revealing was this comment showing the DNR's real influence:

lufthase: I just happened to catch the DNR's "Deer Hunt 2014" program because it came on right after the Milwaukee Bucks game (ironic programming choice), and I noticed that the host and a number of presenters chose to wear Safari Club International hats. This seemed a bit odd for a DNR-produced program. Safari Club International is a lobbying organization, and a pretty radical one at that-- they promote trophy hunting, canned hunts, hounding bears/wolves, and oppose endangered species protections. Stranger still, DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp appeared on the program wearing a vest that prominently featured the logo of Wern Valley game farm - offering canned hunts for which no hunting license is required (but a $1,195 annual membership is), according to their website.

Here's an edited clip of the show promoting the Safari Club International and the Wern Valley game farm (their ad too). Special thanks to lufthase for the help:



The DNR "doesn't expect you to remember all these changes," you know, making the hunting experience supposedly so much easier. But bigger problems should be addressed, as lufthase suggests in the comments:

Now, the question is will Sec. Stepp be held accountable? She was performing an official function as a state employee and promoting an interest group and a private corporation. And there's also the question of whether Stepp paid for the vest herself or received it as a gift, which would be a(nother) no-no.

Deer Populations Down, Chronic Wasting Disease Up! Walker and his "Deer Trustee" Mismanage and Hurt Hunting in Wisconsin.

Assuming a majority of hunters lean conservative, why are they letting the Walker Authority mismanage the deer herds in Wisconsin with no apparent blowback?

Our "unintimidated" great white hunter said this when he ran for governor:

Walker says Gov. Jim Doyle and the state Department of Natural Resources have engaged in "political games" and "put bureaucrats in Madison ahead of hunters of the state." Walker claimed that the "deer population has dwindled" as a result of "mismanagement" by Doyle and the DNR.

And once Walker took over, he used every excuse Doyle wasn't allowed to make for low deer numbers:

Last year's significant snow and cold that persisted into May resulted in lower deer numbers going into the 2013 fall seasons … antlerless permit numbers at their lowest levels since the 1990s.

Now chronic wasting disease is spreading due to Walker cutbacks in population control and discontinuing the use of sharpshooters in certain areas of the state:

jsonline: Chronic wasting disease continues to spread in western Dane and Iowa counties, where about 1 in 4 male adult deer is believed to have the fatal deer malady. That's more than double the figure of 2002, when 8% to 10% of adult males had the disease, according to the agency.

By contrast, the prevalence of the disease is much lower in northern Illinois, where targeted sharpshooting has been used by Illinois wildlife officials since 2002. The prevalence rate is under 1% in Illinois' 12-county CWD area. In 2007, the DNR defended the use of sharpshooters as an "efficient and effective tool in reducing deer numbers and removing diseased deer," because the shooters were killing more antlerless deer than hunters were.

So Walker's policies reflect public opinion, and Illinois' policy used wildlife officials research:

Strong public objections (in 2011) prompted the DNR and the Legislature to curtail some control tactics. Sharpshooting was eliminated. So was an early season on antlerless deer. The Legislature eliminated a program known as "Earn a Buck," which required hunters to kill an antlerless deer before earning the right to shoot a buck.

Another example of administrative mismanagement, and more excuses:

The agency cautioned against making year-to-year comparisons because sampling isn't uniform between years. But the long-term trend is clear: The rate of infection is rising ... David Clausen of Amery, a veterinarian who served on the Natural Resources Board until last year, is a proponent of the DNR taking a more aggressive role in trying to control CWD. Clausen expects the prevalence of the disease to increase and spread if "people choose to ignore reality," he said, and continues to balk at measures to reduce deer numbers to help control the disease.

And now this coming from Wisconsin Public Radio news:

DNR Is Unlikely To Act As Deer Herd Faces Possible Starvation: Minnesota Starts Emergency Deer Feeding Fund, But Wisconsin's DNR Can't Follow Suit Without Legislative Approval.