Wyoming long range hunting debate

[Pacific_Fork]

Anyone who thinks that hunting with a modern rifle and scope is different at one range than another is just a different level of hypocrite than the guy who thinks that distance is 100 yards more or less.
If they want to limit range, it's going to have to include excluding optics entirely. Which, as a mule deer hunter, I'm entirely in favor of.

Sent from my Pixel 6 using Tapatalk

300 yards a buck, bull, pronghorn can VERY easily spot or smell you. Hell even at 4-500. 800+ is where they have almost zero advantage anymore. So your logic is just, well dumb.

 

[mt terry d]

So attack the biologists and not the individual posting their results. Or better yet, you go do your own study and publish the results. Show us exactly how a study should be done. Then go work with every G&F department to implement a foolproof method to accurately track wounding and mortality rates by weapon type and distance.


Otherwise you and your thoughts belong on The View with the other cackling hens.

I was attacking the biologists and the guy from MTFWP.

Sorry if you inferred otherwise.

 

[PathFinder]

300 yards a buck, bull, pronghorn can VERY easily spot or smell you. Hell even at 4-500. 800+ is where they have almost zero advantage anymore. So your logic is just, well dumb.

How bad do you have to screw up to get busted at 400 yards? Even 300?
Last year I had a MZ tag in a unit that also has early rifle tags. There was a group of 8 bucks living in a little corner of a basin, two were shooters. The glassing point where I sat to watch them during the four days I hunted them was 350-600 yards away from where they fed and bedded, depending on exactly where each buck was. It wasn't difficult whatsoever to avoid detection at that distance. With a scoped rifle, that hunt would have been over in five minutes. With the open sighted MZ, it took four days to get a scenario where I could get close enough to one of the big bucks without busting them.
Saying there's no effective difference between scoped and open sighted weapons just because if you jump up and down, waving your hands and screaming they'll notice you at 400 yards is what is stupid.

 

[Stinky Coyote]

I was attacking the biologists and the guy from MTFWP.

Sorry if you inferred otherwise.

Exactly, More of this!

If you’re getting to a point where you have to trade a rifle season for an iron sighted muzzle loading season OF COURSE the wildlife managers would prefer we blame ourselves for the problem...rather than do their job.

Now if, with transparency, they show you they’ve done everything possible in predator and habitat management, including aerial culling, bounties, night hunting games for predators, and still not enough ungulates to sustain a rifle season in a certain unit, THEN you make the change to start changing seasons to reduce harvest so they can recover. But is that what they do? If they showed us all they did we would humbly accept the changes needed to bring that unit back.

I’m not calling out all biologists but they also got bosses, and those bosses have bosses, and there are closet anti’s in the game working to undermine things for a broader agenda and it’s not our agenda.

This infighting sparks those fackers much joy. Focus on them first, not each other.

 

[repins05]

Derailing this post but I find it interesting that people actually believe in and trust wildlife biologist's studies, reports, and numbers.

 

[Pacific_Fork]

How bad do you have to screw up to get busted at 400 yards? Even 300?
Last year I had a MZ tag in a unit that also has early rifle tags. There was a group of 8 bucks living in a little corner of a basin, two were shooters. The glassing point where I sat to watch them during the four days I hunted them was 350-600 yards away from where they fed and bedded, depending on exactly where each buck was. It wasn't difficult whatsoever to avoid detection at that distance. With a scoped rifle, that hunt would have been over in five minutes. With the open sighted MZ, it took four days to get a scenario where I could get close enough to one of the big bucks without busting them.
Saying there's no effective difference between scoped and open sighted weapons just because if you jump up and down, waving your hands and screaming they'll notice you at 400 yards is what is stupid.

Happens every day in the woods. I’ve been busted by cows at 600 yards because I was setting up prone to shoot a bull on open granite that was distracted by all the ladies staring at me. I’ve also shot a bull at 20 yards with a rifle that was clueless I was there. We all have our anecdotes. And it’s beside the point I was making about fair chase and shooting a mile.

And I def didn’t say there’s no “effective difference” so don’t put words on my keyboard.

 

[Tower13]

technology is getting wild, but the reason should not be to appease tree huggers and liberals in hopes of a better image. I would not be opposed to some very stringent laws as I think we are all experiencing the crowds in the west.

When will it all stop? I think it wont and each year a little more will be taken from us that love to hunt.

 

[Tower13]

Derailing this post but I find it interesting that people actually believe in and trust wildlife biologist's studies, reports, and numbers.

I have never been given an honest report just BS all the time

 

[ddowning]

Are you really saying these early and late rifle hunts have high success % because of rifle tech?

Seems these hunts have always had high success just by the nature of the timing. Why do you think migration hunts, rut hunts, etc have always been sought after tags….since, well, forever.

How about we cut all early season and rut hunts when the deer are most vulnerable? Have all mule deer hunts happen Oct. 1 - 14th? I don’t see a problem with that.

I'm slowly reading through this. I live in Iowa, so no mule deer problems. We have whitetails, which are arguably as adaptable as anything except coyotes. We have whitetail problems like EHD, shit tons of pressure from the division of larger farms into 40 acre and smaller hunting acreages, farmers that hate deer more than rats and want them all dead, loss of habitat due to people wanting to live "in the country" but really they want to bring their city living arrangements to the country. They build 10-20 houses 7 ft apart, but they don't have to look at houses for miles, they get to see "nature" out their back window. Every greedy landowner wants to get a piece of the pie. This fractioning of habitat has definitely effected the quality of the herd. Also, farm implements have become so good at getting everything that there is very little winter food available. 20 years ago, deer fed on grain missed by combines through the winter all the way up until spring. Now, the older bucks are starving during the coldest winter spells.

If all of this is having a very noticeable effect on whitetails, I can only imagine the effect it has had on mule deer that are not very adaptive to different habitat and food sources. One thing Iowa has always been pretty good at, their weapons restrictions and season dates. The only weapons we can hunt with during the rut are vertical bows. The only people that get to hunt during the early season are youth and disabled hunters. Muzzleloaders are limited to 7500 tags for residents during October. Gun seasons are short. Only the population control doe hunts are allowed to use long range rifles ( there are some loopholes in the regs like smokeless muzzleloaders). Non-resident tags are limited, and we have mandatory harvest reporting.

Doe kill has a dramatic effect on population. I have been asked to kill as many does as possible in a couple spots. Some fields would have 200+ deer in them on winter afternoons. Now 5-10 deer in them. If you pay attention, you can keep deer at a decent level by shooting a few does every few years if the intent is to keep them low (farmers and auto insurance). If the intent is to keep the habitat at carrying capacity, you need to shoot just the right amount (and it is a lot here), if you want to grow numbers, don't shoot does. The problem in Iowa is that deer numbers are managed by county and the state is mostly private land. Guys that think they are building big buck meccas won't shoot does and they tend to get over populated. Farmers want zero deer, so they invite people to kill them and the only ones that get invited back are the ones that kill a lot of does and treat everything very respectfully.

As has been said, reducing doe harvest will put more deer on the landscape. Making deer harder to kill by limiting hunting when they are most vulnerable will result in more mature bucks. None of this addresses water, wild horses, cheat grass, habitat loss, or developments popping up in migration and wintering areas. I don't have great ideas for solutions for a lot of those problems that are politically palatable, but I think a lot of the big gains are there.

 

[JackButler]

Know your limitations and act accordingly. You owe it to the animal, whether it’s a 900 yard rifle shot or an 80 yard archery shot.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Agree but unfortunately many people absolutely do not acknowledge their actual limited ability to make lethal hits under field conditions past about 300 yards.

 

[nm.otter]

many people absolutely do not acknowledge their actual limited ability to make lethal hits under field conditions past about 300 yards.

You're being overly generous on that distance.

 

[MuleyFever]

You're being overly generous on that distance.

For sure. There is even a thread on here about wounding elk on shots beyond your max range.

 

[JackButler]

Nationally, it’s not even close. In 1982, the American hunting population peaked at 16.7 million. In 2022, there were 15.9 million hunters.

As a relative percentage of the population that hunts has gone down drastically. In 1982, 7.2% of the United States hunted. In 2022, it was 4.8%. So, yes, fewer people are hunting.

But that doesn’t mean that fewer people are hunting where you are located. From what I can glean from the Internet, many western states are crowded by nonresident hunters. Your states are seeing big dollar signs from nonresidents.

It’s true that I am from Virginia. I’ve only ever hunted in Virginia (and one deer hunt in Oklahoma and one pheasant shoot in Kansas). I am one of the many people who would like to hunt “out west” at some point in my life. What has stopped me so far is that I don’t think it would feel like hunting and I don’t want to pay fees that I think are outrageous.

The public lands in Virginia are practically deserted in my experience. In the early 1980s, it sounded like Phantom Fury out there. These days, I can hunt all day in the Jefferson National Forest and not see or hear another hunter.

So, anyway, not to sidetrack the entire discussion, but I don’t believe in increased government regulation of means and methods. I don’t think it will solve “the problems.”


____________________
“Keep on keepin’ on…”

Now put those numbers up against how much land is accessible to hunt and you’ll see the issue. Especially in the west, but even in the east or Midwest. Growing up I could knock a few doors and have access to more prime deer and pheasant hunting than I had time to hunt. Today, good luck with that.

 

[JackButler]

The willingness of people on this thread to advocate for myopic governmental control of very specific aspects of hunting is blowing my mind. In general, its just a terrible idea. I thought we may have learned our lesson these last few years about how that works out folks…


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

it’s a matter of perspective in some cases…people don’t bat an eye about the difficulty of getting a suppressor. I think they should come standard on any firearm. It effectively the law that your gun MUST be loud unless you have a special permit.
Also, while I’m no fan of any politician, I really don’t t feel like I had to “live though”anything in particular the last few years, any more or less than any other point in the last 40+ years I’ve been around, especially as it pertains to guns or hunting. .

 

[CMP70306]

it’s a matter of perspective in some cases…people don’t bat an eye about the difficulty of getting a suppressor. I think they should come standard on any firearm. It effectively the law that your gun MUST be loud unless you have a special permit.
Also, while I’m no fan of any politician, I really don’t t feel like I had to “live though”anything in particular the last few years, any more or less than any other point in the last 40+ years I’ve been around, especially as it pertains to guns or hunting. .

If you owned a pistol brace and didn’t destroy it you were a felon for a while. Or if you went through the proper channels and made a Form 1 suppressor you had to destroy it or face a felony conviction. Several states got assault weapon bans, others got the minimum age to buy certain firearms bumped from 18 to 21.

Then there is the various hunting bans, trapping bans, the wolf reintroduction to reduce elk and deer populations among a multitude of other things.

There was a bunch of government overreach in a number of places if you were paying attention.

 

[JackButler]

Derailing this post but I find it interesting that people actually believe in and trust wildlife biologist's studies, reports, and numbers.

I won’t say they are without flaws they certainly have limitations and a margin of error. That said, I’d believe a peer reviewed scientific study more than my buddy Jim’s gut feeling that there are less bucks in Idaho this year because he didn’t see many.

 

[JackButler]

If you owned a pistol brace and didn’t destroy it you were a felon for a while. Or if you went through the proper channels and made a Form 1 suppressor you had to destroy it or face a felony conviction. Several states got assault weapon bans, others got the minimum age to buy certain firearms bumped from 18 to 21.

Then there is the various hunting bans, trapping bans, the wolf reintroduction to reduce elk and deer populations among a multitude of other things.

There was a bunch of government overreach in a number of places if you were paying attention.

I don’t t know everything about every locality so you may be right on those? Have those things been reversed in the last 6 months?

 

[mt terry d]

For sure. There is even a thread on here about wounding elk on shots beyond your max range.

I'll bet vastly more are wounded within one's "max range".

No doubt a few million tax $$$ could fund a study by "wildlife experts" that would prove
the only solution to ending wounding of animals is to eliminate hunting.

 

[CMP70306]

I don’t t know everything about every locality so you may be right on those? Have those things been reversed in the last 6 months?

The pistol brace and form 1 suppressor ban were federal, they were 2022 to 2023 time frame if I remember correctly. The various other hunting bans were state dependent.

 

[Pacific_Fork]

I'll bet vastly more are wounded within one's "max range".

No doubt a few million tax $$$ could fund a study by "wildlife experts" that would prove
the only solution to ending wounding of animals is to eliminate hunting.

Probably, but that’s because there’s vastly more critters shot at closer range than say 400+ yards. And it’s not even close, probably 99% of deer shot in the US yearly is under 100 yards.

In my experience there are two types of long range “hunters”. Ones that are great shots because they put hundreds of rounds down range all year and those who own a 3K+ rifle with next to zero understanding of how to use it. The latter usually take 5-10 rounds to get an elk down at long range if they are lucky. They bought that rifle becuse SM told them what to do, it’s sad.