Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

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1STRANGEWILDERNESS
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Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby 1STRANGEWILDERNESS » Sat Nov 30, 2019 3:35 am

I have to say it. Hunter recruitment does not alarm me. It’s all I hear about yet I still see a pile of hunters.
My state wants to

1.keep baiting because of hunter recruitment
2. Legalized crossbow because of hunter recruitment (yes and herd #’s)
3 now they want to open our gun season on nov5 and let it run the whole month :shock:

I’m okay with people using bait, crossbows or hunting the whole month of November. (Just switch weapons when the season changes)

But if some perfectly healthy individual doesn’t want to hunt deer at all because they can’t have a bait pile, use a crossbow, or they think the season is too short then we don’t much need them in our ranks. How much do they care about hunting? Not much passion there.

Hunter numbers? I’ll take quality over quantity. You have to eliminate as many challenges as possible to get a kid into the sport? Seems a lot of older hunters didn’t get youth seasons, crossbows, couldn’t afford bait etc and they still did it and continue to do it.

So I’m curious how do the beast members feel about hunter recruitment ? And do you think making things easier means more people will do it? Do we need more people in the woods?


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Hawthorne
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby Hawthorne » Sat Nov 30, 2019 4:17 am

I agree. Most or all of those rules did nothing to recruit hunters. I think Dan and THP has done more to recruit hunters than the state. Another problem is private access. I see tons of people hunting public but drive miles of private and not see any hunter activity. It’s really lopsided
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1STRANGEWILDERNESS
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby 1STRANGEWILDERNESS » Sat Nov 30, 2019 4:58 am

Hawthorne wrote:I agree. Most or all of those rules did nothing to recruit hunters. I think Dan and THP has done more to recruit hunters than the state. Another problem is private access. I see tons of people hunting public but drive miles of private and not see any hunter activity. It’s really lopsided


Yeah Dan and THP are doing good stuff. They seem like great dudes you could see yourself hanging out with.
I gotta say I believe you about the lopsided public and private hunting down south. Up here I honestly think the private is hit harder than the federal land. Most the fed land near me has no trail access. People don’t like that. They like private cus they can drive in to where they drop bait, not get lost, and the ease of retrieving the kill :lol:
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby gsquared23 » Sat Nov 30, 2019 6:30 am

I’d be ok with my state raising the cost of permits and hunting licenses, IF that extra money would be used for the state to buy more land that can be made public. The biggest issue with hunting recruitment is lack of access; gone are the days of knocking on doors and hunting, most landowners know the value of hunting land and will lease to the highest bidder. Packing more and more people on the same overcrowded public land will only lead to frustration and more people quitting due to lack of success, and at best a yo-yoing of hunter populations. If you want to increase and maintain a higher hunter population, you gotta make room.
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby mipubbucks24 » Sat Nov 30, 2019 6:35 am

Hawthorne wrote:I agree. Most or all of those rules did nothing to recruit hunters. I think Dan and THP has done more to recruit hunters than the state. Another problem is private access. I see tons of people hunting public but drive miles of private and not see any hunter activity. It’s really lopsided



BINGO!! Hunter access is a huge issue and one of the reasons hunter numbers have gone down in the last 5/6 decades. Even 25/20 years ago it was much easier to gain access. Now everyone that owns anything is so worried about lawsuits, and can you blame them. I see the same exact thing, tons of guys hitting the public and hardly any vehicles parked on big chunks of private. I don’t know what the answer is but I doubt anything the government does will help. I am for sure not a fan of the current attitude of not caring what the actual hunters think and catering to $ and trying to get more hunters.
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby d_rek » Sat Nov 30, 2019 7:08 am

All of the proposed regulation changes don't account for the myriad other socioeconomic factors that present a formidable barrier to new hunter recruitment. Grasping at straws because the MIDNR is facing down the barrel of tremendous revenue loss from lower license sales.

Someone else said it in a different thread, and OP mentioned it above, but these changes don't actually improve the quality of our hunting these are just trying to maintain the quantity of license sales.

If we'd quit managing the resource for quantity and instead for quality I think we would see a long term reversal in hunter drop out and recruitment.
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby trob_205 » Sun Dec 01, 2019 5:35 pm

Living and hunting in Michigan is frustrating. But as a whole we have let it happen to ourselves. We supposedly have one of the highest amount of bow hunters yet we have some very few people in MBH. We have no voice other than individually voicing our opinion- we have no one fighting for us. Maybe MBH can’t be the voice we need but sooner than later we need to find SOMETHING to make us stronger. I’ve never looked into this until the recent events and I’m writing up a draft to ask some questions to the MBH board members to see what’s being done and what can be done.
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby Bowhunting Brian » Mon Dec 02, 2019 1:30 am

Rules won't help. It's the people that make the difference.
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby Kraftd » Mon Dec 02, 2019 1:55 am

On the surface I agree completely with the OP's sentiments. I'd love to believe its that easy. In reality, most numbers have hunters down around 5% nationwide. AT those numbers, we're vulnerable to shifting political winds, and things can change faster than we would like to believe. I'm not sure these rule changes are the best answer, but I do think being proactive and considering more drastic changes is worth leaving ourselves open to.

I do think the privatization and monetization of hunting is and has been a huge factor in loss of numbers and quality, on public in particular. That's what makes preserving, protecting, and expanding public lands so vital.

One other thing that may be necessary from the perspective of pragmatism, is to realize that society in general is lazier and more in need of instant gratification than ever. I hate it as much as you, and strive to fight it off with my own children. At the same time, failing to recognize this reality and adjust, if adjustments are feasible, may just bite us in the backside.

Not an easy problem to solve.
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby cspot » Mon Dec 02, 2019 2:05 am

You do have to realize that some of these changes (like longer gun seasons) are becoming necessary for the Game Agencies to maintain the harvest numbers that they want. As hunter numbers continue to decrease you will see more and more opportunities.

Unless you go hunt high fence I just don't see hunting as an instant gratification type of activity. It never has been and likely will never be. The deer just don't read the script.
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby BAS4109 » Mon Dec 02, 2019 2:49 am

Bowhunting Brian wrote:Rules won't help. It's the people that make the difference.


Exactly.

How many people are taking their kids hunting and fishing?
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby crankn101 » Mon Dec 02, 2019 3:19 am

Deer farming and leasing property are the down fall to hunting as it once was.

Back in the day people of the community would help farmers with various tasks such as driving the grain truck during harvest and in a unwritten or really even a unspoken upon agreement would give that guy and his friends access to hunt that property. Now that farmer pays people to haul the grain and hunter from hundreds of miles away pay thousands of dollars to have exclusive hunting rights to the property. So, now you have two "strangers" hunting a property that once was a place where the hardworking, community minded locals and their kids could go and carry on traditions and knock down a few deer in the process.
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby CallMeFishmael » Mon Dec 02, 2019 3:34 am

This topic always makes me shake my head. Do State agencies really have such a hard time grasping that the largest portion of our population (and the biggest population of hunters) in the baby boomers are hanging it up? Even if they recruited the same % of current generations to be hunters, there would still be a significant drop in hunters. But we also have a generation that doesn't want to hunt. So it accelerates the decrease. 18% over 3 years is a bunch. But that trend will continue regardless of how long the make the season or how big they let the bait piles become.

Let's face it, baby boomers are getting older. I hear all the time "Michigan hunters won't hunt due to the increased price of tags." They went up $3 each, so I call bs on that. If $3 breaks the budget, there are bigger concerns. I hear "APRs are causing people to quit." There are lots of areas without APRs, so I doubt that one too.

It all comes down to the aging population, which they cannot reverse. They should get together with the people who run Medicare programs. They might have an a-ha moment.
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby headgear » Mon Dec 02, 2019 6:09 am

Kind of stopped caring about this too, you just aren't going to make people want to hunt and catering to anyone on the fence doesn't do any good for them or the rest of us. Large numbers of hunters around us have hung it up or starting hunting in other places, maybe a little of both. Heck even among the guys I hunt with most are weekend warriors and only show up a couple of times a fall anyway. More woods and deer for the rest of us.
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Re: Hunter recruitment- go ahead lemme have it

Unread postby Dewey » Mon Dec 02, 2019 6:42 am

Hunting isn’t supposed to be easy. When I started out it took me 8 years to kill my first deer. Never once did I wish things would be easier and want them to change the rules to benefit me. I grasped the struggle and it only motivated me to succeed. That is something that is really missing these days. So many want everything handed to them and don’t want to work hard for it. The way I see it changing rules to keep making things easier is just creating a bigger problem by alienating the experienced guys that are tired of all the meddling in our traditional season structures. Those guys are so much more important to hunter recruitment than any current rule change will ever be. They truly are the the means to the future and lay the groundwork for new hunters. If they continue to upset them and cause them to drop out of the sport the impact will be huge and that will never be reversed.


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