Originally Posted by poorcountrypreacher
Originally Posted by N2TRKYS
The increase in numbers could be nothing more than compliance with GC increasing.

The deer baiting deal could be a correlation stretch as well.



I agree with you on the first point - we absolutely do not know whether the harvest has gone up, or whether it's simply more hunters participating in GC. And that's exactly what you and I agreed was going to happen in a phone conversation years ago when they were doing the GC meetings. They have wrecked the system that we had for estimating harvests, but I don't see even a tiny hint of Chuck accepting the blame for that. If he wants to run the dcnr like a corporation he oughta recommend that he be fired for such a major mistake. Don't expect that to happen. smile

On the second point, I 100% know that has happened and have had people tell me straight up. I have also seen at least one instance where a club didn't even know that they couldn't bait during turkey season. That one has been corrected, but when the state is willing to let people bait one game species in exchange for money, there are a lot of folks who don't understand why it shouldn't apply to others.

My perception is that baiting during turkey season has increased a lot since the introduction of the bait license. Do you not agree? Maybe I hang out with a different class of people? smile


I don’t think we ever had a system that estimated the harvest accurately. We’ve had two honor systems: the mail survey and GC. I don’t believe one honor system is better than the other.

I don’t see anymore baiting for turkeys now because of the baiting permits. That could also be expected from the increase of turkey hunters compared to the years prior to. I doubt we’ll ever truly know the answer to that.

As far as the class of people one hangs out with; baiting, by in large, doesn’t always follow class groups, from my experience.

83% of all statistics are made up.