Originally Posted by burbank
Originally Posted by abolt300
Originally Posted by CNC
It doesnt matter if you lower the bag limits if you keep adding more hunters…..The first things that need to be done are enforcing the limits we already have and capping the amount of out of state folks that are allowed in…..Quit adding one more hunter, one more hunter, one more hunter……and enforce the three buck limit......Before that is done I wouldnt even consider reducing bag limits and seasons

No CNC, the first thing we need to do is eliminate baiting completely and enforce the laws and fine the chit out of anyone caught baiting and take their hunting license for 5 yrs. Make intentional game violations hurt. That’ll solve most of the over harvest problems and the guy with 1-10 acres will go back to only being able to harvest zero or maybe a single or couple deer, at most, on his over hunted, poor habitat, over pressured property behind his home. .

You keep,saying it’s out of state hunters. Remember too that there are a ton of people from other states that own significant acreage in AL and they have to buy non resident licenses too, unless they own every single acre they are hunting, which most aren’t. Post up a chart showing annual out of state license sales by year. Not a google guess or estimate, but the actual number of out of state licenses sold by year. That’s a trend that would actually have statistical significance and mean something. Are you even sure that the number of out of state license sales has actually increased dramatically in the past 5 years? Could the license increases be the result of Alabama’s resident population growing from just under 4.8 million in 2018 to 5.143 million in early 2024? Average age of males making up this population increase being 38 yrs old and 66% white? Prime hunting demographic. How many of those 350,000 new residents hunt and now buy a resident license and leased up land or joined clubs? Just saying’. If just 10% of that 350,000 hunts, then that accounts for basically all of your license sales increase. Everyone is always complaining on here about all the urban sprawl with big subdivisions being built everywhere, causing property fragmentation, and how all these people are moving into alabama from out of state and crowding the roads. Every single one of those people becomes an alabama resident as soon as they rent that apartment or buy that house and get that AL drivers license. Are they not allowed to hunt because they were not born in alabama?


So let me get this straight, the issue is the guy hunting 5-10 acres?

Hmm. There is zero evidence of that.

Yep, that’s CNCs theory and it’s valid to some extent. Now that baiting is legal, anyone with a small parcel, of what used to be marginal at best deer habitat, can turn it into a honey hole with the ability to bait. His theory is that all these smaller properties that used to take minimal deer annually, are now able to impact harvest numbers much more substantially. I tend to agree. Back when baiting was illegal, I had several neighbors successfully baiting numbers of deer off our big heavily managed property and onto their little 2-20 acre parcels surrounding us, where they were summarily executed on sight with zero restraint. I had those people busted by the GW multiple times and they’d be right back doing it again the following year. So yes, bait can and will definitely enable the small property owner to drastically increase the number of deer he can take annually on a sub par parcel and it is now happening all over Alabama.

Last edited by abolt300; 12/28/24 04:06 PM.