No, it was not a pampered chef party. He was presented with numbers from years past vs numbers from more current years. He had replies for most everything, sometimes the replies were not on topic, but replies none the less. I don't want to get into what that conversation entailed here, perhaps we can start another thread on the matter.
Yep. Same old same old. They're going to keep trying to kill more deer. Manage by counting dead deer instead if live ones. Keep the farmers happy. (Which really means farm bureau backed by insurance companies. - not his words he would talk about politicians and their impact on the DNR). They're 70% ish to their goal. They want the kill at about 170k. He doesn't think they'll get there as he thinks they can only lower it so much and they're about there. Mostly Because people will quit hunting thus reducing their ability to lower it more.
They lowered the tag limits to 4 to show that they care and are listening to us. So he does fight for us. So much so he had to face some pissed off farmers that ambushed him over the reduction and had to explain to them it doesn't matter because less than 2% of hunters kill 3 or more deer anyway. So really lowering them doesn't do anything, just makes it look like they care. Blowing smoke. Btw these complaining farmers had kill permits and did not allow hunting. They killed 7 deer and should have killed 1 for every 25 acres so 78 total.
We ned to turn in our hunter surveys so he can get better data. It's too hard to get better data by actually counting deer like other states do. Even though the DNR counts turkey gobbles, bog turtles, peeper frogs, and a host of other wildlife. But it's too hard and expensive to count deer.
The Wisconsin DNR got fired because they didn't communicate to the hunters. Not because they lied to their hunters. Reduced the population drastically. Pissed the hunters off when they figured it out. The governor was up for reelection and wanted the hunters vote so he audited their DNR. Found out the hunters were right. Fired the DNR and took over. But Tonk says there are still deer starving to death in Wisconsin and the DNR should have done a better job of communicating that to hunters thus they got unjustly mad. It was a communication issue. Not a we pissed everybody off by lowering the deer population issue. And funny thing is the Wisconsin DNR has far far far more data on their website about their deer reduction goals than we do.
Let's see. I think that's about it. Hello my darling hello my baby hello my rag time gal.