A summary of the summary's

[Bigcountry40]

There you go and put restrictions on landowners to hunt on their own land. That won't go over well if at all. Private owned land is the largest amount of land in Ohio.
I also don't want to any type of free access placed on private land as that will only lead to major problems of abuse placed on the landowner from the majority of the hunting public.

I don't want to see access too private land, I just think restrictions public land laws more will not help based on the #s. If restrictions are going to be made to help the herd population, majority of hunting/killing us on private land. I hunt private land, I just don't understand what restrictions frustrated poor public land hunter will prove or do, other than piss off already disgruntled resident public hunters.

 

[Bigslam51]

I don't want to see access too private land, I just think restrictions public land laws more will not help based on the #s. If restrictions are going to be made to help the herd population, majority of hunting/killing us on private land. I hunt private land, I just don't understand what restrictions frustrated poor public land hunter will prove or do, other than piss off already disgruntled resident public hunters.

I think it's what has to happen. If it doesn't, the resident hunters will become even more disgruntled. Then there will be nothing but NR's hunting it, which will piss off the resident public hunters even more, and it will all go to hell in a hand bag.

 

[finelyshedded]

Very telling telling data Kim! It appears to me that many gun hunters over the years have started hunting with archery gear due to just wanting a longer season! The technology in both compounds and crossbows have made it a much more proficient to hunt with plus you have 4 months to hunt instead of just two weeks total combining shotgun and muzzy.


The fact that many deer all already dead before shotgun season even gets here is being over looked IMO. Many deer are also killed over the summer via kill permits and other natural causes like disease or collisions with vehicles which also don't get counted among the havest totals.

Very few true to the core gunhunters out there anymore that wait to hunt deer with the shotgun and muzzy these days.

I'm just tired of hearing the excuses the ODNR lists year after years as to why the gun kills are down when the most logical and imo, honest reason is, there's just less deer out there to hunt and kill!

 

[bowhunter1023]

But I was gun hunting out of tree stands 30 yrs before I started bow hunting.

That's not what he meant. Every swinging dick is a bowhunter now. When you were gun hunting from stands 30 years ago, there was 4 bowhunters in your whole county. Now there's 4,000 and everyone of them has 4 stands. It's next to impossible to go anywhere now and find ground that isn't hunted by a Bone Collector wannabe.

IMO part (a small one) of why the gun numbers suffer is the heavy pressure put on deer in November by bowhunters. Twenty years ago, deer were hardly pestered prior to gun season. Combine that with higher numbers, less opportunity, and it made for a stellar gun season. Now it's a madhouse in November. In Washington County, I am now seeing more NR license plates the second week of November than I do during gun season. I'm not going to single out a particular state/weapon/method of hunting, but there's one version that has to make up a statistically significant portion of the bow kills in this county. I think a lot of those guys used to gun hunt, now they come here to bowhunt. A lot of them are done hunting before gun season even rolls around; another contributor to lower gun season numbers.

 

[Bigslam51]

Good points, Ric and Jesse.