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Sunday, June 20, 2010
New Mexico Wildlife Federation Says It's Getting Even More Difficult for Locals To Get Permits
By Deborah Baker
Copyright © 2010 Albuquerque Journal
Journal Staff Writer
It's a rite of spring for New Mexico hunters: enter the annual drawing for a big game license, then grumble when you don't get one.
"I can't get an antelope permit in New Mexico. ... I'm going to have to go to Wyoming again this year," fumed retiree Ron Hammond of Santa Fe, who has struck out the past 15 or so years.
"It's totally disgusting. It's totally unjust," Hammond said. He headed north in 2008, spending $450 in gas but returning with coolers full of enough antelope and deer meat to last a couple of years.
The New Mexico Wildlife Federation says New Mexico's generosity to in-state landowners and out-of-state hunters combines to squeeze out locals — and the situation is getting worse.
"It's not just people complaining about the luck of the draw," said the federation's director, Jeremy Vesbach. "At heart, it's an unfair system."
But the Game and Fish Department says the system is determined by elected legislators and governor-appointed commissioners with public participation.
"The rules are set by the Game Commission, and the laws are set by the Legislature, and we implement them," said department spokesman Marty Frentzel. "There are plenty of opportunities for people to debate them and to provide input."
The recent public drawing decided who got licenses to hunt deer, elk, antelope, ibex, javelina, bighorn sheep and Barbary sheep.
While there were more than enough javelina licenses to go around, there was competition for other species. For example, there were 10,042 applications by resident and nonresident hunters for 1,699 antelope licenses available in the public drawing, 39,859 applications for 20,255 elk licenses, 5,085 applications for 14 bighorn sheep licenses and 3,699 applications for 200 ibex licenses.
There were more deer licenses than applications — 36,195 licenses and 35,882 applications. But that includes licenses for less popular types of weapons, such as bows and arrows or muzzle loaders, and for less popular areas, creating competition for the more coveted licenses.
Landowners favored
According to the wildlife group, the chances of New Mexico hunters' drawing the popular elk or antelope tags have dwindled in recent years.
There are a couple of factors influencing the trend.
First, the state gives away a large percentage of the available hunts to private owners of land that is the animals' habitat.
In fact, the federation says no other state in the mountain West is as generous as New Mexico to private landowners. Colorado and Utah also give transferable tags to landowners, but Vesbach said his research showed less than 10 percent of the antelope permits went to them. In New Mexico, 70 percent of pronghorn antelope licenses were allocated to landowners in 2008, according to the federation's research.
Technically, what the landowners are given are license-purchase authorizations, which they, in turn, can sell. There were a couple of so-called landowner tags for buck antelope on sale last month for $1,500 apiece.
The remaining available licenses — 30 percent, in the case of antelope — are then distributed through the annual public big game lottery.
But New Mexico hunters get only 78 percent of that remaining 30 percent; the other 22 percent are reserved for out-of-state hunters, under a law passed in 1997 that covers deer, elk, pronghorn antelope, Barbary sheep and javelina.
That's a higher number than in other states.
'A tough deal'
In New Mexico, of the 22 percent reserved for out-of-state hunters, 12 percent go to nonresidents guided by New Mexico outfitters, and 10 percent to nonresidents without guides.
"It's a tough deal, if you want to hunt in the state," said Russell Johnson, who lives in the South Valley outside Albuquerque and got his last antelope permit seven years ago, although he and his wife enter the drawing annually.
"There's a bigger percent of tags going to out-of-state hunters than there should be. ... We put in year after year, and it's just frustrating not to draw anything," Johnson said.
Johnson, whose "passion is hunting," did get a deer permit this year, but for an area that was his last choice and where he expects to see few, if any, animals.
"Basically, we're just going to camp," he said.
Other Rocky Mountain states generally have a lower percentage of big game licenses reserved for nonresidents: It's 10 percent, for example, in Arizona, Montana, Utah, Nevada and Idaho, according to spokesmen in those states' wildlife agencies.
In Colorado — where the set-aside for landowners for big game is capped at 15 percent — nonresidents are limited to 20 percent of the licenses in the premier hunting areas and up to 35 percent in less sought-after locations.
In Wyoming, nonresidents are capped at 16 percent for elk licenses and 20 percent for deer and antelope.
Private habitat
Elk and antelope are the only two New Mexico species subject to the landowner allocation system, said Cal Baca, the state Game and Fish Department's private land programs manager.
He said the percentage of authorizations that goes to ranchers — who must enroll with the department to be eligible — reflects where the animals are found.
Most of the pronghorn antelope habitat is privately owned, so most of the hunting opportunities go to the private landowners, he said.
Elk are more likely than antelope to be found on public land, so the proportion of authorizations to landowners is lower. The Wildlife Federation says more than 40 percent of elk licenses went to private landowners.
Baca said the landowners are given the authorizations in recognition of their contribution to wildlife habitat.
"We're basically saying, because your private property is supporting a certain number of antelope, this is your ability to hunt some of them," Baca said.
"I don't feel it's an unfair system," he also said. But neither is it consistent, he added, because the agency's four designated geographical areas differ in their methods of determining the allocations to landowners.
Revisions under way
The department is developing a statewide approach to managing antelope that would standardize the allocation procedures, he said.
"That system is being debated right now, and everybody has the opportunity to comment on it," said the department's Frentzel.
A system is already in place for elk.
Hammond, the Santa Fe hunter, alleges the state Game Commission is "dominated by the landowners."
"They think of the public, wild game as owned by the landowners. ... They treat it like it's their personal property, and its not," he contended.
Bruce Wilder, senior pastor at Faith Lutheran Church in Albuquerque and a longtime hunter, said he is saddened to talk to members of his congregation who have given up on what he called "that great American hunting tradition."
While some members of his congregation can afford to buy expensive authorizations from landowners, "for the average working-class person who is just wanting to hunt, $1,500 becomes cost-prohibitive," he said.
Wilder and his two sons-in-law plan to head to his former home state of Minnesota in October to hunt deer, after failing to draw permits for the animal here.
"Food you buy, gas you use: That's all revenue our great state loses when people like myself have to go out of state to hunt," Wilder said.
Wilder did draw a permit to bow hunt for elk in a location he said would be "exceedingly challenging."
The new antelope regulations could be ready in September, and sportsmen are asking the department to revamp the system with public input and move toward issuing a greater percentage of permits through the drawing.
"It might not happen overnight, but we need to get started," Vesbach said.
He called the 70 percent allocation to private landowners "excessive" and questioned whether the agency has the data to justify it.
A system that creates a "secondary market" in tags politicizes wildlife management and is unfair to hunters , he also said.
"No matter where they are, the wildlife belongs to the public," Vesbach said.
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