So what are you eluding too? That getting to camp and doing anything other then hunting should be mlre highly prioritized by the pgc? Why does anyone not being able to take off during rifle mean that they should never be allowed to take off your hunt, or it will be held against them? Why do you expect the pgc to favor a specific demographic whose issue is not that they can't hunt or that they don't have ability to, it's they want tp relax and unwind instead of hunting?
I believe he is eluding to the fact that the younger guys prefer the Saturday opener because they don’t have to take off work yet have no problem taking off work for archery. In other words they prioritize archery over rifle hunting so they don’t care if the change ruined the pre season traditions of rifle hunters because it wasn’t important enough for them to take off to hunt in the first place.
And the questions still stand. . . Rifle hunters controlling the population has nothing to do with relaxing at camp.
And guess what neither does a Saturday opener, it’s not like so many more people are hunting the opener or killing so many more deer because the season opened on Saturday. The rifle harvest numbers are pretty similar with the buck average being down 1.8% for the post Saturday opener while the doe harvest is up 11.4% predominantly due to the reopening of doe the first week that skews the average up compared to the 2014 to 2018 years when it was closed.
And extending the season didn’t have to be the two days preceding the current season, it could be done at any other time and still meet the harvest goals. Adding two days at the beginning of the season isn’t extra opportunity when most people don’t use the extra time anyway.
Rifle hunting pressure is so high because so many people are crammed into a short period of time and it takes a week or two after the season ends for the deer to settle back into their normal routine. So adding a couple more days to the beginning just makes the deer skittish earlier and shifts the harvest slightly earlier with very little impact on the total harvest overall.
There were plenty of other options to really give rifle hunters extra opportunity,
- an additional week starting before Thanksgiving and running for three weeks in conjunction with bear season.
- one weekend in early October or November where rifle hunting is legal for buck and doe.
- the Jr/Sr rifle season be open to anyone.
- an extra weekend or two of rifle in late January or Early February after flintlock.
Some kind of extra rifle season anywhere on the calendar other than anytime directly connected to the existing rifle season to spread the pressure and harvest out over time. They can even limit it to straight wall cartridges as a lower impact season if over harvest is a concern. As of now all they did was take away the traditions while paying lip service to “extra opportunity” yet giving us little to no tangible benefit for it.
Part of what I love about rifle season is all of the camaraderie that happens outside of hunting. I’m not a fan of the Saturday opener because of loss of opening day traditions in exchange for the so called “extra opportunity”. We now hunt Saturday through Monday or Tuesday and kill just as many deer as we did before the removal of the concurrent season. The difference is that now there is very little time to just hang out at camp with everyone, I already go up Friday night and get right to hunting first thing Saturday morning almost every other weekend in the fall during archery, rifle season was special because it was different. If they were going to change it I’d have wanted something much more worthwhile than an extra evening sit to undo 50+ years of hunting traditions.
