OCR Text |
Show I barren critical of deer hunting Z practices on near-by ranges ft- I V An open letter to "i ,. Governor Hampton :; Marvin F. Warren the request of several hun-iFv. hun-iFv. deer hunters in Utah V t i am asking you to ' emergency powers you ' . stop the doe killing on nd Fork, Nebo, Hobble and North Manti ran-jlso ran-jlso the Wallsburg range i in to Strawberry. I 'Cr listening to the cora-. cora-. ts of these many hunters, w t, ! tided to find out for myself. 1 friends and I spent two 1 riding by horseback on "1 h of these ranges. This was ood on-the-spot study of all areas. We rode high in the' draws, ridges, through tte ?oTieVlack pine' and d hV,? ,6 ?ak n some ars We Prime deer C0U"J try. We did not even see a track. We rode hard for two days and stayed out from early morning until late evening so as to see any movement of deer that most generally happens at these hours. haW; ZB? amazed and could hardly believe that after eight days of good observation, we came up with a grand total of just eleven deer; during the same time we counted approximately approx-imately 200 cattle, (a ratio of nearly 20 to 1) I'm told that the hunting business in Utah is close to 70 million dollars a year, and that the cattle business bus-iness is around 50 million a year. Now if the deer are as scarce as they seem to be, and I'm sure they are, then our 70 million mil-lion dollar deer hunting program pro-gram is all but down the drain. We may have time to save it if we can get a "buck only" season beginning October 22 of this year. If this is not possible pos-sible then we should not have over a five day season and no extended weekend hunts. I would believe that this shortage of deer exists throughout through-out the whole state. How long has it been since you or the motoring public has seen a deer of any kind while driving through our many canyons? In the past year I had the occasion oc-casion of traveling some 15,000 miles as a Lions Club District Governor. Most of these miles were through what used to be wonderful deer country from Montezuma in San Juan to Manila Ma-nila on the Wyoming border; all of which were beautiful canyons and forest habitat. I watched closely at all times for deer, and in all those miles, I didn't see one. At this writing, I dare not disclose where I saw the lonely eleven, because if I did, most assuredly the Dept. of Fish and Game Commission Com-mission would open a special hunt to eliminate them. If you want to get the real facts about our deer herd, one should talk to the old timers who get off the roads and who have hunted in the same place for the past 10 or 15 years. You cannot get this good reliable information from some college kid in wildlife management or from the department C. - O's who never leave a well traveled road. Talk to some of the old timers who hunt the back coun-ery, coun-ery, and they will tell you the Department of Fish and Game along with the Big Game Board and Five Man Commission have shot themselves into a corner, and will never get out unless doe killing is prohibited entirely for a few years. Today is the time to start for tomorrow it will be too late. It's hard for me to visualize a true hunting sportsman shooting shoot-ing the female breeding stock of our deer herd, or for that matter anyone advocating it. In conclusion, I would ask one more request and that is in regards to correcting the unfair un-fair treatment the State Boating Boat-ing Dept. gives our Utah County Coun-ty boaters. How long will our boaters have to pay into the boating fund before getting any improvements in Utah County waters ? We in Utah County have over two thousand boats registered regis-tered with this department, and this has been going on over five years. Utah County has a great deal of boating water but to date after pouring thousands of dollars into the Boating Department De-partment we still see no ramps or restroom facilities. We all thought for sure that by now after these many years that the boating facilities on "Millionaires "Million-aires Row" at Bear Lake would be sufficient, and that our good little people in Utah County could get some of their money back in launching ramps and other areas of improvement. I would suggest that all Utah r,,i.r Uatorc, pcfnca tr, registration and tax or do it under protest. At the same time they should ban together with a good fair lawyer as council to protect them against such fraudlent tactics as taking tak-ing their money and not giving them anything in return. Governor, I hope you do not wait too long to correct the two problems above. The Portland, Oregon, Traffic Traf-fic Safety Commission notes: "Vacationers tend to go too far and too fast for their own good. Quite often they keep going until they're tired and consequently not very alert . . . you can deal with such situations defensively in your driving. Watch out for out-of-state licenses . . . cars towing boats or trailers and confused drivers slowing down, possibly looking for landmarks. You might be able to help them . . . and by defensive driving, you can definitely help yourself your-self avoid an accident." |