Earn-a-buck licenses, kills remain on the rise
For all the talk that hunters hate Wisconsin's earn-a-buck program, they sure have a strange way of showing it when buying licenses, and shooting a doe or fawn before pursuing a buck.
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Bowhunters supposedly outdo gun-hunters in their contempt for EAB. If so, why did they arrow a record 116,010 deer in 2007? That's the third time in the past four years that bowhunters registered more than 100,000 whitetails in one season.
The odd year of the past four was 2005, when bowhunters didn't reach 80,000 deer. Interestingly, that was when the Natural Resources Board rejected the Department of Natural Resources' EAB recommendations, and shelved the program to appease the whiners and howlers.
The Board's 2005 vote fits the "fool me once, shame on you" category. When hearing how intensely deer hunters really, truly, seriously hate EAB, and that they would never again buy a Wisconsin deer license, the Board caved like yuppie parents with spoiled kids.
Guess what? Deer-license sales fell anyway. Gun licenses declined 1.7 percent, 654,812 (2004) to 643,673 (2005); and archery licenses fell 2.1 percent, 252,602 (2004) to 247,309 (2005).
The Board remembered the insult and approved EAB in 2006. Gun-license sales increased by about 2,000 to 645,609, and archery-license sales rose 4.5 percent to 258,394, the second highest in the license's 74-year history.
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