Dear Editor:
The Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) certainly should increase the number of antlerless tags in 43B; it is verging on silly too!
I saw around a hundred deer, mostly does and fawns, in the few days that I hunted there last year. Now to be perfectly frank, I sort of stopped counting after a few days, so 100 is just an educated guess, but some fields would have over a dozen at any low light time, so…
My boys and I all got stuck with antlered deer only tags, mind you even though there are never as many bucks as does, it still only took a few minutes of hunting for any of us to shoot a buck. Why in the name of goodness do they have the antlerless draw at all in the fact of all that abundance? They should perhaps be allowing a second tag, at least in some areas.
Why is it that there are often second tags given out for Wildlife Management Unit 38 or 42 where there are not nearly as many deer as there are on the Island and yet it has been very seldom that we have had that opportunity on Manitoulin?
It could be that the WMUs are too small on the Island, and they should be divided up by township. If you look in the hunting regulation summary there are small zones like that in southern Ontario so why not here in the North? We have in Northern Ontario Wildlife Management Units that must be nearly as big as all of southern Ontario!
They certainly should be giving the farmers automatic antlerless tags and perhaps two of them! I know that many farmers are finding the deer are damaging their crops. We don’t want the farmers to find the deer problematic! That could end up being counter productive in a rush. Farmers are organized in active organizations and are by their very nature proactive types. There are areas in the US where they call deer “horned rats.” We don’t want them to have that type of attitude here, do we?
Charlie Smith
Massey
