Quote:
Originally Posted by SLH
So we need to figure out why this is happening. Is it lack of effort on measuring sheep, is it lack of funding in the offices to take short sheep cases to court, is it the courts being liberal, is it a lack of support from SRD for the field personel taking these cases forward.
It would seem fairly straight forward to me if you have a harvested ram that is short you lose the ram to the crown, you lose one year hunting privleges as a fine and you get fined accordingly to the extent to which you screwed up honest mistakes maybe nothing more, complete disregard for the system and the animal lifetime bann and huge cash.
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If this really is an issue and I'm not convinced it is, why not just go to three or four central registration offices in the province where the personelle are highly trained in measuring and aging sheep rather than putting the entire province on draw? This has been discussed. I've honestly never heard officers complaining about registering sheep. Perhaps it's an issue in the south but I really haven't heard of it being an issue province wide. I do believe SRD is behind this but it's not enforcement IMHO. I realize there have been a couple issues in the south with people being charged for short sheep that are very close to a couple of you....perhaps you judgement is a bit clouded on this one. I don't see this any other way than SRD wanting to reduce the harvest of rams to increase trophy quality and the easiest means of achieving this are by reducing hunter opportunity.
I guess at the end of the day, it doesn't matter who is behind it, the key is to find the week link in the information they are providing us with and fight it based on that. With RAMP it was money. In this case it seems to be the fact that hunter harvest hasn't really changed for decades so obviously hunters are not the problem...so why are they managing hunters only. The outfitters may be our biggest ally in this fight too. If the allowable harvest is cut back to say 150 sheep, they would see a severe reduction in tags.....and income.