[GillieSuit]

So to put another perspective on things lets just play with some numbers and look at this argument from the harvest allocation side.

SRD just wants to harvest "x" number of animals each year. They don't care which weapon of choice we use all they want to see is "x" number of deer, elk, moose, sheep, etc etc killed.

So there are currenlty around 100 000 hunters in alberta. approximately 15 000 of them are bow hunters and approximately 85 000 are rifle hunters. I won't get into cross over scenarios that discuss those that use muzzle loaders, bows, xbows and rifles etc etc. Keeping it simple lets look at harvest allocation.

ASRD allocates 15% of the overall harvest allocation to bow hunters. The remaining 85% goes to the rifle hunters.

What does this mean. Well it means that 15 000 bow hunters are expected to harvest 15% of the available animals. and 85 000 Rifle hunters are supposed to harvest 85% of the available animals. Seems reasonable almost balanced in fact.

So we want to allow crossbows in archery only seasons (archery only zones won't change, because harvest success in the bowzones is limited by hunter access to private land not overall hunter success, of 15 000 bow hunters in alberta, only a mere 200 actually have permission to hunt the calgary bow zone) Back to my point. If we open up the archery only season to crossbows we can expect the number of archers to double or triple. So lets look at the numbers and assume that total hunter numbers will stay the same and rifle hunters will become bow hunters.

15 000 x 3 is 45 000. So now we have 45 000 bow hunters and 55 000 rifle hunters. Lets look at this from a harvest allocation perspective.

45 000 bow hunters are expected to take 15% of the harvest allocation and 55 000 rifle hunters are expected to take 85% of the harvest allocation. Not very balanced anymore is it.

The word on the street is that the rifle hunting community will not give up any of the harvest allocation so the only way control the harvest rate of 45 000 bow hunters is by limiting the access to that 15% allocation. This means pretty much every animal will go to a draw except for white tails as they seem to thrive on predation.

So this scenario kind of sucks for everyone involved. Crossbow and vertical bow hunters alike. You see currently the bow hunting seasons and zones allow a larger opportunity for tags because bow hunter success is balanced with the expected harvest allocation. The scenario I've described doesn't give anyone an advantage. It just restricts our access to the resource even more than it already is.

I think we should spend less of our time worrying about the pros and cons of crossbows vs vertical bows and look at the numbers. Harvest Allocation is what really matters. If the bow hunters increased to 45 000 and the allocation increased to 45% that would be great. The harvest success of a crossbow is only 6% better than a vertical bow according to the national average so the bow hunting tag opportunities wouldn't change a whole lot. You might see some minor tweaks here and there for draws, but nothing major.

The Rifle hunting opportunities shouldn't change all that much either assuming that the crossbow hunters and the vertical bow hunters are successfull and don't go back to being rifle hunters once the Late October and Early November Rifle seasons open up.

Anyway just something else to wrap our brains around.

I doubt this would happen as bow hunters are a minority and the rifle hunting community won't give up their harvest allocation.

Debate on my friends.