One of the many reasons why Texas is at the top of the list:
OUTDOORS: MIKE LEGGETT
http://www.statesman.com/Sunday, September 02, 2007
Advocate Says Hunting Traditions are in Jeopardy - Ignorance About Landowners' Liability is Keeping Some from Opening Their Land to OthersLegal liability, dead nubbin bucks, trash on the trail, hippies dancing naked in the tank. Those are just a few of the reasons we hear, and have always heard, that private landowners are reluctant to allow more public access to hunting and wildlife-related activities on their ranches.
Liability, in fact, was the major obstacle Texas Parks and Wildlife commissioners cited recently when they discussed department plans to further develop a Web page to aid hikers, birders, hunters and others in finding outlets for their activities. Expanded public hunting is one of the major goals, commissioners said.
David Langford served for years as executive director of the Texas Wildlife Association
http://www.texas-wildlife.org/ He lobbied for and helped achieve liability protection for private landowners and the state. Langford's family owns land in South Texas, so he knows the importance of hunting and of protecting landowners, and he believes that protection's already in place.
"We're supposed to be preserving hunting," Langford said by phone from his South Texas ranch. "The first step is this misconception about liability."
Langford said he was involved in helping pass legislation that capped a landowners' liability at $1 million, as long as they weren't charging more than $5,000 for a hunt.
Public hunters wouldn't be paying anywhere near that amount, Langford said, so that argument against more public access just doesn't hold up.
"It's about $400 a year for (insurance to cover a $1 million payout). If you've got 40 deer to kill, that's just $10 a deer. Everybody can afford that," he said. "There's just not knowledge about liability. There's ignorance, and that's hurting us in terms of hunting and nature tourism, too."
Langford said TWA, which touts itself as the organization speaking for thousands of landowners who control 35 million acres of Texas hunting land, has to take the initiative in trying to match public hunters, hikers and birders with willing landowners. Many of those same ranches already are dealing with an overabundance of deer, too, which means there should be some reasonable way to make an expanded public hunting and public access program work for Texas.
It would be naive, of course, to expect that all ranches in the state will ever take part in any kind of public hunting exercise. A landowner has a right to choose, and that's as it should be. But it's just as naive to believe that landowners, all Texans really, don't have a responsibility to history and to making that history available and important to future generations.
"There are people right now who were born after I went to work for TWA, and a trip to the outdoors for them is going to the zoo," Langford said. "And those people are going to vote. We need to a way to make sure they know about our hunting traditions and how important they are to all of us."
Langford said he believes that hunting itself is in danger if Texans who don't hunt aren't allowed access to the outdoors to absorb some of the hunting tradition and to pursue their own nature tourism activities.
"That tradition is in jeopardy," Langford said.
