doublegunshop.com - home Forums Thread Like Summary - OT: the bane of online licenses

A bit of a rant (please forgive me). Just abandoned an attempt to have my teenage son hunt big game with me here in Colorado next year. Tonight is the deadline and nobody's answering the phone at the Division of Wildlife (perpetual busy signal all afternoon). Was creating an account for him online yesterday when I noticed that his CID number (customer ID number) wasn't accurate (missing 2 numbers). After several attempts to correct the number (which is linked to his hunter's safety number and the requisite "preliminary license" needed to apply for big game which we, of course, bought in person a few days ago) I was forced to try to start over, except that the system wouldn't let me in again, saying he already had an account and no new access would be allowed. Even new password attempts were rejected. Gee Whiz! How did we ever get to this point? We even went to where we'd bought his "preliminary" license earlier today and tried to fix the mess there but... no dice. He's got a lesson tonight (cancellation would be $100) and he opted out of the long drive to downtown Denver to try to fix it there (which would not be a guaranteed fix anyway).

Oh well....it's a draw and a longshot at that (no points from previous applications) but.....blast it! Teaches me to trust in these bedamnedable systems. The primary focus of most State DNR systems anymore is pure revenue generation, period. Sales without any human interaction (which adds cost) is how many (if not most) are operating now. Colorado even shortened their now-many rifle seasons to 5-days only for the simple reason that it allows them to sell many more tags to more hunters. Is this all part of "The Great Reset" by any chance?

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Last fall, after 5 days chasing elk near Fairplay, I come home to find these guys in my yard...

Hunting big game in remote places, (especially bear country) takes preparation.
The paper side of it just takes attention to dates on the calendar.
It’s no different to me than paying regular bills.

If you can’t do that part, how serious are you?

My efforts in Alaska over the next few seasons are just to fill out my life game card.
Most people aren’t determined enough to train their body, mind, and field craft skills for an entire year pre-remote hunt. It get physically more difficult each year.

Corona virus is making the taking of a “Macnab” sketchy for this season.

As for the money side of it all, Just add up the constituent parts, budget for them, work hard, and save your money.

I am the wrong person to makes quips about immigrant labor to. I have ICE on speed dial.
I’ve had at least a thousand of them rounded up over the last decade.

The penalties are on the wrong side of the equation.

Lloyd did not wait until the last day. If you read his original post, he bought licenses over the counter a few days before the deadline, and was attempting to get his and his son's big game tags the evening before the last day.

Not that it matters. It shouldn't matter if he had waited until the last day... if he was using a well designed, tested, and user-friendly computerized license system. We are well into the 21st century, and use computers to file State, Federal, and Local Income taxes, to renew motor vehicle registrations, and to pay utility bills and do online banking. We can now easily trade stocks online without a stockbroker or the high trading commissions. We even easily do a lot of shopping online. So there is no good reason Lloyd should not have been able to complete his application and licensing transaction easier and faster than he did 20 or 30 years ago.

These systems are not being overwhelmed. All we hear from Game Management Departments, in their never-ending desire to raise license fees, is that they have less revenue due to declining numbers of hunters. That was a joke in my state, where in recent years, our Game Commission got a huge windfall from several thousand dollar per acre gas and oil leases and fracking production royalties. That was in addition ongoing timber sales and previous mineral extraction deals on State Game Lands.



I also found your lecture about the $93.00 fees for a "chance to collect a preference point or a tag" amusing. I can just hear you complaining about disenfranchising the poor and minorities if the same system was applied to voting and elections.

I also hate our relatively new pheasant stamp. I hate having to pay more for the right to shoot put-and-take stocked birds, because it was screwed up management by our Game Commission that quickly turned Pennsylvania from a state with a very good native population into one where native ringneck pheasants are all but extinct. Then they messed up deer hunting in much the same manner, and have been playing with things like adding Sunday hunting in an effort to attract some of the hundreds of thousands of hunters they drove away, to return to the sport. Last week, they announced that we shattered the previous record for antlered deer killed in the era of antler restrictions. This was laughable, considering the warm and rainy weather we had during the antlered and antlerless deer season, fewer hunters, and the widespread complaints from hunters about the obviously low deer numbers. They still keep talking about the need to harvest more does to control the population, but I had more full days in the woods without seeing a single deer than any season in my life. Rubs, scrapes, tracks, and Deer shit do not lie. When you aren't seeing much sign, it means there just aren't many deer around that area... no matter what the Game Commission Biologist is telling you.

Yet when hunters and the Unified Sportsmen of Pennsylvania attempted to sue the Game Commission over poor deer management, the Courts ruled that we had no "standing" to sue. Sounds a lot like the dozens of lawsuits filed concerning 2020 election fraud, where Courts ruled that voters and State Attorney Generals lacked "Standing" to sue. When the game gets stacked against you, being right does not matter.