This conversation really goes to the root of the problem in the country today. Yes, anything that the government gets involved with and tries to regulate, generally gets screwed up. That’s a 100% fact.

I counted individual responses to this thread and 15 posters were positive toward the SOA hunts and 4 were negative. Yet, over 50% of the posts in this thread were made by those 4 people that are against the SOA hunts. Without getting into socioeconomic status, who’s got the money to afford private leases, who wants to hunt a well managed property and who wants to just hunt and kill every deer they see, and other stuff like that, take a step back and look.

We as a country cannot continue to cater to the lowest common denominator just because they yell louder or post more. That’s exactly how we’ve “earned” all the current problems that we have in this country and so many on here complain about.

I would hope that the state will always have open land, with unrestricted access, for people to hunt everyday and shoot anything they see for minimal cost, but I also think that the state should have these SOA areas for the people that want a quality hunt on a managed property. While the 15-4 in favor of the SOAs in this thread is a very small sample, it is most likely a representative consensus for most hunters in this state. If 20% of the license revenue and money for the dept. is supplied by those not wanting SOAs, with the 80% Of funds coming from those that do want SOAs, in a perfectly fair world, 80% of state owned or managed lands should be under SOA type management, and 20% should be a wide open free for all.