I am in favor of protecting what you guys have up there. I know here in Kansas, we are fast on the path of Illinois. I don't want Iowa to become like us with unlimited NR tags.
That being said, I get tired of hearing how non-residents are hurting the trophy quality in Iowa. There were 60,000 bucks harvested this year. I don't know what the success rate was for NR, but I would bet it was well below 25%. So out of 60,000 bucks less than 1,500 of them were killed by NR. Thats less than 3%. Even fewer does were taken.
I am not arguing that there are not many negative side effects to allowing more non-residents into your state. But hurting the deer numbers and the trophy potential is not one of them. If you guys want good numbers of trophy whitetails, you need to go to a one buck system. One buck tag good for all seasons, like a landowners tag. I guarantee that would make a huge difference in mature buck sightings, but don't guess that there are very many residents that would be interested in doing this.
