Reading the comments this change appears to have hit a few nerves. It only took some NR to screw things up. First, some weren't happy just buying a doe tag and hiring one resident kid for peanuts with a buck tag, they had to hire two kids with buck tags to sit in the blind, so he could kill two bucks with that doe tag. Then some would bring a buddy or two with doe tags and have two kids sit with them with buck tags. Quite frankly it's called greed. I absolutely have nothing against NR friends and family getting together for a few deer drives if it was just that and they buy a buck tag and not just a NR doe tag year after year.
It's obviously impossible to know the numbers, but I hunt in the eastern part of the state. I'm sure it happens from time to time, but every single non-resident I know that bought an antlerless tag for Gun 1 or 2 was friends or
family coming over the river
or home to deer hunt.
I saw memes mentioned above as well. The biggest meme I see around social media regarding this topic is that there's a bunch of rich NRLO's walking into Walmart and paying some poor unsuspecting goobers for their buck tag on the side. Multiple buck tags, even! Really?
I sort of hinted at it before, but a lot of the bad feelings about party hunting, or group hunting, or driving deer, or using a 45-70 with the same ballistics as a 12 gauge slug/muzzleloader, or etc, is simply lashing out at the fact that 90% of hunters aren't holding out for a 5 year old, 170" buck every year. "These dumb hicks are driving deer and killing all of the 3 year old bucks, they're taking away big buck opportunities for great hunters like me" is what some people are really trying to say.
Where do we draw the line on the hunt purity test? Should we make deer hunting in Iowa archery only (this is a trivial, but non-zero number of people that exist)? Should we require bucks to be captured on camera first, aged and scored by a panel of 3 judges, before we allow people to harvest them? I've said before, I'm a trophy hunter, but it's getting to the point that it's quite frankly gross to say that given how self-righteous and egotistical some people are acting.
I know everyone wants to get back to the good old days of a Booner behind every tree, but eliminating party hunting for non-residents or everyone altogether isn't going to get there. Land moving through multiple generations of owners with differing interests and values, advances in technology allowing 24/7 observation of animals, the Iowa DNR spending 20 years
begging and promoting non-residents to come hunt Iowa and now converting a lot of those folks into residents who are buying up land, YouTube channels that show exactly where to hunt on already crowded public land, EHD outbreaks. The list goes on...let's not act like a couple of thousand people party hunting for 2-3 days in December is this giant step in the right direction.