Dear FWP and the Elk Management Citizen Advisory Group -
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on your ‘Expanded Hunter Education’ proposal.
The Montana Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers supports the recommendation to improve hunter/landowner relationships through educational programs. The idea is that this would improve the ability of hunters to access private land. Specifically, we agree with the CommEd Division to revamp hunter education course content with more specific landowner relations material, update the current hunter/landowner stewardship project, and to partner with other hunting organizations on a marketing campaign to promote hunter ethics. Overall, FWP's education programs need to be updated as they show their age.
Yet, while we agree that education programs can be effective and play a role, we believe we already have good basic education programs in place. Education programs by themselves will not solve the stated problem and may, in fact, introduce additional barriers to hunter participation. Moreover, the Montana Master Hunter program may inadvertently create a class system which is why FWP was not initially comfortable with adopting the concept years ago and which is why the program has been implemented outside of the department. Plus, such a system is challenging to scale up to be effective. Moreover, we need to be thinking this through before jumping on the bandwagon of asking hunters to do even more to participate. That is, additional requirements in the form of education programs need to be carefully designed to be effective and targeted and without inadvertently misleading hunters by a poorly designed incentive structure. We second the comments offered by the Wildlife Division: "To be effective at a large scale, especially if it comes with increased opportunity, the opportunity to take the expanded hunter education must be broadly available. The opportunity to exercise the expanded opportunity would also need to be substantial to garner participants' interest and reduce elk numbers."
Thank you again for the opportunity to comment on your ‘Expanded Hunter Education’ proposal. We appreciate your careful consideration.
-The Montana Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers