Dissension in the ranks

Minnesota deer dispute: Taking, giving, debating (Star Tribune)
Some say a $1 surcharge to deer hunting licenses would provide the money needed to process deer donated to food shelves. Others say it would be unfair to single out hunters to pay for what essentially is a social service.

I'm not a deer hunter, so I don't have much of an opinion either way with this; but it's an interesting dilemna.
Money vs Principle. It is only $1.00 added, the current license is $79. This is less than buying a cup of coffee, and it will benefit (hopefully) some needy families. I can see the principle side as well. Tough call; let's get ready to rumble on this one.

The part I found really interesting in this article is the following:

Johnson also argues that the 5,000 or 6,000 deer that would be donated to food shelves wouldn't affect the overall deer population much. "From a deer management standpoint, it's insignificant," he said.

Man, to me that sounds like a significant number. I'm going to go check right now and see if I can find a figure on the deer population in MN, be right back. (On the DNR web site, I could just find the deer population in Fall of 1997 was 800,000) Ok, so that's a lot of deer.

I don't think I'll ever do any deer hunting; maybe if JR gets into hunting through the Boy Scouts I'll go out with him at some point. What I might do however, to help join in the fight against the animal jihad, is get my small animal license and go after Rocky-bin-laden's compatriots up in MN. It looks like our MN hunters are doing their part in battling the insidious squirrel population.

Minnesota has two game species of squirrel, the fox and the Eastern gray. Hunters harvest roughly 60,000 to 150,000 fox squirrels each fall, and roughly 150,000 to 250,000 gray squirrels. Kind of like going against the Sunnis and the Shiites.