No system in place for deer tags yet

By Wesley Steckler (Contact) | The Natchez Democrat

Published Sunday, August 19, 2007

FERRIDAY — Tags or no tags, Louisiana deer hunters and wildlife agents will have to wait four weeks before it is determined how hunters will keep up with their deer harvest this season.

On Sept. 6, the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission will meet in Baton Rouge to discuss whether the agency will implement the current proposed tagging program or put the program on hold this season.

“The company that has the statewide contract to operate the hunting license system, had problems with the (tagging) system,” Ferriday wildlife and fisheries agent John Leslie said Wednesday.

The problems are of a technical nature that occurs when licenses and tags are printed.

“(The computer system) was printing out tags with no numbers, tags with numbers that didn’t mean anything at all and their computer system couldn’t handle that much information,” Leslie said.

A deer tagging system has been discussed by Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries for past three or four years and is specifically a mechanism that the agency can use to more accurately determine the total number of deer killed in the state.

“For decades here in Louisiana we kind of had an honors system,” Leslie said. “You could kill six bucks or six does or any combination thereof as long as you did not exceed six deer per season.”

The new system was supposed to allow a hunter to harvest two bucks and four does per season.

Once a hunter harvests a deer, a tag must immediately be placed on the deer and reported to the state wildlife agency either by phone or the Internet.

“I think what it proposed was within 72 hours,” Leslie said.

Besides helping the wildlife agency monitor how many deer were killed in the season, the new tagging program offered other advantages to the agency.

“It provides some basic biological data such as how many total deer (were killed), how many does, how many bucks, what parish and when did you kill it,” Leslie said.

A tagging system would also help the wildlife agency monitor illegal hunting activities.

“There are always ways to illegally get around a wildlife organization,” Leslie said. “A common complaint was that everybody knew John Q. Hunter killed 14 deer last year. With the new tagging system we have a set number that were issued to you so that it makes it impossible for you to say use your brother’s tags.”

But Leslie said a solution to the tagging problems this season does not look promising.

“They’ve been working on a solution for a couple of months and they just do not have a system to print deer tags,” he said.