By BEN NEARY
NMWF Conservation Director
The New Mexico State Game Commission’s pending review of its bighorn sheep hunting rule offers resident hunters a chance to call for reform of a system that has given outfitted hunters and nonresidents too many of the coveted tags for years, advocates say.
Demand for bighorn ram tags far outstrips supply around the West. They commonly command hundreds of thousands of dollars at auctions while a hunter’s odds of drawing a public draw tag remain infinitesimal.
Brandon Wynn, an Albuquerque hunter who has taken bighorn sheep in several states in the West, says the animals occupy a special place in the hearts of many hunters.
“If you’re a serious hunter, getting a bighorn sheep tag is kind of life-changing,” Wynn said. “It’s a big event in your life; it’s like getting married, being born, and drawing a sheep tag. And in the interests of staying married, I’m not going to say in which order those come. It’s a big thing, it really is, a bighorn sheep tag. This is how special this animal is to hunters.”
In response to such high demand, many states in the West do their best to conserve bighorn tags for their own residents, limiting nonresidents to no more than 10 percent every year.
Yet the New Mexico State Game Commission has a history of dragging its feet on enforcing the state’s quota law to benefit residents while giving more tags than necessary to wealthier hunters who hire outfitters and to nonresident hunters.
New Mexico’s quota law specifies that residents must receive a minimum of 84 percent of the tags for each hunt while 10 percent are reserved for residents or nonresidents who have contracted with an outfitter and 6 percent are reserved for nonresidents who haven’t contracted with an outfitter.
Mathematics dictates that in order to have enough tags to give New Mexico residents the required minimum of 84 percent and still have a tag left over for an outfitted hunter, a specific hunt must have a minimum of seven tags. And in order to give a tag to a nonresident hunter who hasn’t contracted with an outfitter, a hunt must have at least 13 tags.
Those key numbers – a minimum of seven tags to offer a single tag to an outfitted hunter and 13 tags to offer one to a nonresident hunter – would preclude anyone but New Mexico residents applying without an outfitter from ever drawing a sheep tag if the state game commission applied the normal definition of “hunt code” to bighorn sheep.
For all other species, New Mexico uses the term “hunt code” to mean a single hunt in a single place at a given time. The highest number of ram tags given in a single game management unit at one time is in the Pecos, where five tags will be issued this year for the first ram hunt.
To sidestep the quota law, the New Mexico State Game Commission currently classifies all Rocky Mountain bighorn ram tags as being in a single hunt code and classifies all desert bighorn tags as being in another, separate hunt code.
The single hunt code classifications for the state’s two types of bighorn rams exist even though the sheep populations are spread out in small groups separated in some cases by hundreds of miles. The various hunts within the single “hunt codes” also happen at different months of the year.
For desert bighorns, for example, hunting on the Sierra Ladrones north of Socorro in December is lumped together with hunting on the Hatchet Mountains, just north of the Mexican border, in October under the single hunt code.
By pooling the bighorn tags together, the number of tags in each so-called hunt code rises high enough that the game commission can claim to be following the state’s big game quota law as it allocates some of the small number of tags to outfitted and nonresident hunters.
“It’s a tortured definition of a hunt code,” said Jeremy Vesbach, a former executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation who served on the game commission until January 2022.
“For bighorn sheep, ‘hunt code’ means something completely different than it does for any other species,” Vesbach said. He said the game commission obviously changed the hunt code definition to ensure that the quota system wouldn’t apply to wealthier hunters.
The game commission has given notice it will start the process of reforming its bighorn sheep rule at its March 4 meeting. The commission addresses the bighorn rule and the rules for other big game species every four years.
Vesbach said it’s clear that instead of continuing to twist the hunt code definition to sidestep the quota law on bighorns, the game commission should send the matter to the New Mexico State Legislature so it can craft a solution by changing the quota law itself.
“The quota law is not working and the Legislature needs to take it up and fix it,” Vesbach said. “It’s not the place of the game commission to give a different definition of hunt codes so they can apply the quota law differently for different species.”
New Mexico’s current twisted sheep regulations have their roots in a federal court order that a Texas hunter named David Terk secured against the state in the 1970s. That court order prohibited the state from imposing quotas on nonresident tags for bighorn sheep, oryx and ibex. The state imposed quotas on other species in 1996.
Although a federal law enacted in 2005 established that states could impose quotas on all game species, New Mexico didn’t ask the courts to overturn the Terk injunction in response to the federal law until 2013.
Wynn said he and other hunters implored the state game commission to impose quotas on bighorn tags as soon as the federal law allowing them went into effect in 2005. But he said the commission failed to respond.
From 2006 through 2013, nonresidents unrestrained by any quota law drew 53.5 percent of New Mexico’s 144 Rocky Mountain ram tags, Wynn said. During that same period, nonresidents drew 76.3 percent of the state’s total 38 desert bighorn ram tags.
“All you’ve got to do is go to the district court and ask to vacate the Terk injunction, but they sat on their ass for eight years and wouldn’t do it,” Wynn said of the game commission. “Because of course, they don’t want a quota because of outfitters. They don’t want a quota on bighorn sheep.”
Wynn has analyzed the records of the bighorn sheep tags New Mexico awarded during the eight years it unnecessarily allowed the Terk injunction to remain in effect, from 2006 to 2013. He said nonresidents received 63 more bighorn ram tags during that period than they would have received if the game commission had stood up for state residents and asked the federal court to overturn the Terk injunction in compliance with the federal law.
The issue came to a head when New Mexico removed desert bighorn sheep from the state’s list of threatened and endangered species in 2011. Wynn said he and other state resident hunters begged the game commission to impose a quota on nonresident hunters before the state opened up hunting for desert bighorns.
“You’re going to have a bunch of desert bighorn sheep that have never been hunted,” Wynn said of New Mexico’s situation as it opened up hunting for the desert bighorns. “When this opens up, it’s going to be the greatest desert bighorn hunting in the modern history of desert bighorn sheep hunting. We have the most, the biggest. It’s going to be an unbelievable, generational opportunity to hunt bighorn sheep, you’ve got to impose a quota. Of course, they didn’t.”
As a result of the game commission’s failure to ask the federal court to rescind the Terk injunction, nonresident hunters in 2012 drew 15 desert bighorn ram tags while only a single tag went to a New Mexico resident. Wynn said that disparity was so lopsided and unfair that it prompted the state game commission finally to file legal papers to end the Terk injunction.
But ending the injunction created a new problem in the eyes of the commission, Wynn said. “As soon as that thing passed, I was like ‘ha, outfitters and non residents are getting no permits.”
But that’s not what happened.
The federal court vacated the Terk injunction in 2014 after the application deadline for hunting licenses had passed. Nonetheless, Wynn said the game commission invited nonresidents to apply again and let it be known that the state would earmark one of the four ram tags in the Wheeler Peak area and one of the four Latir Mountain ram tags for nonresidents even though that would leave resident hunters just 75 percent of the tags in both areas – below the 84 percent minimum required by quota law.
Immediately after illegally giving nonresidents both a Wheeler and Latir tag, the game commission moved to classify all bighorn ram tags as being under single hunt codes. The New Mexico Wildlife Federation strongly opposed the move.
Garrett VeneKlasen, former executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, addressed the game commission in 2014 when it considered putting all the bighorn ram hunts together under single hunt codes. He warned that the proposal “bends the legal definition of hunt codes.”
“According to state law, a hunt code is the species, weapon type and time frame for a specific hunt,” VeneKlasen told the game commission. “The proposed Rocky Mountain ram hunt code includes seven different herds spanning 400 miles and these seven different time frames.”
VeneKlasen called the proposal to lump all the ram tags together in a single hunt code, “a gross distortion of state law if not an outright violation of the law.”
Nonetheless, the game commission proceeded to enact the single hunt code system for bighorn rams that continues to sidestep the quota law to this day.
“So we waited eight years for relief, for our state officials, game officials and or the commission, to get rid of Terk,” Wynn said. “They sat on their ass for eight years, and they cheated us out of 63 sheep permits.”
But the second outfitters stood to lose permits, the game commission jumped into action, Wynn said.
“New Mexico is the oddity,” Wynn said. “Where every other western state, they push the limits of their laws, and their statutes and rules, to get as many permits to their own residents as they can without breaking the law, and as few to nonresidents without breaking the law, New Mexico has always done the opposite.
“It’s demonstrably true that New Mexico officials pushed the limits of our laws to give as much of our wildlife hunting opportunity to nonresidents, especially ones that are represented by outfitters, and the smallest amount possible by law to residents,” Wynn said. “We’re the only state that does that.”
Wynn suggested that New Mexico resident hunters contact the game commission and urge it to end the practice of classifying bighorn ram tags in various areas as being all in a single hunt code. He said New Mexico residents should get all the tags until the Legislature acts to address the problem.
“Give us the permits back over time that you stole from us while you get your act together,” Wynn said. “Do the heavy lifting, and go to the Legislature and have a special part of the quota law written for bighorn sheep.”
Even if the Legislature ultimately keeps the number of bighorn tags afforded to outfitted hunters and nonresidents the same, Wynn said abandoning the single hunt code structure would have real benefits.
Wynn said he’s been able to draw bighorn tags in other states by studying the draw odds and applying to hunt in areas with the most difficult terrain – areas where fewer other hunters want to go.
“The reason I’ve been able to draw is they have separate hunt codes, they have normal hunt codes, and so I can look at the draw odds for all the different hunts, and I always pick the easiest to draw hunt,” Wynn said. He said that approach increases his odds of drawing a sheep tag as a nonresident tremendously over what he faces in New Mexico.
“Because in New Mexico I have to apply for all the Rocky Mountain rams, and I have to apply for all the desert rams, so I’m not able to arbitrage those numbers,” Wynn said. “I can’t say, ‘I’m willing to put in for the hardest sheep hunt in the state of New Mexico that is physically the most challenging, maybe less sheep, I’m willing to accept that to increase my odds of drawing a bighorn sheep sometime in my life.’ They’ve taken that away from me.”
Wynn said he hopes New Mexico hunters will get involved in the current effort to update the sheep rule. He said they should tell the commission not to bastardize the hunt code system anymore.
“You had to give away 15 out of 16 desert bighorn permits the first time we had expanded desert bighorn sheep hunting, and then all of a sudden it’s an emergency in 2014 the first time an outfitter’s not going to get a tag,” Wynn said. “We’re tired of it, we want you to go back and we want you to put us first, over nonresidents, just this one time.”
Wynn said he plans to ask commissioners, “What are you going to do that shows that you actually represent New Mexico resident hunters? What are you going to do to turn your back on the monied interests and care about the New Mexicans who live where these animals live? Out of all these rules, you need to come up with one thing to show us good faith.”
Jesse Deubel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, said applying the same definition of hunt code to bighorn hunts as the game commission does to other species may not appreciably help the average resident draw a tag. But he said doing so will send an important message nonetheless.
“What’s important here is to recognize the philosophy of our state wildlife agency, tasked with representing the interests of all New Mexicans,” Deubel said. “Game and Fish bends over backwards to bend the rules and skew the rules to benefit the nonresidents, while every other state in the country does its best to help its residents.”
The New Mexico State Game Commission is scheduled to meet from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Fri., March 4, at Macey Center, 801 Leroy Pl, in Socorro. The meeting will be streamed live on the Internet at: http://www.wildlife.state.nm.us/commission/webcast/