The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish just announced the draw results for the 2022-23 elk season. As usual, far too many resident hunters got the bad news that they didn’t draw.
There’s always been high demand for elk tags, but that doesn’t fully explain the disappointment that too many public land hunters have been experiencing in the New Mexico draw in recent years.
There’s more to the situation in New Mexico than merely high demand for tags. The fact is, New Mexico treats resident hunters unfairly compared to other states in the West.
The New Mexico State Game Commission is doing its best not to discuss the fact that a huge portion of our state’s elk tags are siphoned off before the public draw.
In 2020, the most recent figures available, New Mexico had 23,180 elk licenses in the public draw while 14,616 went directly to private landowners under what the state calls “EPLUS” (Elk Private Land Use System.)
The New Mexico State Game Commission is now in the process of setting a new four-year rule for public land elk management. But so far, the commission has rejected calls from the New Mexico Wildlife Federation and other groups to consider any changes to EPLUS.
In other words, the game commission is going to spend this year talking about how to manage only about 60 percent of our state’s total elk hunting opportunity. The remaining 40 percent of tags is off-limits for discussion. The game commission won’t talk about it, even as thousands of state residents fail to draw tags year after year.
How are we going to pass down our hunting traditions when so many of us can’t draw a tag?
Michael Sloane, director of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, said at a commission meeting in Santa Fe this month that over 121,000 people put in more than 275,000 applications for elk and other species in this year’s draw. That’s down a bit from last year’s record numbers, but still reflects a huge demand for tags.
Nonetheless, Game Commission Chair Sharon Salazar Hickey said at the March 5 commission meeting in Socorro that the commission won’t consider changes to EPLUS.
Under EPLUS, the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish issues permit authorizations to private landowners who have properties in elk habitat. Landowners commonly sell the authorizations for thousands of dollars to hunters. Some authorizations limit hunting to the landowner’s private property but others allow hunting anywhere in a game management unit, including on public lands.
In cases where hunters hunt public lands with a unit-wide permit they’ve purchased through the EPLUS system, they compete for elk meat and trophies with state residents who have drawn elk licenses through the public license draw system.
In late 2020, the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Finance Committee staff recommended that the game commission make sweeping changes to EPLUS to bring elk management in the state in line with neighboring states that commonly reserve 90 percent of all elk licenses for state residents.
“Game and Fish takes great effort to set hunt levels for big game in a way that sustains herds; however, landowners and out-of-state hunters, not New Mexicans and public land hunters, are the beneficiaries of department policies,” the LFC audit report states.
In other states in the West, landowners sell what is theirs to sell: access to hunt their land. Neighboring Arizona, for example, give no landowner tags. Only New Mexico gives publicly owned wildlife to landowners wholesale so they can sell it off to the highest bidder.
It’s time for everyone who cares about New Mexico wildlife to get involved and demand a change to this unfair system. This is New Mexico, not Europe where the landowners own the wildlife. Yet the EPLUS system will continue funneling public wildlife into private hands for just as long as we put up with it.
Contact the New Mexico State Game Commission and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office and demand opening up the EPLUS rule for real reform during this year’s rule cycle. To contact Commission Chair Salazar Hickey, click HERE. To contact the governor’s office, click HERE. Tell them that there’s no way to engage in comprehensive elk management when 40 percent of the tags are off the table. Tell them to reform EPLUS!