Whoops, hang on there, tall stranger, I'm thinking your Shotgun may have gotten a double feed.
SFW gets credit for a bunch of stuff but in 1989 there was no SFW. They came to the party in 1992 and became known to the public in 1993, as I recall.
Here a brief historic record of elk in Utah, prior to SFW.
http://wildlife.utah.gov/hunting/biggame/pdf/elk_plan.pdf
"Elk were hunted under a limited entry hunting system until 1967 when the Board of Big Game Control adopted an ?open bull? hunt strategy on most large elk units. Smaller elk units continued to be managed as ?restricted permit? or ?limited entry? type hunts. That hunting strategy continued until 1989 when a ?yearling only? regulation was initiated on the two largest elk herds, the Manti and Fishlake. Yearling only was later replaced with a ?spike only? regulation and expanded to other units."
The concept came from an experiment done in the State of Washington that Dwight Bunnall with the Utah dwr had gone up to see. The Wash. results had produced a lot of mature bulls, they said. The hunters in Utah were sick of killing most all of the bull elk as yearling and figured it was worth a try. (Mind you we were nervous because we didn't trust the dwr but you can see what the results were from the photos of elk posted on MM is week, Dwight was right, we were wrong, on the elk!)
So.........while it's just great sport and all kinds of fun to bash the SFW boy's, they get a pass on this one.
This was elk hunting on the Fish Lake, circa 1985. Compare that to what get's posted today. Damn those spike only units! Can you find Bocephus?
DC
