Originally Posted by Farmboy1 on 24hourcampire.com
My neighbor who has been very lucky for years did not draw his deer tag this year.
I am from ND and numbers and tags are down again this year. So he may get a bow
license across the counter, so he can still hunt. I offered him my compound bow but
he said he is going to try to get a Drs. excuse so he can use a crossbow.
I don’t like it one bit, I call BS. What do you think ?
I screwed up my shoulder in 2007, getting ready for bow season. It was still painful at Thanksgiving, and I realized it was probably time to stop bowhunting. At the time, I was a pro-staffer for a magazine, and I decided to try converting to crossbow and write about the experience. I had my doc sign the state form declaring my shoulder a disaster area.
I had never been saddled with crossbow hatred the way some guys are. I came up hunting in Ohio, which puts crossbow on an even par with other forms of archery. I just naturally gravitated towards compound bow and that was that. Everybody else could do as they pleased. Up until the 2009 season, I’d never tried hunting with one.
Bottom line: Everyone who disses crossbows thinks they shoot like a rifle and offer an unfair advantage. I found out the first accusation was patently false: I could get maybe 45 yards out of my contraption, and that was just under my maximum range with a bow. A better working range was 15-25. The device was unwieldy, hard to load, and impossible to reload with any speed. I did one year of it, missed a good buck by bouncing a bolt off an overhanging limb, and decided that was a good place to stop. If I’d been hunting with my compound, I could have seen the limb easily. Using the scope on the bow, my field of view was too limited.
I stuck to rifle hunting after that.
What do I really think of crossbows? If you look at the KY Telecheck system , you’ will see harvest number for crossbow that are lower than archery but still comparable. These are each close to 10 times less than firearm-related numbers. If you look at the recent zone changes in KY, you will see that a lot of counties are moving up the zone ladder. By the time you hit Zone 1, the deer harvests are not keeping up with deer. At least in Zone 1, I would be doing more to encourage deer harvest, and the easiest thing to do would be to put crossbows on par with all other archery. As it stands, crossbow season is far more limited, especially in the early parts.
EDIT: Let me take something back. I just checked the KY rules for this year. The difference between archery and crossbow seasons has been reduced to just the first 3 weeks in September. The rest of the deer season is open to crossbow 9/19 to 1/18. Good for KYDWFR!
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