The DNR’s Upside Down World of Deception and Deceit

Hunting is a $2.5 billion industry in the state of Wisconsin, so it should come as no surprise that the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and Gov. Tony Evers would like to kill it.

That’s especially so in northern Wisconsin, where the Democratic administration has ordered any hint of economic activity to be shot on sight. The agency and the governor have spent the better part of six years trying to vanquish anything that moves—property owners, business owners, homeowners, local government, and, oh yeah, the deer herd.

Just as a primer, in Wisconsin, the DNR is the star of Wisconsin’s bottom’s up world of bureaucratic deceit and deception. In public, the agency wants you all to know just how transparent it is. Which means it’s as closed as a nonessential business in pandemic town. They also want you know how much they listen to “their customers,” which means your missives and pleas are going straight into the circular file.

By the way, when agencies start talking about having customers rather than serving citizens, they mean they view those they deal with not as democratic participants with legal rights and ownership in the agency but as transactional consumers who are little more than visitors in their shop seeking a bargain. The goal is to secure a bureaucratic profit, not provide a core government service, and in that shop the customer is not “always right”—bureaucrats scoff at the very notion—and “the customer” is most certainly not their boss.

In such a capsized regulatory world—where fiction-as-fact-is presented with a straight face—we must be skeptical of anything DNR progressives tell us. When it comes to this agency, in fact, things are often exactly the opposite of what the progressive “experts” insist is the truth.

With that in mind, back to hunting and the deer population. Just recently came the news that the Natural Resources Board (NRB), the DNR’s governing body, ignored several County Deer Advisory Council (CDAC) recommendations in setting deer harvest authorizations for the upcoming fall deer hunt. CDACs are comprised of hunters and other stakeholders whose mission it is to provide recommendations to the department on deer management within their county, including harvest quotas.

Specifically, the NRB decided to ignore recommendations that there be no antlerless deer harvest on public lands in two counties in 2024 because of the dire straits of the deer population. The DNR board not only ignored them but increased the number of doe tags on public lands by 400 in Bayfield and Oneida counties.

The CDAC recommendations did not come out of the blue. Some CDAC members were saying the crisis was so bad that the DNR should have considered no deer hunt at all in those counties. The Oneida County CDAC recommendation also followed a public listening session last December that drew more than 200 participants, during which the hunters expressed concerns about the declining deer population as well as the lack of respect the CDACs receive from the DNR and NRB.

Not only that, but hunters in northern counties have been warning for years about the population decline, including in two major legislative committee meetings last year. At those public sessions, hunters from across the northern region described in great detail the twin crises facing northern Wisconsin deer hunting—the ongoing disappearance of the deer population accompanied, as might be expected, by an ongoing disappearance of the deer hunter. No deer soon enough equals no hunters.

Some hunters went so far as to call the DNR’s approach sanctioned murder by making it too easy to harvest deer: allowing crossbow hunting the week before the gun deer season, which was once proscribed, for instance, or no longer requiring hunting licenses to be purchased before the hunting season. As one hunter told the panel, you could shoot a deer out your back yard with a cross bow and then go buy a license and choose to register or not register.

What’s happening in the Northwoods isn’t rocket science. The deer populations aren’t recovering as they normally would after suffering losses, whether it’s from hunting or severe winters or predation from wolves and bears. And so hunters have been screaming for years—and these sessions were part of the scream—for the DNR to change its management strategy.

That’s if it actually had a strategy. For example, the DNR revealed in those meetings that it did not conduct actual population counts of deer, did not track deer predation, and no longer tracked hunter activity, such as hunter density per square mile. It sets no population goals; rather it focuses on county-wide harvest estimates, making no distinction on differing habitats and predation within the counties at the unit or site level. A Sex-Age-Kill (SAK) population model estimates the number of deer and then officials estimate how many bucks will be harvested and how many antlerless deer can be harvested.

The results of modeling rather than actual counting have been catastrophic. In the North, there is a very successful program to bolster interest in hunting among young people called the Northwoods Youth Deer Hunt Challenge, which last year revealed some interesting statistics about what the DNR’s “strategy” has wrought, which is a savaging of the deer population. In 2005, according to the group’s data, there were 70 entrants and 56 deer harvested in the youth hunt challenge. After that, the ratio started going down, and, by 2016, there were 221 entrants but only 73 deer harvested.

Between 2016 and 2021, the DNR kept the doe kill up even as agency harvest numbers continued to decline. The official 2023 harvest data was startling: The deer kill in the northern zone was down 30 percent over 2022 and 19 percent from the five-year average. The five-year average for the antlerless harvest was down 27 percent.

At a second hearing last August, hunters urged the agency to restore population counts, as well as unit or micro-landscape management rather than landscape or regional management; and to lower harvest authorizations until the herd numbers could recover sustainably.

At that second hearing, too, state Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) disputed the DNR’s population estimates. She urged the agency to start listening to the CDACs—“the guys … who actually are out in the woods doing the hunting.” Not doing so was one of the DNR’s biggest faults, she said: “They [the agency] don’t take into consideration economics when they do a lot of their planning and the economics of the area. So what is our overall goal? What direction should this body go? That’s a huge question.”

Did the DNR listen to any of this? Nope. Not to the hunters at the hearings. Not to the 200 people at the listening session. Not to concerned lawmakers urging the DNR to get boots on the ground to assess what was really going on, and not to the CDACs, the very councils the DNR says it formed to get input.

Both Felzkowski and state Rep. Rob Swearingen (R-Rhinelander) said they weren’t shocked, and they pointed out that DNR and Evers’ administration officials had turned down entreaties by the two lawmakers to meet and discuss the rapidly deteriorating situation.

“It’s no surprise that the DNR and NRB took these recommendations and threw them in the trash,” Felzkowski and Swearingen said. “Deer hunting and the deer population are clearly not a priority for this administration, as Gov. Evers, attorney general Josh Kaul, DNR deputy secretary Steve Little, and six of the seven NRB members declined our invitation to hear real concerns from folks in northern Wisconsin. This latest move is just another notch in the bureaucratic belt that continues to squeeze our state’s longstanding hunting heritage into nonexistence.”

So, I’m not the only one who thinks the agency’s trash can is its most important filing cabinet when it comes to public opinion, and, yup, the NRB, in its demand for a reckless and arbitrary harvest number, simply closed its mind to local CDAC concerns. In what might be described as a dramatic orchestral finale, the NRB’s powerful policy horns simply blared with insistent and discordant abandon, drowning out every other contributing policy instrument, including those of common sense and science.

All that is bad enough, but everyone has to know that the bureaucratic horn blowers were only half the story. Just as there is a famous symphony in two parts called Of Time and the River, this was a DNR swindle in two parts known as The DNR and the Governor. In Part 2, the NRB kicked the public and its local representatives to the curb by fiat; but in part 1 Gov. Tony Evers had already stepped on the stage waving his veto wand like a mad conductor to silence any legislative attempt to resurrect a public voice for the deer.

As it turns out, earlier this year a group of northern lawmakers, perhaps understanding that the DNR would ultimately do what it does best—ignore both people and science in pursuit of its ideological whims—introduced legislation that would have, among other things, prohibited the DNR from establishing a hunting season on antlerless deer in the Northern Forest Zone. The restriction would have lasted four years.

State Rep. Chanz Green (R-Grand View) and Sen. Romaine Quinn (R-Cameron) were the authors. Swearingen and Felzkowski signed on as co-sponsors. The lawmakers said the public outcry to their offices and the overwhelming demand for action in public forums required a legislative response to reverse the decline of the population.

“Deer hunting has been a tradition for generations in northern Wisconsin,” Green said. “But those traditions have been thrown by the wayside because the population of deer has been decreasing for years. We want future generations to enjoy the tradition of hunting in Northern Wisconsin, and this bill is a good start to making that happen.”

The bill sailed through the Assembly and Senate, albeit with predictable Democratic opposition, and arrived on Evers’s desk, only to meet with, again, a predictable veto. So why did Evers shoot down representatives who were responding to local and constituent concerns that the DNR’s sanctioned antlerless deer harvest was decimating the population?

Well, the governor said, he was doing it to protect local control and preserve constituents’ ability to manage the deer population at the unit level. In other words, the governor said he had to kill democracy to save democracy, a familiar Democratic theme these days:

“I am vetoing this bill in its entirety because I object to circumventing the established County Deer Advisory Council process, which provides opportunities for public input on proposed deer population estimates and harvest quotas. …. I am also vetoing this bill because I object to limiting the ability of the Department of Natural Resources and other public and private landowners to respond to local deer population levels.”

That’s rich. Read closely, what the governor is saying is that he only wants the DNR to be able to circumvent the CDAC process, not the people’s elected representatives, and that allowing the people to enact policy through the legislative will of their elected representatives—or to set deer quotas through CDACs if the agency disagrees with their recommendation—is offensive to him because it “limits the ability” of the bureaucracy to have its will and way.

All this is a familiar sheet of music, the upside down DNR and governor casting the elected legislature as a special interest and the bureaucracy as the true representative of the people. And not just that, but the NRB, a nest of political appointees, is anointed to somehow have the final word on the scientific wisdom of all deer management policies.

They and they alone green light the slaughter of the remaining does in the north. Not lawmakers. Not hunters or scientists with many years of experience and knowledge. Not CDACs. We must not listen to the people or their representatives on deer management, the governor exhorts, because we must listen to state overlords who alone know what’s in the public interest.

Nobody in the media seems to notice. It is a magnificent swindle in two parts played out before an adoring audience of corporate media reviewers, telling the world just how exquisite the bureaucratic cacophony is. It’s true in the DNR. It’s true in other state agencies. It’s true on the federal level as well.

The party that says it hates millionaires and billionaires is run by millionaire and billionaire globalists. The same party that proclaims to be saving democracy has run the most pervasive censorship regime in history. The party that purports to be the party of freedom ruthlessly locked down its population, tried to compel people to inject themselves against their will to stay employed (your body but not your choice), closed schools and churches, and divided people and workers into essential and nonessential.

There is nothing more totalitarian than the latter. The Democratic dystopia is not so much Orwellian as it is Ayn Randian. Its Anthem, as it were, is to recast the nation in a regimented mold, in which scientific progress is scored by political “scientists” who demand not fealty to the scientific method but loyalty to the political outcome, as decreed by a consensus dictated from deep within the regime.

That’s how protests against Covid lockdowns in 2020 were deemed dangerous by the scientific establishment but Black Lives Matter riots over George Floyd during the same period were not only OK but encouraged. And that’s how, on a much more local but no less important issue, the NRB shot down the CDACs and issued 400 antlerless tags too many on public lands in multiple counties.

In this gauzy world of inverted reality—more popularly known as gaslighting—our inquiries into the truth should recognize an important reality: Things are often exactly the opposite of what the progressive “experts” insist is the truth.

When the DNR says turn left, it's a pretty good sign you need to turn right. Those left turns can be murder.