Overruling the NRC a great i-deer
In case you hadn’t noticed, there are only 33 more shopping days until the election. Meaning if you haven’t stocked up on yard signs, T-shirts and other assorted campaign bling, you’d better get cracking, cuz time’s a-wastin’ and between supply chain issues and Hurricane Ian, come Nov. 8 all you may have to show for it is a tattered old bumper sticker that says “Vote for Dick.” And who wants something like that?
Unless your name happens to be Dick.
But that’s nothing compared to what happened while we were driving to the candidate debate the other night. There we were, jamming to Herman’s Hermits while tooling along the highway when two deer suddenly ran out and stopped right smack dab in front of us. So we did what any normal person would do under the situation. And changed the lyrics to our Peter Noone singalong. From Dandy to Bambi. Which got us to laughing so hard---we’re easily amused---that we nearly drove off the road and into a cornfield. No surprise of course.
A funny thing always happens on the way to the forum.
But low-grade humor isn’t limited to two-track treks to venues where candidates lob verbal hand grenades at one another. It can also happen under the dome in Lansing. Where not long ago, the Michigan House passed some deer hunting-related legislation. And where last week, the state Senate gave its blessing, too. And here’s the funny part.
They actually got it right.
It all started when the state’s Natural Resources Commission a few months back adopted a slew of new mandatory reporting requirements hunters would have to abide by. Not content with knowing how many Bambis they harvested during the second week of deer camp — or maybe it’s beer camp; it’s hard to tell the difference — commissioners also threw in a laundry list of other data backwoods nimrods needed to cough up. Including date of birth, kill tag license number, the GPS coordinates for where the deer were taken, the number of antler points, and what specific kind of bang-bang stick they used to smoke ’em out and bring ’em to justice. Not to mention the most important part of all.
Whether or not a smart-alecky, carrot-chompin’, long-eared galoot had managed to tie the gun barrel into a bowknot seconds before the trigger was pulled.
So much for encouraging greater participation in a rapidly declining pastime. To be sure, supplying general information at DNR reporting stations provided useful population data from each of the state’s deer management units. But minutiae like latitude and longitude down to the second and whether the weapon of choice was a blunderbuss or Gatling gun was over-the-top nonsense. So were three other components. Dumping the aforementioned reporting stations and insisting that everything be done online. Giving hunters only 72 hours to comply. And socking anyone who failed to do so with a $500 fine.
Plus 90 days in the pokey to contemplate the consequences of their sins.
None of this would have affected us. The only hunting we do is for really cool CDs. Still, we’ve got friends who load us up with packages of deer steaks, and they love nothing more than spending 14 days out in the boonies where the only thing that’s on line is the laundry they did in the creek. So three cheers to the bipartisan group of lawmakers who responded to the NRC’s onerous new rules by wiping out — with limited exceptions — all hunter-related deer harvesting reporting requirements. Sometimes you have to show them who’s boss. And from where we sit, that’s just dandy.
Bambi.
Talk Back with Doug Spade and Mike Clement is heard every Saturday morning from 9 a.m. to noon Eastern Time on Buzz 102.5 FM and online at www.dougspade.com and www.lenconnect.com.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Talk Back: Overruling the NRC a great i-deer
