Tom Weston, Boehr et al

I have a question for you and all the members of this site. Since the DNR is now going to have on-line license sales, how would you feel about taking an on-line deer survey before you buy your deer license? It would only apply to people buying on-line and wouldn't involve standing in line at a store waiting for others to take a survey. Here's how it could work. You would first have to enter your name, address, birth day and drivers license number. Most of this is required for buying a tag anyways. Then, before you purchase your license, you'd have to take a quick deer survey. The questions could be 1. Did you deer hunt in 2000? 2. Did you harvest any deer in 2000? 3. If yes, were deer harvested in archery, firearms, muzzleloader or a combination of those seasons? Click correct respective seasons for type and number of deer harvested. 4. How many of those deer were bucks, does, button bucks, doe fawns? Then, if there was an insert to the state map of DMU's, you could ask which DMU the deer were harvested in. You'd have to have ability to put more than one because some hunters kill deer in more than one DMU. Then you could update it weekly so everyone could see what the respective harvest was for each DMU. You could also ask a few easy questions like 1. Did you pass up any bucks in 2000 in pursuit of QDM? 2. Would you like to see a "no spike" rule in archery season? Or similar questions. Of course, this info would be from the past season, but it would allow hunters to see which DMU's have the highest kill ratio, because you'd be able to see the number of entries to number of deer killed, and the DNR could cross reference it with thier data from that year. Assuming that 10-15% of hunters will buy on-line, that's better than the mail out surveys now in place. It wouldn't be a hassle because you could do it at home. By having to enter your name and drivers license number, the DNR would know if you bought a tag that year and thus insure that some PETA type wouldn't want to play games with it. So, what does everyone think?