I am a Member in a hunt camp…

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019-0405

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I am a Member in a hunt camp in WMU 50, near the Town of Kearney, and we currently have 18 Members, but we are set up to have up to 25 Members. We own one thousand acres of land and our traditional hunting area extends beyond this one thousand acres onto adjacent Crown Land. Our camp is such that we can easily accomomadate 28 hunters and we have traditionally run our Moose Hunt with between 25 and 28 hunters (a combination of Camp Members and some guests). We are very concerned with regard to the proposal to limit party hunting to 10 per group (currently from what I can see per 2019 regs pg 26 section titled "party hunting", there is no limit stated re maximum group hunting size; only reference to group size appears to be under moose hunting allowing a maximum of 15 to "apply" in a group) As per a brief discussion one of our Camp's Members had with Keith Munroe (biologist) of the OFAH, who is also a member of the BGMAC committee, that would mean for a group our size (usually 25 to 28) legally hunting in 2 groups of 10 and a 3rd group of 5 to 8 depending on how full we are and then only being able to harvest an animal within those smaller groups provided someone within that same smaller group has a tag for the animal harvested - the way I understand this, with applications/draw for calf tags also now proposed if we only get a single tag for the camp it would mean only 10 guys can legally hunt moose that week; worse still if no tags are received no one from the camp could hunt!
We are aware of a number of hunt camps in our vicinity which have well over 10 hunters involved in their annual moose hunt. We respectfully ask that the Ministry reconsider this limitation on group size and/or try to accomodate larger hunt camps. Ours has been going since 1966. The proposal for limiting group size on a tag could truly mean the end for ours, and many other larger hunt camps. Thank you.