Think your fish and wildlife department’s funding would be secure, if only hunting and fishing license sales were healthy? It seems that even excellent hunting and fishing license sales don’t guarantee a healthy budget, as the situation in Wyoming seems to show.
A Caspar Star-Tribune editorial says that tourism is Wyoming’s number two industry, and many of those tourists come to hunt and fish in the state. Still, that doesn’t prevent the state Game and Fish department from going hat-in-hand to state legislators when they need raise license fees to keep up with inflation. When Fish and Game makes an unpopular decision, the legislature just says, “no.”
That may be a problem that many state fish and wildlife departments would rather deal with than the funding problems they have now in their own states, but it does show that things are rough all over.