New hunting licenses raise $6 million for
the Indiana Department of Natural Resources
By Joel
Wilcox, THG Outdoors
A mistake made by an
Indiana Department of Natural Resources employee paid off big this fall as the
agency collected an additional $6 million in hunting license fees.
Last March, when hastily
trying to meet his deadline for publishing this year’s hunting license fees,
Indiana DNR publications director Edgar Marcum mistakenly made two new additions
to the brochure: a $15 fee to obtain a license to hunt black bear and a similar
fee for hunting mountain lions.
It seems that Marcum, in a
hurry to finish the publication, cut and pasted information from the Montana
Department of Natural Resources website onto a Microsoft Word document to save
time. He did not proofread the brochure before it went to print.
Before the DNR noticed the
error, the brochure was in sporting goods stores and taxidermists’ shops around
the state. Since Indiana has no mountains and hasn’t had wild bears living in
the state for generations, DNR officials decided not to recall the brochures.
They thought that Hoosiers would realize that it was indeed an error and ignore
those license fees.
They had no idea how this
mistake would be a tremendous windfall for the cash-strapped agency.
When summer rolled around
and Indiana hunters started buying their yearly licenses, most immediately
noticed the additional black bear and mountain lion licenses that were
available. Thousands of hunters purchased these so they could hunt new, more
exciting species.
“I just figured that bears
and mountain lions had been taken off the endangered list or something so we
could hunt them,” said Orangeville resident Doug Barnhill. “I was looking
forward to bagging one. I already got a mess of deer heads hanging in my living
room.”
After seeing how much
money the new fees were bringing in, the DNR decided to advertise and promote
the sale of the licenses. TV and radio stations around the state played
commercials touting them.
By the time hunting season
began, the Indiana DNR had sold a combined 400,000 black bear and mountain lion
hunting licenses.
It wasn’t until Marcum’s
conscience got to him that he went public with the DNR’s secret; there really
were no new species roaming the wilds of The Hoosier State.
By this time the damage
had been done. Hunters were out over $6 million dollars, money that went to the
DNR’s general fund.
Hunters statewide were
outraged, and many threatened legal action. The DNR was undaunted.
“We never said there were
black bear or mountain lions in our ads,” said DNR director John Bacone, “All we
said was that the licenses were available. We violated no laws.”
To appease Indiana’s angry
hunters, the Department of Natural Resources recently released some of the new
species into the wild. Three elderly mountain lions from the Indianapolis Zoo
and a dancing black bear named Fluffer from the Hadi Shrine Circus now make
their homes in Hoosier National Forest.
