Bingo! when you start doing statistac anaylis you have the potential to magnify the effect of false data. That is why a "clean" smaller sample is more useful than a compleate survey that has 100% partisipation with unknown ammounts of misinformation. You always get it, but the more you can do to eliminate it the better.
The smaller the sample, the more magnified false information will be. In other words, if you have 10 reports and one lies or misleads, it is far worse than if you have 100 samples and three lie or mislead. The first example you have 10% bad info, the second you have 3%.
But why lie or mislead on harvest report? I can understand not wanting to give your honey hole up. If someone wants to peruse the reports to find a better place to hunt, more power to them. But I don't like to see the game department post bulletins pointing people to my sweet spot. (That can be addressed to the game department) Heck tho, the reason a lot of people visit sites like this are to glean info on where to hunt. And I see lots of people bragging here about the area or at least the unit they are hunting and posting pics of their success. You won't see that from me. This is the spot I'll be very vague as far as my success goes.
I want the game biologists to have the best information. (I just don't want them to blatantly share it). Otherwise they can't do their best work. They don't have the time and there aren't enough of them to check every hunter every day to get an exact count on animals taken and hunter success. But it's easy enough for hunters to report that info. The bios need this info whether you believe it or not to make informed decisions on season length, whether antlerless hunts are needed or need to be scaled back, if there is a healthy recruitment into the herd, if there is a problem in a certain area. Hunter success rates are important, not just for the season but how many days are spent for each animal harvested.
Just because other harvesters aren't reporting doesn't mean we shouldn't. We should be working towards getting all hunting groups to report responsibly because that is the only way to good management. You can't take the moral high road when you say "well they aren't doing it so I'm not going to." Do the right thing and make them look bad is the only way to win in the court of public opinion.
Go ahead, don't report, or, lie when you do, but I don't want to hear you complain when your area gets limited because the game department got bum info out of you and others.
