Arkansas Sportsman

North Little Rock ordinance off mark

The North Little Rock City Council passed an emergency ordinance Aug. 19 making it illegal to discharge a bow or crossbow within city limits.

Charlie Hight, a North Little Rock city alderman, proposed the ordinance. He said it mirrors similar ordinances in Little Rock, Maumelle and Jacksonville.

The regulation is intended to protect public safety, Hight added. He said that people who use the Overbrook Trail in the Overbrook subdivision complained about a homeowner whose property abuts the trail right-of-way. He said the homeowner shoots targets with his bow, and the trail is behind the target. Hight said it put the safety of those using the trail at risk.

"If he missed the target, walkers and joggers and users of the Overbrook jogging trail were at risk of being hit by an arrow," Hight said.

Curiously, the ordinance allows an exception for persons discharging bows or crossbows at stationary targets on their own property beyond the firing range of neighboring property. The ordinance does not require a target shooter to be a minimum distance from a residence or other property. Hight said such a requirement wasn't necessary. However, if someone is shooting from an elevated stand, the angle effectively removes the target from the firing range of neighboring property, with the ground serving as a backstop.

The new ordinance effectively prohibits at least one landowner from reducing an overpopulation of deer on his property. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission recently issued extra deer permits to Gene Pfeifer under its Deer Management Assistance Program. The permits allow Pfeifer to kill more than four does from his property annually. The annual bag limit for does on property in deer management zone 10 that are not in DMAP is four if taken with archery equipment. Before the city council passed the ordinance, archery tackle was the only legal means for taking deer within city limits.

Little Rock banned hunting within city limits in 1997, but times have changed. The national trend in major metropolitan areas is to allow controlled hunting in highly populated areas with bows -- and with crossbows in states where crossbows are legal. Alexandria and Fairfax, Va., have embraced archery deer hunting to control deer populations that have, as wildlife biologists put it, exceeded their sociological carrying capacities. Fairfax and Alexandria are Washington, D.C., suburbs. The story is the same in Maryland's D.C. suburbs. Bowhunting is also used to control deer in Baltimore and Annapolis, Md., and in metropolitan St. Louis and Kansas City and their suburbs.

George Timko is a deer biologist for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Because people in southeastern Maryland live so close together, Timko said homeowners generally won't tolerate bowhunting on small residential properties. Instead, those municipalities hold controlled hunts in city and county parks. In urban and suburban areas, parks are refuge habitat and staging areas for deer to sortie for their nightly hosta raids.

This is also true in Burns Park and Two Rivers Park.

To facilitate public deer reduction efforts in Montgomery County, Md., which has a population of over 1 million, the county passed an ordinance allowing the discharge of bows to within 50 yards of a residence. Previously it was illegal to discharge a bow within 150 yards of a residence.

"It's been effective," Timko said. "Timing of hunting is important, to do it when a majority of people are driving and aren't home during the day. Baiting can be used, and deer can be conditioned to come to feeders at times when they're not going to run into people on a school bus or people driving in a commute."

In Virginia, 41 counties, cities and towns participate in an urban archery program that runs from the first Saturday in September through the last Saturday in March. An article written by David Hart in a 1997 issue of Virginia Game and Fish magazine titled, "Washington's Beltway Bucks" described how two bowhunters routinely killed Boone and Crockett class bucks bowhunting from treehouses, swingsets and jungle gyms.

"The biggest sticking point for officials is a perceived safety issue," said Nelson LaFon, urban deer program coordinator for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

A safety issue that statistically does not exist.

"If we could open access and change perception, we'd love to, but we're not going to," Timko said. "The best thing we can do is educate the public on options and convince them that hunting is the best tool."

Liberalizing ordinances that restrict the discharge of archery equipment is an important step, Timko said.

North Little Rock's intentions are sincere, but on this issue the city is behind the times.

Sports on 09/04/2014

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