Bob Collins
You may soon have another reason to try to live to age 84. You’ll get to shoot a doe.
The Associated Press reports today that a provision has been tucked into the House Republicans’ budget bill for environmental and natural resource agencies that would allow hunters 84 and older to kill a doe without a permit.
It’s almost entirely the work of George Krog, 84, of Two Harbors, Minn., who went to the DNR last year to get an antlerless deer permit. The conservation officer said he wasn’t authorized to issue one.
So Krog wrote to some of Minnesota’s most powerful politicians.
Krog said he can’t be sitting out long waiting for a buck to come by, and he’d like to shoot a doe.
“Every day in October I would scout the area that I was going to hunt,” he told the Lake County News Chronicle in February. “Every day I would see does, and one day I saw a buck. After that, I never saw him again.”
It doesn’t hurt, apparently, that the DNR likes him.
But he did get a buck last fall. Dan Thomasen, the DNR district enforcement supervisor in Two Harbors, brought one to Krog during the firearms deer season. Soring had suggested that Thomasen see what he could do to help Krog get some venison.
Thomasen had seized an illegally taken buck from another hunter during the firearms season, he said in a telephone interview Tuesday, and offered it to Krog.
“I asked why I was getting this buck,” Krog said. “He said that the main guy in the Cities told him he just had to get a deer for George, and he did.”
“(Krog) was just beaming,” Thomasen said. “I thought he was going to be in tears. Next thing I know, he’s giving me a hug. He was flabbergasted I’d do that for him.”
Thomasen did one better. He took the buck to the woods and field-dressed it, washed it out and brought it back to Krog.
