Contributors to this thread:
I usually don't listen to the radio while driving, but the other day I turned the radio on a talk show, their was an advertisement by HSUS telling all ranchers/farmers to put there land into a land trust with HSUS to protect all wildlife from hunters and trappers. HSUS is here and will not stop till they shut down are legal right to hunt/trap and fish. It will be a sad day when that happens. How can we fight such an issue as this.
http://www.wildlifelandtrust.org/ appears to be HSUS.
Being a real estate broker I happen to look at land for sale. Some of it has conservation easements on it, so I have read quite a few easement agreements. I also owned some land with a conservation easment from a prior owner. I read one from the Estes Valley Land trust that specified no hunting on 320 acres. Now - Estes Park is overrun with elk, don't you think they would want to manage that and understand the value of hunting? Nope!
You put that no hunting language into a perpetual easement, you just limited your buyer pool significantly. Totally stupid on a landowners part!
It is great to preserve land forever, but after reading the requirements of many easements I would never put a conservation easement on land that I owned, ever.
Like Grasshopper said, if a landowner is obtuse enough to put a perpetual 'no hunting' restriction on their land, they and whoever buy it deserve the financial hit they will likely take on future sales...
A local rancher passed away last fall. He owned several hundred thousand acres. He left the land to the state of Colorado, with the terms it never be sold, developed or hunted for the next 30 years. It's to be kept as a working cattle ranch, with the grazing and haying permits sold. It's a huge ranch, loaded with big mule deer, resident elk and bear, and elk that move onto the ranch at the first sign of pressure from hunters on the national forest.
