Legislative Bills of interest
2025
OPPOSE:
House Bill 216 - An act requiring the FWP commission to establish rules to issue deer and elk hunting licenses to private landowners within the boundaries of the Flathead Reservation.
HB 176 - Remove harvest quotas on wolves when the population exceeds 450.
HB 222 - Keep open wolf hunting season until population is at or below 600.
HB 259 - Revise gray wolf management (allow thermal imaging scopes).
Since 2015, MSA has been producing a legislative scorecard of bills that affect Montana’s sportsmen or wildlife and habitat.
We are officially non-partisan. We will support legislators from any party if they share our philosophy and are committed to work for the benefit of Montana resident sportsmen/women and the long-term conservation of public trust resources.
We have a policy of “no federal lands transfer”. We will not endorse any candidate who advocates a federal lands transfer position.
SUPPORT:
HB 101 - Reclassify wolves as furbearers.
HB 202 - Generally revise laws related to unlawful use of aircraft for hunting.
SB 63 - Revise laws related to use of motion-tracking devices while hunting.
SB 106 - Revising laws related to use of manned and unmanned aircraft while hunting (support with clarifications).
“Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying that “the game belongs to the people.” So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The “greatest good for the greatest number” applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.”
Theodore Roosevelt (1916)