I attended the spring meetings in Marathon county this year and listened to the biologist present on antlerless goals and tag issuance for this year. This is the first year that there will be public and private antlerless tags. What surprised me was that in Marathon county, 15% of the antlerless tags were set aside for public land. The biologist explained that 12% of the land in the county is public, so 15% of the tags were set aside for this group. I thought the idea was to increase antlerless pressure on private land, but setting aside MORE tags for public would have the opposite effect. I then called the biologist for Portage County (where I own a farm) and asked her the same question. She said she looked at public vs private land harvest in the last 5 years. 7% of antlerless deer were historically killed on public land, so they set aside 15% of the tags for public. THIS IS EVEN WORSE! I own private land in these counties and we don't have a deer shortage on the land we own. I am afraid that with this type of tag issuance we will have too many deer shot off public land, and not enough on private. The Portage county biologist said they did this to make sure that public land hunters get a chance at an antlerless tag- this amazed me.