The state’s Natural Resources Commission voted this month to let hunters use electronic kill tags. You can register your deer on your phone instead of filling out a paper tag in the field. I’m for it.
Paper tags have been annoying me for years. Not because the concept is bad (you kill something, you tag it, that makes sense) but because when you buy a tag, you’ve got to wait for it to show up in the mail. That could take weeks.
According to Tom Weston, the chief technology officer for the Michigan DNR, it’s taken the post office “up to 10 to 15 days sometimes” to get that actual kill tag to their home. You buy your license in September and then wait. Meanwhile, you’re checking your mailbox every day, hoping the thing shows up before opening weekend.
The mail delay was especially bad during the government shutdown. Hunters looking to pick up additional doe tags found themselves waiting on a system that wasn’t moving. Tags weren’t getting processed, and good hunting days were slipping by.
This isn’t new for Michigan. We started a pilot program for turkeys back in spring 2024 and sold thousands of electronic turkey kill tags. It worked. Now we’re expanding it to deer.
Wisconsin switched to electronic registration years ago with GameReg. Indiana’s been using CheckIN Game, where you report online or by phone and get a confirmation number. Pretty simple. You shoot your deer, pull out your phone, punch in county, buck or doe, antler points, done. The DNR gets the data right away. Michigan’s system should work the same way. We’ll hear more this spring about the details, but the framework’s there.
Paper tags will still work, if that’s what you want. Nobody’s making you use your phone.
The real benefit here is faster data. Right now the DNR’s working blind for months after season ends. Stacks of notched paper tags coming in that need to be logged, counted, and entered into databases by hand. It takes months and costs taxpayers money in man hours. By the time they’ve got harvest numbers sorted out, we’re into spring. With e-tags, they’ll know within days what harvest looked like in each county.
That actually matters when you’re making decisions about herd management, setting tag quotas for next year, tracking whether certain areas are seeing population shifts. Better data, better decisions about Michigan’s deer herd.
Look, I get the hesitation to add another app. But we’ve all had smartphones forever at this point. Might as well make them useful for something besides doom-scrolling between sits.
E-tags, coming this fall. It’s about time.
Tom Zandstra is a passionate outdoorsman and CEO of The Fair Chase. Follow him on X @TheFairChase1.
