“Many of our members said they would close their lands to all hunting if a Sunday hunting bill was passed,” he said. “Pennsylvania farmers would rather see the season extended than the addition of Sundays.”

The problem, said David Graham, Ohio Division of Natural Resources chief of wildlife, is that hunting pressure tails off dramatically toward the end of lengthy seasons, so stretching deer season by a few days or even a week will likely have little effect on hunter participation.

“Adding an extra day to a weekend is what gets hunters in the woods,” he said. “We’ve seen that in Ohio. We recently added a late weekend deer season and that has really proven popular. Hunters took 25,000 deer just on those two days.”

It’s not just farmers who are opposed to hunting on Sunday. According to surveys conducted in Virginia and North Carolina, many hunters are also against the idea. Surprisingly, more hunters are opposed to it in North Carolina than are in favor of it, based on a survey conducted by Virginia Tech and Responsive Management, a research firm in Harrisonburg, Virginia, that specializes in natural resource, issues. The report, released last March, found 53 percent of licensed hunters are against Sunday hunting while only 38 percent are in favor of it. Sixty-eight percent of those hunters opposed to Sunday hunting cited religious reasons.

A survey of Virginia hunters conducted in 2006 found nearly two-thirds of hunters in favor of Sunday hunting with an even higher percentage of support in urban and suburban regions of the state. Fisher, however, wonders why one-third of Virginia hunters still don’t support the freedom to hunt on Sunday.

“There is no biological reason to not hunt one day a week,” he said. “The choice should be up to the individual, not the state government.”

Ohio’s David Graham said hunters in his state were overwhelmingly in favor of the idea when it was first suggested in the early 1990s. Despite the support, it took several more years before limited Sunday hunting was allowed when, in 1997, it was permitted only on private land where the landowner agreed to allow it. There were few complaints and even fewer issues related to it, so the entire state was open to Sunday hunting without any restrictions in 2002.

“It just hasn’t been an issue,” said Graham. “It’s as if we’ve always had it.”

Maryland also added limited hunting opportunities on Sundays in 2004, starting with a single Sunday after the opening Saturday of the general firearms season, along with a single Sunday during the late archery season. Individual counties had to choose to participate, according to Paul Peditto, director of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ wildlife and heritage service. About half the counties in the state did. Now seventeen of the state’s twenty-three counties allow deer hunting on those two Sundays.

“There haven’t been any problems, no issues, nothing that many opponents feared would happen,” said Peditto. “Our deer kill has gone up, which is what we were hoping for, and participation has been excellent.”

Aside from creating more opportunity, proponents of Sunday hunting argue that it will give state wildlife agencies a needed shot of money by encouraging more hunters to come back to the woods. Graham, however, can’t say that the additional day of hunting has helped boost or at least maintain hunter numbers in Ohio, but he said that it certainly hasn’t hurt participation. Peditto agreed, but he said there are no plans to push for additional Sunday hunting opportunities--at least not yet.

“We would certainly like the authority to open all hunting, but at this point we would rather walk than run,” he said.