I suspect the perspective is a question of your involvement in archery/bowhunting. In BC, crossbows are legal archery tackle.
If you spend a lot of time within the archery community, bowhunting purist or 3d FITA shooter, then the crossbow will likely not fall into your definition of a bow. Are crossbows allowed at Federal FITA shoots? Are crossbow harvests allowed in
Pope & Young? Are the first questions that come to mind in our quick judgement.
If you are a hunter and archery is not your first love, and you are looking to take advantage of an additional hunting opportunity, within BC, we are fortunate to be able to use the crossbow within the bow only seasons. In this instance we will likely not see the subtlties of the differences.
While we have an educational issue for first time bowhunters, in BC there is lots of country and normally lots of animals. Adding crossbow users to the bow only season has little negative impact on the bow hunt and maximum impact on supporting our collective want for hunter participation.
Many jurisdictions do have to manage the number of hunters on the landscape and they draw the line for management reasons excluding crossbows from bow seasons.
We quite often use data from south of the boarder in our arguements on here. For some perspective, I've attached the position of a number of "bowhunting organizations" from the south.
Crossbows
To Whom It May Concern,
.....Crossbows, on the other hand, are locked at full draw by a trigger, utilize a rifle-like stock, have rigidly controlled internal ballistics, can readily be shot from a rest
and typically use a telescopic sight. A crossbow’s characteristics are so vastly different from those of conventional bows that summit attendees agreed that crossbows would negatively impact bowhunting seasons if allowed in archery-only seasons......