In general, no. But there are exceptions here in CO so I must presume it’s similar in other states as well, two wit: If you turn in your tag before the season starts, no reason necessary, you get your money back, but if you invested preference points in the tag, you lose those (as I once did with a resident tag). After day one, you’re out of luck for a refund.
Along a related trail of thought, I’ve come to believe that there is viable no “meat” justification for the cost of nonresident elk hunting and in most cases for deer. For the price of a nonresident elk tag in any state I can buy half an organic grass-fed steer of at least the same weight. Rather we are paying for the experience, and meat is a bonus. If a hunter lives in a state with multiple whitetail doe tags, and in a few states unlimited tags, now that’s a great deal on meat price! But traveling never is. A Coues tag in AZ, for instance, is about $360 … for some 40 pounds of meat! This fact puts a bit of a kink in our justification of hunting primarily for meat, which is the one justification most nonhunters will go along with–at home it’s easy, but at nonresident rates it’s ludicrous. We understand the “for the experience” part but it’s hard to explain it to nonhunters who tend to group out of state (or out of country) hunting as trophy hunting (and in the latter case it almost always is, if not for antlers or horns, then for exotics). The psychology of how people think about hunting–justify or attack it–increasingly interests me as a hobby in itself aside from hunting. It’s all so gloriously complex and controversial. 😆
