How odd, I was curious why there seemed to be no beaver news lately so I rechecked my google alerts. They had vanished! Well, fortunately I repaired them just in time to get the PERFECT alert for an art
icle that deserves my comment perhaps more than any other in recent years. It is Len Lisenbee’s gloating commentary on the Montana Trapping Law’s failure to pass. The headline itself is misleading, since it should read “Election bodes well for our right to kill wildlife”. But I couldn’t have mockwritten this article better myself. Even his photo looks like great work from central casting.
Election results bode well for wildlife
Many people might not know it but, besides Donald Trump’s rather amazing and certainly unexpected victory on Nov. 8, there were also several important conservation items on various state ballots. And there can be little doubt that our fish and wildlife resources also won important and rather surprising victories.
I am not referring to President-elect Trump’s well-publicized stance on gun control and his four-square support of the Second Amendment. No doubt that position, all by itself, won him countless votes from among like-minded conservatives.
Here is one important fact: Rarely does any wild species benefit from emotional voting questions. Animals that are protected from hunting, such as cougars and black bear in California, are still subject to the laws of nature that include continued breeding, population expansion and eventual adverse interactions with humans and their pets and livestock.
The “Montana Animal Trap Restrictions Initiative,” listed as I-177 on the ballot, was designed by anti-trappers to greatly reduce and restrict trapping on public lands within the state. It’s history is sordid, lengthy, and steeped in deceptive misinformation and outright lies. And in the end, Montana voters were 63 percent against the amendment.
This initiative was extremely wide-reaching, and would have banned all trapping on any public lands. That prohibition would have included all city parks, municipal golf courses and all state owned properties everywhere in the state.
That’s right, in addition to electing Donald Trump class president, the wisdom of which will soon explain itself, this november showed its intelligence by protecting the right to kill wildlife on public lands. Because the right to SEE WILDLIFE on said lands is obviously secondary to the right to kill it, which must always, always come first.
I’ll let Len explain, since he understands this so well.
Enter the voters in Montana. They were not fooled by the rhetoric spewed out by the anti-trappers. Many paid close attention to the advertisements favoring existing Montana Fish and Wildlife management. The vote results were a landslide, and common sense in the form of scientifically-based wildlife management was able to overcome emotions on this important issue.
What problems would this initiative have needlessly incurred had it passed? Based on similar ballot initiatives successfully passed in other states, the results would have been devastating. Local communities, counties and the state would have had to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to deal with “nuisance” wildlife issues. Species such as beavers, skunks and raccoons would have become living problems in short order. Wolves and coyotes would have caused major depredations on livestock, and they would have decimated deer, elk and moose herds within just a few years.
Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts and Washington are the only states that have enacted a ban on trapping. All were the direct result of ballot initiatives. And all of these states are currently experiencing major wildlife-related problems as a direct result of their misguided efforts to end trapping.
With this argument, Len firmly attests that failure to allow the sporty take of wildlife will result in public lands having to pay for the depredation of wildlife. Which might well be true, I suppose. States with more recreational trapping have less depredation, period. (Although it might be better for the stewards and park rangers of that land to decide which beaver colony is causing specific problems flooding culverts rather than letting Jimbob decide whatever beaver happens to be closest to the car.)
But I would argue that the difference for the beaver itself is actually negligible, since it makes very little difference to a him whether he’s killed for sport or for convenience. And, of possibly greater importance, the loss to the public that would have wanted to bird watch or photograph the beaver pond is hardly mitigated by whether the beavers were made into fur or just gotten out of the way. Right?
One example I like to use is the beaver problem in Massachusetts. The anti’s managed to get an emotion-filled ballot initiative against all trapping passed. Everyone who voted for it felt good.
But in just two years the beaver population increased dramatically and the complaints began to pour in. Backyards and basements flooding from beaver dam back-ups were the primary complaints. And the trapping ban on beaver was rescinded by voters one year later.
Wildlife management by emotions is never a good idea. But there always seems to be groups of individuals who, for whatever reasons, want to bypass scientific wildlife management. They always use emotions, deceitful information and lies to make their various points. And it is always wildlife that suffer in the end when too many people believe the lies.
Those crazy beaver huggers that want to bypass SCIENCE and use their emotions to make decisions. Now, I know what you’re going to say reader, but lets lay aside the fact that his example is false, MA never actually overturned the law, and bypass the fact that the entire gun rights lobby would disappear in a puff of logic if we ever made decisions based solely on science and not EMOTION – laying all this aside for the moment—- let’s just allow Len to demonstrate his keen grasp of the issues with his pointed discussion of climate change.
Considering that “climate change” used to be called “global warming” until the warming slowed and finally petered out completely, and also considering that our climate has been changing since well before the dinosaurs died out, and also considering that carbon dioxide is considered to be the major culprit of no longer mentioned global warming and yet is absolutely necessary for maintaining virtually all life on earth, I would hasten to suggest that there is ample room for more than one opinion on this subject.
Whoa! You know, the outcome of this crazy election is finally starting to make sense to me. Thank you for that. In the face of such a mind-blowing steely-surfaced argument I can only reply this:
