Massachusetts has felt very badly ever since those pesky voters in ’96 took away their right to use certain kind of traps and selfishly demanded that beavers be humanely killed. Now we are treated with alarming regularity to civic hand-wringing about this woeful and crippling legislation and the ensuing beaver population explosion. Of course since they changed the laws they can statistically prove that people get permits to kill beavers LESS OFTEN since the passage of said laws,
but that doesn’t necessarily mean there beavers get KILLED any less often or that there are more beavers because of this fact.You do know that people don’t always get permits, right?
No one can be bothered to count the beaver population or even to compare the number of complaints to a neighboring state without similar trapping restrictions. Instead they spend their mournful afternoons at the State house looking for legislative friends and finally Mr. Bergquist and those trap-happy folks in the bay state have hit upon a solution.
If state laws are too restrictive, bring in the feds!
So Massachusetts has a deal with Wildlife Services on the table to take care of “LARGE RODENT DAMAGE”. The plan is online here and is open for public comment until the end of June. I will be wading through its lavishly overwritten and information-obscuring pages this weekend. It is absolutely stunning to me that even after the horror of Thomas Knudson’s reporting on WS in the Sacramento Bee, which ran in McClatchy papers across the nation, describing the alarming numbers of ‘accidental’ otter kills in beaver traps, the shocking rate of house pets killed by mistake, and the reports of WS employees being told to remove and bury dog and cat collars and never tell the owners—-even after two congressmen are calling for a bipartisan investigation of the agency, Massachusetts looked closely at their blood-thirsty, species-indifferent killing fields and thought, now THAT’s just what we need around here! Wildlife Services!
The money quote so far
Conibear traps are allowed for controlling beaver and muskrat to protect human health and safety. However, the MDFW acknowledges that this restriction does not apply to WS activities on federal lands (see Appendix E; W. MacCallum, MDFW pers. comm. 2010).
I’ll keep you posted.
