Wildlife problems start with us – Wyoming Tribune-Eagle Online

By Harry Harju

hjharju@bresnan.net

CHEYENNE – I’m constantly amazed at how excited some people get about a hunter killing a deer or elk, but how little they care about the killing they do.

Every human on the planet is responsible for wildlife dying and disappearing. That includes the animal rights folks, the animal lovers, the vegetarians, the hunters and people who hate and fear animals.

Our polarized, politically correct society seems to be made up of people in favor of wildlife because they just love their cute little fuzzy faces, but breed and pave them out of existence every day.

There are those who don’t like killing, but who would kill me because I hunt. There are crazies who bomb laboratories that use animals in research, but then they take advantage of the results of that research.

There are men who only hunt to get horns or antlers to display, and those who hunt for meat, and also those who could care less. The latter outnumber all of the other groups, but the former are much more vocal.

I spend lots of money on wildlife every year, and if I didn’t hunt, I’d still spend some, but considerably less. I plead guilty to the accusation that I like to have wildlife around because I hunt. But, like all hunters, I spend more time watching wildlife of all kinds than other groups, too, and probably appreciate, value, and understand wildlife a lot better than those who don’t hunt.

Hunters are the folks who banded together at the turn of the century to get wildlife management started, to stop market hunting, to close hunting seasons during much of the year, to get bag limits implemented and to preserve the big game animals they wanted to hunt.

All of this also was a benefit to animals that weren’t hunted.

Meanwhile, the rest of society was busy eliminating wildlife through market and illegal hunting and converting wildlife habitat into cities, farms, roads, mines, polluted streams, pastures, clear-cuts and prairies where forests once existed.

Except for market hunting, what the rest of society once did pretty much continues today, while hunters have created organizations like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, the National Wild Turkey Federation, Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever to try and preserve habitat for one species or another in the face of the rapidly increasing human population  Full Story

Wyoming Tribune-Eagle Online.