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Commoners’ Right To Hunt Under Threat

Commoners’ Right To Hunt Under Threat

In Olde England, hunting was the privilege of the landed and the rich. The right to hunt depended on the number of acres owned or one’s income.

This inequity led English jurist William Blackstone to complain in the late 18th century that “50 times as much property (is required) to enable a man to kill a partridge as to vote for a knight of the shire.”

English colonists settling America wanted no part of the old country’s class-based rules. Anyone could hunt or fish in America.

But that is slowly changing, as the rich and politically connected employ new tactics to close off opportunities for hunting and fishing to the common folk. The most intense conflicts between the wealthy and locals are taking place in the American West — where there’s room for everyone, or so we thought.

First, a plea to non-hunting environmentalists to join sportsmen in the battle to preserve access to wildlife. Ordinary hunters seeking sport or food were not to blame for the near loss of the bison and the extinction of such species as the passenger pigeon, heath hen and Labrador duck.

The villains were commercial hunters who slaughtered wildlife for profit, shipping millions of hides, feathers and racks of game meat to American and foreign markets. Hunters started the American conservation movement over a century ago to stop the destruction.

Today, the biggest threat to wildlife is loss of habitat, a concern for all environmentalists. Another issue, the movement to privatize public lands, should also link hunters and vegan hikers in common cause.

Back to the politics.

In Montana, public access to the state’s wildlife now dominates the governor’s race. On one side, incumbent Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock is fighting private efforts to close off hunting and fishing grounds that Montanans have enjoyed for generations.

On the other, Republican Greg Gianforte is seeking to empower big landowners (like himself) to limit such access. In 2009, he sued the state to remove a public easement that gave anglers, walkers and others access to the East Gallatin River via his property. He accused the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks of using “extortion” to keep that river path open.

Through much of the rural West, wealthy out-of-state buyers are amassing huge tracts of land to create their personal duchies. (Gianforte is a multimillionaire from New Jersey.) They often break with the neighborly ways of an older West where landowners didn’t fret much over locals’ crossing their property.

The North American Wildlife Conservation Model is clearly under threat. Formulated by a group of wildlife biologists about 20 years ago, it regulates hunting, protects habitat and defends the right of every citizen to hunt and fish.

Colorful misfits like rancher Cliven Bundy make headlines for occupying federal land, but of more concern are serious proposals to turn land owned by all Americans over to state politicians and allied moneyed interests. Calling this a “land grab” is not an exaggeration.

The 2016 Republican Party platform officially calls for handing federal lands to the states. That’s after Utah passed a bill in 2012 demanding that more than 20 million acres of federal land be transferred to state officials. Eleven Western states have considered 37 similar bills. Six of them got through.

Happily, there has been pushback. Lawmakers in Wyoming and Oregon turned thumbs down to the awful (and radical) idea. Colorado and New Mexico actually passed bills affirming support for national forests, parks and wildlife refuges.

The battles over public lands and access to wildlife will rage on — among mining companies, Native Americans, sportsmen and their fellow environmentalists. We must not let money determine the outcome.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached atfharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Bureau of Land Management Oregon and Washington

We Should Rethink Naming Wild Animals

We Should Rethink Naming Wild Animals

Animals do not name themselves. The lion illegally hunted down in Zimbabwe last year did not know he was “Cecil.” The western lowland gorilla shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after a 3-year-old fell into his enclosure did not answer to the name “Harambe.”

We can understand why zoos, nature preserves and animal rescue groups give their headliner animals a name. It helps humans imagine a bond with the creatures, leading to donations, visits and other support for their institutions.

But naming wild animals is not all good. “It trivializes wildlife and makes it less wild,” complains Don Thomas, a well-known hunting writer and environmentalist based in Montana.

Thomas told me that while writing an article about the zoo controversy, he had used “Harambe” as the original title but then caught himself. There’s a long tradition of hunters giving names to “special” game animals, he added. That, too, should be discouraged.

Naming wild animals makes them seem human and also less dangerous. That can work to the detriment of both the animals and humans. The “beloved Cecil” had become a virtual pet in a game reserve and thus may have lost a natural wariness toward humans.

The outcry over the killing of “Harambe” included a good deal of fantasy about the gorilla’s relationship with the toddler. Many insisted that “Harambe” was actually protecting the boy.

Protective? Aggressive? No one could possibly know, Thomas insists. “The video clearly does show a powerful, agitated animal dragging a small child rapidly through water deep enough to drown the kid and roughly enough to kill it in an instant, intentionally or not.”

Expecting wild animals to act with human benevolence is especially risky in the case of primates closest to us on the evolutionary charts. Recall the terrible story of “Travis,” the chimpanzee that virtually tore off a Connecticut woman’s face and hands.

If any animal deserved the title of honorary human, it was “Travis.” He appeared in a Coca-Cola commercial and on TV shows. “Travis” wore a baseball shirt and could operate a TV remote control. But in 2009, he suddenly tore at one of his owner’s friends. Police shot him dead.

Facebook is heavy with videos that seem to unite natural enemies, feeding the human dream that all creatures can get along. A cat plays with a parakeet. A chicken cares for a kitten.

A problematic example that has gone viral shows a 1,500-pound Kodiak bear cuddling with its keeper. The bear has a name, of course — “Jimbo.”

The video promotes a wildlife rehabilitation center in upstate New York. The center may do good work nursing injured animals, but is it doing the public a service in portraying bears as potential playmates?

The gruesome demise of Timothy Treadwell should have put an end to the idea of bears as trusted companions. Heavily into self-promotion, Treadwell claimed to have forged loving relationships with grizzly bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. He recorded himself living among these fearsome mammals — and playing roughhouse with them.

In a documentary about him, “Grizzly Man,” Treadwell is seen talking baby talk with a giant bear he named “Mr. Chocolate.”

National Park Service rangers accused him of harassing wildlife.

On Oct. 6, 2003, the rangers found the chewed-up remains of Treadwell and his girlfriend. They killed a large male grizzly near their campsite and found human body parts in his stomach.

Could he have been “Mr. Chocolate”?

We grow up with teddy bears and stuffed lion toys. Ideally, children — and adults — will learn to distinguish between make-believe and biology. Holding back on giving wild animals names might be a good start.

 

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo: Max Goldberg

Conservatives Taking Hunters For Granted

Conservatives Taking Hunters For Granted

The Durfee Hills contain some of the finest elk hunting grounds in Montana. Some 2,700 acres of this majestic country is open to sportsmen, courtesy of the land’s owner, the United States government.

But “no trespassing” signs could sprout if two rich Texans succeed in persuading the federal government to give them the hills in return for another chunk of land on their 360,000-acre spread — a parcel providing the only road access to 50,000 public acres along the Upper Missouri River. Both federal properties are overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.

If they prevailed, the Wilks brothers would create a world-class private hunting preserve the size of a small European country. This is not an isolated case. A lot of open space is closing around Montana, Wyoming and throughout rural parts of the West as billionaires and developers vie to shut out the public.

They are getting a helpful push from conservative politicians demanding that Washington dispose of the huge amount of federal land it owns, especially throughout the West. Though these politicians routinely declare love of hunting — all but posing with a moose draped over their shoulders — they are in effect calling for the closing of the land used by 72 percent of Western hunters.

Republicans in the U.S. Senate, meanwhile, recently passed a nonbinding budget resolution calling on the federal government to dispose of all its land other than national parks and monuments, which are almost entirely off-limits to hunting.

“A lot of politicians are making the claim that these lands are worthless, when in reality these are the lands that matter the most to the average sportsman,” Joel Webster of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a group of environmental-minded hunters and anglers, told me.

In a doubled double cross to hunters, the National Rifle Association backs the politicians wanting to close off the land to public sportsmen. Some hunters have told me that they refuse to be NRA members.

The Wilks brothers can play hardball. Their N Bar Ranch surrounds the Durfee Hills, so hunters must fly in, and they do. The brothers put a fence around the BLM land, depriving hunters of the elk that graze on their ranch property.

And they posted armed guards on the old road leading to the Missouri River, a road that was open until 2011. (They’re now allowing temporary public access, perhaps to ease local anger.)

“If the BLM caves in,” said Don Thomas, a Montana-based outdoors writer, “it will establish a dangerous precedent that could eventually spell the end to public land hunting and fishing throughout the West.”

Some of the politicians tell the sportsmen that federal land taken over by states would be kept open to hunting. That’s nonsense, Webster said.

Most state constitutions require that state lands be managed for profit. In Colorado, for example, 80 percent of state land is closed to hunting. You can’t even walk your dog there.

This is the scenario if the land were transferred to the states: The states would immediately complain that there’s no money for maintaining it — and raising taxes is against their religion.

“What happens next,” Webster said, “is the states identify which lands have the most industrial potential. Then they’ll sell the prime real estate lands — the lands with lakefronts and mountain basins — to billionaires and developers. That’s how you maximize profit, right?”

About 640 million acres — mostly BLM, U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service land — is in the crosshairs. Western hunters had better counter this movement to curb federal land ownership — or they may no longer be Western hunters.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: m01229 via Flickr

Ethical Hunters Shocked By Cecil Story

Ethical Hunters Shocked By Cecil Story

BOZEMAN, Montana — That picture of Cecil the lion’s corpse and the American dentist posing triumphantly over it was ghastly. Cecil had apparently been lured out of a safe haven in Zimbabwe and illegally shot.

It happens that the Cecil story appalled many of the hunting and fishing writers gathered here by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The partnership represents sportsmen dedicated to maintaining wildlife habitats.

Its members often see themselves squeezed between other environmental groups hostile to hunting and the “slob hunters” they believe sully the sport. And they feel underappreciated as protectors of the wild environment. Hikers and campers pay far less for conservation than they do.

“Cecil was an absolute disaster on multiple fronts,” Don Thomas, a well-known outdoor writer and co-editor of Traditional Bowhunter magazine, told me. From what is known, Thomas places most guilt on the dentist’s hunting guides. It is their responsibility to know the laws and see that hunters abide by them.

“The hunter’s errors seem to be more a matter of sleaze factor than of illegality,” Thomas added, though he is not cleared of the latter.

But Thomas also has a problem with the Disney-fication of Cecil — “taking a wild lion, giving it a name and turning it into a faux pet as a tourist attraction.” The biggest threat to African lions, he explained, is not hunters but the loss of wild habitat through human overpopulation, development, and climate change.

What is ethical hunting?

It’s not killing an animal who has no legitimate means of escape. It’s not taking an animal who has been around people a lot and has lost its instinctual fear of humans. Collared and long studied by biologists, Cecil would seem to fit into that second category.

Ethical hunters have long condemned “trophy mania,” that is, measuring the experience merely by the size of the antlers harvested.

The general public, meanwhile, does not grasp how much conservation is paid for by hunters and anglers. Hunting and fishing license and permit fees largely go toward habitat restoration.

The Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937 taxes the sale of hunting gear. The proceeds, more than $12 billion so far, go to state wildlife agencies for conservation. A similar tax on fishing equipment followed the 1937 law. Buy a fishing rod and you pay the excise tax. Buy a sleeping bag and you don’t.

In 1900, fewer than 500,000 white-tailed deer remained in North America. Extensive deforestation, poaching, and over-harvesting had decimated the population of deer, as well as of turkeys and ducks. Now there are 30 million white-tailed deer.

Better habitat care and hunting practices deserve the credit, Brian Murphy, a wildlife biologist who heads the Quality Deer Management Association, told me.

The complaints nowadays are of too many deer — and with reason. “Too many deer imperil the health of the forest, removing forage that other species rely on,” he said.

Many hunters and anglers feel right at home in the locavore movement, which promotes food grown locally. They say their relationship with the hunted dinner is far more intimate than with a plastic-wrapped chopped meat shipped from wherever.

When his family says grace over a meal, it thanks the animal itself, Murphy said. “I’ve never felt that way over a Big Mac.”

Furthermore, the game animal on the dinner table had probably enjoyed a far fuller life in the wilds than the penned cow turned into hamburger. These hunters have a point.

The Cecil story should have little to do with them.

Photo: Kevin Chang via Flickr