TQS: "Besides there, there are many places in America and elsewhere, where subsistence hunting is necessary, as there are not enough jobs nearby."

Eugene: "My parents farm is way out there and the closest town doesn't even have a grocery store anymore... UPS won't deliver there if I try to ship them something."

Norad45: "...if I lived in an area where I literally had to hunt to survive, I'd move--particularly if I had "a family to feed."

So, Norad, exactly WHERE would you move to? The high rent of a city where your minimum wage job just pays the rent? In case you hadn't thought about it, farm/country people often don't have the skills needed to do anything but manual labor.

(If someone's next comment is that they need to go to school, think about that for a few minutes.)

The excess deer population exists in most part because they are rather heavily protected. The ranchers have gotten permission to kill off a lot of the predators because of the ranchers' "right" to graze dumb livestock far into the public lands, and they want to protect them from everything, all the time, under all circumstances. The ranches even see the deer and elk as competitors for the grass, but there, their lobbyists are up against the hunter lobbyists, which are about equally matched.

Here in WA, there are a lot of poachers. It's sort of like "Deliverance" country. I don't begrudge someone feeding their family, but I suspect they just do it because they can. There was a state worker whose father found FOUR untagged deer hanging in his shed. I asked the father if he was going to turn him in, and he said, "Probably not. If he loses his job [which he probably would], he would probably want to move his trash family in with me, and that ain't gonna happen."

I don't mind REAL hunters hunting and observing the rules and regs, but I DO mind those once-a-year weekend hunters who think they know it all without ever taking a gun safety course, can't shoot worth da*n, shoot at anything that moves, take the rack and a haunch and walk off, etc. I know those people tend to kill off each other, but not enough.

I worked for a vet in OR who was out jogging, and heard a shot. As he jogged around a curve, he saw the taillights of a pickup just going around a curve. The big elk's rack had been sawed off. His comment: "Trash begets trash". (Which has become my second rule, after #1: To get to the truth, follow the money.)

And I still don't think the kid killed the bear by himself.

Sue