"...There are way too many deer - far more than before westerners colonized the US..."

Really? I wonder how we know this? Who counted them way back then???

"They are impossible to control and interfere with proper conservation and wildlife management practices."

You got me on that one. It sounded like you meant it (context), but by itself it sounded pompously facetious.

"Conservation and wildlife management practices" is a misnomer. Wildlife management as practiced in the U.S. simply depends on which lobbying group is paying the biggest bucks, and the competition is fierce.

The hunters want to kill anything that will prey on or compete with their deer and elk.

The loggers want to kill anything that gets in the way of clearcutting.

The farmers want to kill anything that looks like it might eat their seed corn.

The ranchers want to kill every predator in the country so they can run their cattle and sheep fifty miles from the ranchhouse without losing any.

The horse people want to kill every burrowing rodent so their horsies don't step in holes and break their legs.

The careless parents want to kill off anything that might go after the kids they can't be bothered to watch.

The people pushing their homes into the wilderness want the views without danger of something that will kill them, their kids, their dogs, etc.

None of that is management or conservation.

Sue

Susan - I think you summed up a lot of what I feel about "forest management". In the end it doesn't resemble a forest, as in a complicated inter-dependant and diverse mix of animal and plant life, so much as an industrial farm with separate 'pens', areas, dedicated to the concerns each lobbying group.

What was open and relatively self-maintaining ecosystem has been squeezed down, Nerfed and regularized into a caricature of an ecosystem. The forests resemble real wilderness about as much as "Frontierland" in Disney World resembles the actual frontier of the 1800s.

Many of the places I used to hike and camp have been made into soulless and barren mono-cultures too depressing to countenance. I can't bear to see what has been done to them and now avoid many of my old hiking trails and camping grounds.

On the positive side coyotes do eat some of the invasive species we have brought with us. Like domestic animals. Go coyotes.

Susan
Well said . You hit the nail on the head .

Yep, pompously facetious would be the appropriate term.

I tell you what does chap my hide, though. Back home they have huge herds of elk that live in an "ecologically sensitive" area that is off limits not just for hunting, but for any human incursion. Now, this herd was introduced by the government quite a few years ago, and they've been multiplying steadily until it's obvious now that there are far too many, and the damage they are doing to the "ecologically sensitive" area is of great concern. So the feds, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the herd needed to be culled down to a more appropriate number. Now you would think that this would mean they would open the area up to a very limited hunting season with restrictions on access and egress to foot traffic only. Not so. Instead, they brought in a number of US F&W agents and took SUVS, 4x4s and helicopters into the area and killed the requisite number of animals. Then they gave some of the carcasses to the local indian tribes and destroyed the rest.

I ask you, how could a bunch of paid government employees driving to a fro cause less damage to an arid shrub and grass covered hillside than a handful of hunters hiking or with a few horses, and why couldn't the meat at least have been given to the local food bank or some such, rather than just burying it? And the worst of it is we paid these clowns to do this.

BTW, some of your statements are throwbacks to the 70s, but there are still idiots out there who think this way, just not the majority anymore, at least from my experience.

Oh yeah, and the farmers who live adjacent to this "ecologically sensitive" area are charging up to $10k for trophy elk hunts on their land, with the state allowing only a restricted number of permits to hunt their land that the farmers get to hand out as they please, because the farmers claim that the elk are destroying their property???? We're talking dryland wheat farmers who are receiving govt subsidy via CRP to grow native grass instead.

And people living in urban areas want everyone elsewhere to deal with the costs (smaller game populations, loss of lumber jobs,
crops, and livestock, threats to children, loss of property
values) just so they can have an idealized rural place to vacation
in or dream about.

Stereotypes are the refuge of bitter people.

Local coyote on his way to eat my neighbor's chickens.

I also have coyotes, raccoons, porcupines and opossums.

I have chickens, a dog and some cats. I make it a POINT that that Group A doesn't meet Group B.


"BTW, some of your statements are throwbacks to the 70s"

Do you mean something has changed, or just gotten worse?

Sue

I'd say things are changing, meaning getting better than they were thirty years ago. There are still plenty of people who think as you indicate, but thanks to programs such as the Hunter Education program and such, conservation ethics are slowly taking hold.

I just watched a program on the Outdoor channel last night about a bear hunt on the Quinalt Indian Reservation. Apparently the injuns are getting concerned about what is happening to the environment after their "closed to the general population" program has allowed black bears to propogate to the point where they are now causing over $1 mil a year in tree damage alone.

Apparently too many bears can be a bad thing...

Judging by your post, it looks like 30 years of change has not mellowed your views and ideas of racism....

I have notified the moderators of your post...