If
politicians preying upon your attentions this season fail to inspire,
you might seek common cause with the beasts — the four-legged variety
rather than those running for office. Ballot
initiatives aimed at protecting bears and wolves from hounding,
trapping and other inhumane hunting practices are up for a vote in two
states — Maine and Michigan.
Oh,
be still thy twitching trigger finger. This isn’t an anti-hunting
column; it’s a pro-humanity column. Ours. And the referendums, driven by
the Humane Society of the United States,
are aimed only at minimizing animal suffering and restoring a measure
of decency and fair play in our dealings with creatures.
First, the bears. Maine is the only state that still allows
bear baiting, hounding and trapping. More than half of the 32 states
with legal bear hunting allow hounding, a dozen allow baiting, and only
Maine allows trapping for sport.
For
clarification, hounding refers to the use of dogs that have been trained
to chase bears relentlessly and then to corner or fight the poor beast.
The bears have no choice but to turn to face a murderous pack or,
exhausted, escape up a tree.
That’s
when the hunter, who, thanks to electronic tracking equipment, has been
able to follow at a leisurely pace and safe distance, points his rifle
and shoots the bear from a tree limb. Frances Macomber, the cowardly
hunter of Hemingway’s short, unhappy story, looks like a Masai warrior by comparison.
Baiting
means that a hunting guide strews rotting food in the woods and places a
55-gallon drum filled with jelly doughnuts, pizza, grease, fish guts
and rotting beaver carcasses in a target spot. The “hunter,” who likely
has paid a fee to the “guide” for a “guaranteed kill,” is provided a
comfy seat to wait for the bear. Bam!
It’s
ironic — or something — that the same state fish and wildlife agency
folks who post signs warning tourists not to feed the bears will allow
other tourists to feed them for about $2,000 to $4,000 a pop. New
signage might read: Kill what you feed.
The
problem with baiting, beyond the obvious, is that it perpetuates an
unhealthy cycle that only creates more problems — growing the bear
population and making the bruins too comfortable around human areas —
that hunters then use to justify more baiting and shooting. Avid hunter
and writer Ted Williams, who wrote about bear baiting for Audubon magazine in 2005, calls it “garbaging for bears.”
Other
states, such as Colorado, Oregon and Washington, meanwhile, have
managed to maintain mostly stable bear populations without these
inhumane practices. Plus, bear-hunting licenses in these states for
fair-chase hunts have doubled or tripled.
A
fair hunt may be more dangerous and require greater courage than
shooting Winnie in a tree, but isn’t that at least part of the point? It
should be noted that the Masai warrior, who carries a shield and a
spear to hunt a lion, does sometimes lose.
In Michigan, wolves are the designated prey.
The
Humane Society is campaigning there to stop the reopening of a wolf
hunt, which has been deemed necessary largely because of human-wolf
stories that were found to be false. In one true case, a farmer who lost
several cattle to wolves had left several rotting cattle carcasses
lying around. Talk about a baited field. Was he expecting squirrels?
Otherwise,
the stories are mostly myths — wolves staring at humans through
windows, stalking little girls in red capes, that sort of thing.
Although
wolves have been removed from the endangered species list in Michigan,
they number fewer than 650. Humane Society President and chief executive
Wayne Pacelle fears that wolves will suffer the inhumane hunting
practices — hounds and traps — seen in other states that are part of
what he describes as “anti-wolf hysteria sweeping the Midwest.”
Rather
than leaving power in the hands of legislators and commissioners,
Pacelle is urging voters to speak up through ballot initiatives: “We
need to make a statement that the public — and not just trophy hunters —
has a right to have a say in the protection of wildlife.”
The
referendum, by circumventing heavily lobbied legislators, sought to
resonate with people who are disgusted with politics or who abhor
cruelty to animals as sport. And, yes, often for food, but that’s a
subject for another day. In the meantime, we can safely say that nobody
eats wolf. And nobody eats bear — twice.
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