HOYTarcher
02-14-2008, 09:01 AM
The proposed “paid hunting” program is indeed a “foot in the door program”, leading inexorably to wildlife abuse, and impoverishment of both, the public and the provincial economy. Bill Bonko is indeed correct that it lacks any hint of forward thinking, or building on the experiences with paid hunting and the privatization of wildlife.
Note, this pertains not only to private lands, but also to public lands leased for grazing. There is nothing wrong with leasing public lands for grazing, as long as the public retains access to the wildlife resource that it owns, and wildlife is not given away by declaring leases “real property”. The absurdity is that the public by the propose program will pay to get back on the land the public owns anyway in order to harvest a resource it possesses. That amounts to a total give away of the land with not only no benefit to the public, but in fact a loss of benefits.
An examination of wildlife economics reveals that economic activity increases with number of participants, not with amount spend by participants. It’s participation rate that counts. And that translates into substantial wealth and job creation, the economics flowing out of the needs of individuals who hunt, fish and view. This is a direct benefit of the public land to the community at large: the economics from wildlife. Transferring trespass to lessees, therefore, reduces the economic benefits significantly, as it reduces usage and participation rates. The benefits to the public of Wild Life thus become null and void on leased land. Worse still, access denied translates readily into wildlife abuse, of the kind documented at infinitum by the US Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement efforts. Secure from scrutiny, public wildlife is plundered for the benefits of unethical clients and lessees. If you have doubts, invite an illustrated presentation form our neighbor’s Fish & Wildlife Service. Your head will spin!
Paid hunting will decrease participation on leased and private lands. That’s one of the big costs of this scheme. Secondly, one is getting closer and closer to negative commerce in wildlife and to turning hunting from a wholesome recreational and conservation activity into a questionable “blood sport”. That is, instead of many families benefiting from the excellent nutritional input provided by hunting, as well as wholesome, health-promoting recreation, a few wealth clients can engage in frivolous killings under the guise of “sport” and “trophy hunting”. Remember, the proposal reduces our ability to police wildlife as a public trust. It makes wildlife the domain of those who can pay high market prices for tags, and who will pay more the less regulated access and the more shielded their activities from public gaze and official scrutiny. It invites “trophy management”, which aside from the frivolity involved (canned shoots) that is opposed by the public, is also biological wreckage of the species involved. There are excellent biological reasons why bucks and bulls do not grow record antlers normally! It also raises the question what happens to the females? On well-secured areas that’s simple: shoot, dig hole in ground bury does with bulldozer. That’s courtesy of discussions with editors of Deer and Deer Hunting. If outsiders want to pay for tags. Let it be an auction beneficial to the public – who happens to own wildlife!
Incentives to create and protect habitat? An empty promise, as empty as it gets! Do the authors of this “stewardship program” – if one can call it such! – know what it takes to manage for wildlife abundance? Who is going to set aside acres and acres of land for wildlife production, (as is happening in the US where the land owner gets paid for it by the federal government), on the vague promises of the market place? Do they know what it takes to generate, for instance, a “quality pheasant shoot” – besides abandoning completely our highly successful North American model of Wildlife CONSERVATION? Let’s go to England and see how it’s done: severe ongoing predator control by persons hired to do the job year round; generating planned cover, to reduce weather effects on reproduction raise massive pheasants indoors and release six weeks prior to shoot, organize beater and retriever corps, generate quality guest facilities for events. (Clients will pay astronomical prices for a day of shooting pheasants driven by beats). You need a market for the birds shot. Alas, currently such “hunts” saturate the market and the birds are thrown into ditch and buried by a bulldozer. That’s current jolly old England (see Farley-Wittingstall, H. 2007. The River Cottager Meat Book. Ten Speed Press Bekeley/Toronto. pp. 150-152). Why, did you think privatizing wildlife stops with “The Alberta land and Wildlife Stewardship Project”? Only a bottomless ignoramus of wildlife history would be guilty of such innocence! Remember that’s OK with the English elite. Do you think ours would disdain it? Do you think landowners and lessees would disdain $3000-5000 per gun per day of pheasant shooting? Would they recoil from such a “blood sport”? Or from “canned shoots” in which buck deer and bull elk are executed by types that can’t hunt? It’s legal in Saskatchewan! As is baiting of deer etc. Brave New Alberta!
And Oh, the “justifications” in the Terms of Reference! Landowners “producing” wildlife? I beg your pardon. Wildlife survives incidentally to existing operations, in coulees and badlands inaccessible to agricultural machinery, in wetlands not yet drained and opportunistically on crops. Paid hunting will not change any of that! If you want to save or create habitat support Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation etc. Here is a fond of knowledge and professional expertise to do real habitat conservation. Agricultural bureaucracies in Edmonton are not inclined to look favorably on converting agricultural land to anything else. I know. I was involved.
Agricultural landowners have low tolerance for wildlife? Where was I when I lived in Alberta for almost 30 years? Most landowners loved to have wildlife around, considered it part of the land. They were protective of it! True enough, a few did not care for it, and the paid hunting approach will hardly convert such. If wildlife and hunting are to be fostered focus primarily on public land and insure that the public has access to it!
Now that an election has been called, get the message out publicly of what you think of paid hunting!
The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation is one of the cultural achievements of North American Society, the only large-scale system that not merely sustained a renewable resource but made it grow and multiply. It’s what we need to defend. Currently, there are discussions afoot making it the center of treaty between the US and Canada on Terrestrial Wildlife. It is discussed as potentially applicable globally to conservation problems. Ironically, it is even the subject of a White House conference. Yet Alberta has been violating it. Wildlife conservation needs a strong government voice, that is, a voice by the citizen for that’s what government happens to be. Alberta’s wildlife was better off in the 1970’s than today, as it had been abandoned – and private interests are trying to slip into the power void left by the Alberta government for nearly two decades. Wildlife is a great good as long as it is in the public’s ownership and jealously watched over by the public. And history teaches that it can become a curse in private hands!
Do not ignore history!
Cheers,
Valerisu Geist, PhD., P. Biol.
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science
Note, this pertains not only to private lands, but also to public lands leased for grazing. There is nothing wrong with leasing public lands for grazing, as long as the public retains access to the wildlife resource that it owns, and wildlife is not given away by declaring leases “real property”. The absurdity is that the public by the propose program will pay to get back on the land the public owns anyway in order to harvest a resource it possesses. That amounts to a total give away of the land with not only no benefit to the public, but in fact a loss of benefits.
An examination of wildlife economics reveals that economic activity increases with number of participants, not with amount spend by participants. It’s participation rate that counts. And that translates into substantial wealth and job creation, the economics flowing out of the needs of individuals who hunt, fish and view. This is a direct benefit of the public land to the community at large: the economics from wildlife. Transferring trespass to lessees, therefore, reduces the economic benefits significantly, as it reduces usage and participation rates. The benefits to the public of Wild Life thus become null and void on leased land. Worse still, access denied translates readily into wildlife abuse, of the kind documented at infinitum by the US Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement efforts. Secure from scrutiny, public wildlife is plundered for the benefits of unethical clients and lessees. If you have doubts, invite an illustrated presentation form our neighbor’s Fish & Wildlife Service. Your head will spin!
Paid hunting will decrease participation on leased and private lands. That’s one of the big costs of this scheme. Secondly, one is getting closer and closer to negative commerce in wildlife and to turning hunting from a wholesome recreational and conservation activity into a questionable “blood sport”. That is, instead of many families benefiting from the excellent nutritional input provided by hunting, as well as wholesome, health-promoting recreation, a few wealth clients can engage in frivolous killings under the guise of “sport” and “trophy hunting”. Remember, the proposal reduces our ability to police wildlife as a public trust. It makes wildlife the domain of those who can pay high market prices for tags, and who will pay more the less regulated access and the more shielded their activities from public gaze and official scrutiny. It invites “trophy management”, which aside from the frivolity involved (canned shoots) that is opposed by the public, is also biological wreckage of the species involved. There are excellent biological reasons why bucks and bulls do not grow record antlers normally! It also raises the question what happens to the females? On well-secured areas that’s simple: shoot, dig hole in ground bury does with bulldozer. That’s courtesy of discussions with editors of Deer and Deer Hunting. If outsiders want to pay for tags. Let it be an auction beneficial to the public – who happens to own wildlife!
Incentives to create and protect habitat? An empty promise, as empty as it gets! Do the authors of this “stewardship program” – if one can call it such! – know what it takes to manage for wildlife abundance? Who is going to set aside acres and acres of land for wildlife production, (as is happening in the US where the land owner gets paid for it by the federal government), on the vague promises of the market place? Do they know what it takes to generate, for instance, a “quality pheasant shoot” – besides abandoning completely our highly successful North American model of Wildlife CONSERVATION? Let’s go to England and see how it’s done: severe ongoing predator control by persons hired to do the job year round; generating planned cover, to reduce weather effects on reproduction raise massive pheasants indoors and release six weeks prior to shoot, organize beater and retriever corps, generate quality guest facilities for events. (Clients will pay astronomical prices for a day of shooting pheasants driven by beats). You need a market for the birds shot. Alas, currently such “hunts” saturate the market and the birds are thrown into ditch and buried by a bulldozer. That’s current jolly old England (see Farley-Wittingstall, H. 2007. The River Cottager Meat Book. Ten Speed Press Bekeley/Toronto. pp. 150-152). Why, did you think privatizing wildlife stops with “The Alberta land and Wildlife Stewardship Project”? Only a bottomless ignoramus of wildlife history would be guilty of such innocence! Remember that’s OK with the English elite. Do you think ours would disdain it? Do you think landowners and lessees would disdain $3000-5000 per gun per day of pheasant shooting? Would they recoil from such a “blood sport”? Or from “canned shoots” in which buck deer and bull elk are executed by types that can’t hunt? It’s legal in Saskatchewan! As is baiting of deer etc. Brave New Alberta!
And Oh, the “justifications” in the Terms of Reference! Landowners “producing” wildlife? I beg your pardon. Wildlife survives incidentally to existing operations, in coulees and badlands inaccessible to agricultural machinery, in wetlands not yet drained and opportunistically on crops. Paid hunting will not change any of that! If you want to save or create habitat support Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation etc. Here is a fond of knowledge and professional expertise to do real habitat conservation. Agricultural bureaucracies in Edmonton are not inclined to look favorably on converting agricultural land to anything else. I know. I was involved.
Agricultural landowners have low tolerance for wildlife? Where was I when I lived in Alberta for almost 30 years? Most landowners loved to have wildlife around, considered it part of the land. They were protective of it! True enough, a few did not care for it, and the paid hunting approach will hardly convert such. If wildlife and hunting are to be fostered focus primarily on public land and insure that the public has access to it!
Now that an election has been called, get the message out publicly of what you think of paid hunting!
The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation is one of the cultural achievements of North American Society, the only large-scale system that not merely sustained a renewable resource but made it grow and multiply. It’s what we need to defend. Currently, there are discussions afoot making it the center of treaty between the US and Canada on Terrestrial Wildlife. It is discussed as potentially applicable globally to conservation problems. Ironically, it is even the subject of a White House conference. Yet Alberta has been violating it. Wildlife conservation needs a strong government voice, that is, a voice by the citizen for that’s what government happens to be. Alberta’s wildlife was better off in the 1970’s than today, as it had been abandoned – and private interests are trying to slip into the power void left by the Alberta government for nearly two decades. Wildlife is a great good as long as it is in the public’s ownership and jealously watched over by the public. And history teaches that it can become a curse in private hands!
Do not ignore history!
Cheers,
Valerisu Geist, PhD., P. Biol.
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science