To the Editor:
I’ve been a big-game hunter for over 40 years, with trophies to prove it, and I’ve guided many successful hunts: no animals were ever taken by baiting or disabling leg-traps.
As an officer or member of several sportsmen’s groups: Ducks Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, National Wild Turkey Federation, Pheasants Forever, Indiana Sportsmen’s Roundtable, Pennsylvania Game Feeder’s Assoc., Pennsylvania Bow Hunters’ Assoc., and Izaak Walton League of America, etc. I know hundreds of “sportsmen-hunters;” none baited or crippled animals with traps.
These methods are not sportsmanship–it’s simply pleasure-killing a bear distracted by bait or mutilated by a leg-trap.
What happens to a cub, if its mother is leg-trapped and killed? Will it also be killed as it waits helplessly nearby or just left to fend for itself before it’s mature? This is another dirty part of this “control” strategy, killing two bears at the same time, including the baby. I’ve been in the woods of Maine for over 20 years, and have yet to see a black bear.
Luring bears and cubs to human foods is precisely the situation all of our park services personnel across the country are working to stop. As animals get accustomed to human foods, the more likely they are to seek it out and encounter people.
The “management” as implied by the IF&W is simply encouraging killing for reasons of money: sell licenses to out of state hunters who flock here to kill a hapless bear and return to their home state, which prohibits such practices and mock our lax hunting ethics.
To protect some jobs at the expense of wildlife that have no say in their fate – another way some humans can exert their ill-conceived sense of dominance over the wild creatures we should protect. Vote Yes on 1.
