HUNTING
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:
The Federation of Ontario
Naturalists reports that 95% of spring bear
hunters in the province are Americans, from
states that ban spring bear hunting. In 1991,
Ontario spring bear hunters killed 6,760 bears,
9% of the estimated provincial population. A
third of the bears were females. Only 30% of
cubs who lose their mothers live to age one.
“All too many Alaska hunters are
lazy, ill-mannered, beer-guzzling, belly-
scratching fat boys, or girls,” Anchorage
Daily News outdoors editor Craig Medred
opined recently, “who want nothing more
than to ride around on their favorite piece of
high-powered machinery until they find some-
thing to shoot full of holes with their high-
powered rifle.” Medred also attacked the
claim by native subsistence hunters that they
don’t endanger species because they only kill
animals they intend to eat: “If you manage
wildlife populations on the basis of what peo-
ple need, instead of on the basis of what the
wildlife population is capable of reproducing,
you quickly have no animals left to manage.”
Salt Lake Tribune outdoors editor
Tom Wharton recently broke ranks with fel-
low hunters to deliver a scathing attack on the
“cowboy caucus” in the Utah state legislature,
which has proposed open seasons with legal
jacklighting vs. skunks, raccoons, and red
foxes, plus a 20% increase in the sale of
puma permits, in hopes killing predators will
make more game available.
The Vermont House on February
24 voted 108-35 to ban shooting fish. The
ban now requires Senate ratification and the
governor’s signature. Vermont is the only
state to permit shooting fish, a risky pastime
because of bullets ricocheting off the water.
Lobbying to protect the “right” of about 200
licensed fish-shooters to massacre spawning
northern pike each spring (who are not eaten),
hunter Ron Ethier asked, “If you take away
shooting fish, what’s next? Running rabbits
with dogs?”
The Foundation for North
American Wild Sheep, a trophy hunting
group, paid the British Columbia Ministry of
Environment, Lands, and Parks to burn
50,000 acres of forest in 1991: bighorn sheep
who graze on burn sites grow curlier horns.
The Ohio Division of Wildlife
wants an open season on raccoons. Hunters
now may kill “only” four raccoons a day.
The most wanted criminal in
Japan may be the unknown bowhunter who
in February killed three swans near Yamagata
and left a duck to wander Tokyo with an
arrow in his neck. The rescue of the duck
drew nationwide attention.
Ducks Unlimited regional director
Bill Haley, 44, accidentally killed himself
while hunting March 4 near Athens, Georgia.
For the third year in a row,
Princess Caroline of Monaco shot a boar to
open the French hunting season, profaning
the memory of her mother, Grace Kelly, who
outraged shipping tycoon Aristotle Onasis by
banning captive bird shoots in the principality.
Hunters who believe an aphrodisi-
ac can be made from pelican hearts have near-
ly wiped out pelicans on Isla de Los Pajaros,
off the Mexican Pacific coast, according to
the Sinaloa Environmentalist Alliance.
