I thought these kinds of pics were only available by flipping to the back pages of a 1924 Nebraska Game and Parks magazine or rifling through grandpa's old desk drawers, pics from a time when people with overflowing stringers and hides could reassure themselves with the seemingly infinte resources of the West and the comforting sermons of preachers reminding them of their God-given right to subdue and have dominion over "every living thing that moveth upon the earth..."
Fortunately we can still find a few of of these rifle-toting relics today, as we learn from the Scottsbluff Star-Herald's "Sports" page recently. Pictured are part of the "winning team" who "bagged 13 coyotes" over the day and a half event. We aren't told how many coyotes total were killed by the 18 teams competing. "Ties were broken by the total weight of the team's coyotes." To jazz things up a bit, prizes were given for the "smallest coyote" and the "mangiest coyote." I wonder if we ran a "mangiest human" contest now and then what the results would be...
Shame on Cabela's for being associated with this crude throwback event. Even ethical hunters should be shocked at this kind of display (although bloody and often ineffective predator control has been a staple of the taxpayer-funded Welfare West for some time) (see similar overview here; for a contrary view go here).
4 comments:
Duh, don't you know that these manly men have to make sure to shoot as many things as possible before Obama takes their guns away? And when the coyotes are extirpated, and prairie dog, rabbit and ground hog populations spike upwards in a J curve from lack of predation, we will have a contest to shoot all of those "pests" too (and then Cabelas can sell even more hunting gear).
We still haven't learned to think like a mountain (or like a prairie) have we?
I don't think I recall reading a blog that posted both a pro and a con link at the end. I like it.
Thanks--"Fair and Balanced"--that's my motto ;) But seriously I think that author raised some fair points. I'm not against all predator control, but rather against these kind of proud, glory-filled displays of it. And even moreso against taxpayer-funded predator control, the beneficiaries of which are always shouting the loudest about getting the "government off their back," etc.
Elimination of individual problem predators can be necessary for the protection of life and property. Elimination of non-indigenous species of any type is sometimes necessary to protect native flora and fauna. However, while predator control programs have a long history in North American natural resource management, such programs have been widely discredited in the biological community as they historically have been unsuccessful in achieving their aims (i.e. costly efforts to reduce northern squawfish in the Columbia and Snake River system failed to have any appreciable effect on the protection of endangered salmonids,) and/or or created more problems than they have solved (i.e. elimination of wolves and reduction of cougar and coyote populations caused overpopulation of deer in the Kaibab area of AZ, followed by habitat damage and subsequent deer decline; past predator control programs in AK, including federal poisoning programs in the 1950s, resulted in ungulate overpopulation, followed by habitat damage and subsequent ungulate declines). Using predator control as a game management tool is unsustainable and done primarily for anthropocentric purposes. Protection of crops from birds can be accomplished through less time-consuming and less expensive means than predator control. For livestock protection, there are other non-lethal options that are equally or more effective for protection from felines and coyotes, and some non-lethal options have been increasingly successful with reducing predation by wolves.
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