Mont. Governor Wants to Cancel Bison Hunt

[Rose Siding]

HELENA, Mont. Jan 5, 2005 — Gov. Brian Schweitzer, fearing a "public relations nightmare" for Montana, said Wednesday he wants to cancel a hunt for bison that wander outside Yellowstone National Park.

The newly inaugurated Democrat said he hopes to find a way to postpone the season for a year it's set to start Jan. 15 by either ordering the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks not to issue licenses, or by filling the Fish and Game Commission with new members who would reverse the decision to approve the hunt.

Schweitzer said he is not sure he can legally do the former, or has the time to do the latter.

After meetings with state wildlife and livestock officials and a representative of the ranching industry, Schweitzer said he is convinced the planned sale of 10 bison hunting licenses will make the state look bad and do nothing to curb the ballooning Yellowstone herd. Each license allows the holder to shoot one bison.
...
Under a management plan now in place, officials attempt to herd bison that leave Yellowstone back to the park. Those that cannot be returned are captured; those testing positive for brucellosis are sent to slaughter.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=387883&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

[NIGHT TRIPPER]

1. should also call off the new federal law allowing the killing of Wolves !

I was just reading that as of now Wolves can be legally killed in Montana by any farmer or I guess anyone who just wants to try out his new gun.
All they have to do is say the Wolves were threatening his farm or whatever.

Guess they're doing it in Idaho too.

Maybe they'll use helicopters and machine guns like they did in Alaska !

[yorkiemommie1]

2. one of my friends who was all for the war

and declared, 'I don't mind giving up some of my civil liberties', was shocked to hear about the wolves. well, i had to say 'I told you so' and she admitted she was sorry she voted for *. when are these folks going to connect the dots?

[NIGHT TRIPPER]

3. and this is just the beginning

I think your friend is not alone.
Lots of folks will awaken soon.

They just passed the bill to allow all Wild Horses to be killed and sold for meat (they chop them up and sell the meat in Europe)--as many as they can grab out of the wild !
And there are alot of wild horses to be cashed in on by these greedy idiots.

Then the drilling will soon begin in Alaska's Wildlife Refuge.
Then the logging of our National Forests by lumber companies!
Then the allowing of more pollution by factories and by coal burning electric plants.

You name it they want to destroy it.

This is really just the beginning.

[jmowreader]

10. You mean "logging the wilderness areas," right?

The National Forests have been logged for...well, forever.

http://www.endgame.org/gtt-purchasers-94-98.html lists top timber sales in national forests.

[NIGHT TRIPPER]

23. no, they're using the California fires as an excuse to really hack

in untouched areas. Cutting fireroads deep into areas that were previously pristine.
Bernie Ward gets into it sometimes.
http://www,kgo.com

[NYC]

9. They will never connect the dots,

unless you point out the connections. So, keep doing a good job. :hi:

[MrSlayer]

4. Isn't hunting a Bison like hunting a Cow?

Shouldn't it be Bison slaughter?

[jdj]

5. shhh

don't mess with the myth of the mythic hunter myth. It's bad for murika.

[Ediacara]

15. Not exactly...

A bison is like a cow in that it's a bovid, but it's not like a cow in that it's humongous, fast, and extremely dangerous. Not that I'm saying bison hunting should be allowed.....

[antigone382]

6. Kill the wolves, kill the horses, kill the burros, kill the bison...

But then, what else can you expect from a people who have no respect for human life (unless it's unborn, white, American, and can earn them the fundie vote), much less any other creature?

[NickB79]

7. The stupid irony of the brucellosis scare with livestock

Is that elk carry brucellosis just as well as bison, yet tens of thousands of elk roam in and out of Yellowstone annully with no attempts to shoot them.

[RebelOne]

8. Yes, and many of those elk carry CWD

(Cronic Wasting Disease), which started out West and has spread to deer in other states.

[MisterP]

14. I believe it started around Connecticut, and was headed west

because of imports to restock "wild" and canned hunts

[Ediacara]

16. That brucellosis stuff is silly

Why not vaccinate your livestock, rather than shoot bison (and not elk)?

[Southern Dem 2005]

11. Buffalo tastes really good. Can't see eating horse though.

[maxsolomon]

13. dog tastes good if you're hungry enough

brucellosis is a bunch of rancher-pandering crap.

1872 mining & grazing laws MUST BE REVOKED. pay your own way, rugged individualist rural westerners.

[ellie]

18. YES!

This is my pet peeve. These stupid mining and grazing laws are basically welfare for those people. Or as Edward Abbey so eloquently put it:

"The rancher (with a few notable exceptions) is a man who strings barbed wire all over the range; driles wells and bulldozes stockponds; drives off elk and antelope and bibhorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs; shoots eagle, bears, and cougars on sight; supplants the native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cowshit, anthills, mud, dust, and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how much loves the American West."

[MADem]

25. I used to live down the road from a butcher shop

...that sold horsemeat in Europe. It looked like any other butcher shop, except for the cartoon horse on the sign.

[Chicago Democrat]

12. Killing a Bison is not hunting...

it slaughter..

They should cull the heard and have some slaughtered, not this stupid hunt.

[NickB79]

20. How is hunting different from culling?

If the population is overpopulated, and there is nowhere else to transplant them to, then I don't see a problem with the hunt. Certainly cheaper for the state to have hunters pay them to hunt than to pay to capture them, ship them to a slaughterhouse, and then kill them. I would also think a round from a .338 Winchester Magnum round through the chest would be more humane than having it's throat slit and bleeding out. However, since I think there are plenty of places bison can be tranplanted to, and that the brucellosis scare is BS, I don't want to see them shot.

[Torque67]

21. fair chase

We have a local state park that is terribly overrun with whitetail deer. They are looking awful. Poor skinny things run up to cars, as folks have been feeding them apples and other little treats. The vegetation is about gone up to the height of a standing deer.

There was talk of opening up a season for hunters in the park, but that would be bad all around. You could take a half dozen of them with a claw hammer and still make it home in time for dinner.

I'm hoping that these deer, and the buffalo in the story can be culled by professional hunters. Letting regular old joes go at them is bad for the animals, and gives hunting a real black eye. I believe in "fair chase" hunting. Neither of these cases look like "fair chase" to me.

[NickB79]

26. I still don't see the problem

A professional hunter and a private one both get the same results: a dead bison. Why is assisting in what is essentially a cull a bad thing for a private hunter to participate in? I don't see how it is bad for the animals, as they wind up dead in either case. Since bison in Yellowstone are so used to human presence, you can approach them fairly close, giving an easy shot at a huge animal. You don't have to be a professional hunter to hit something as large as a bison in the vitals, so poor marksmanship and slow deaths should be eliminated. My biggest problem is that, while a professional hunter gets paid by our tax dollars to shoot the animals, a private hunter pays fees in order to get the opportunity to shoot the animal. A professional hunter does nothing special compared to many a competent private hunter; he is paid to do something that he is only slightly better at than your average deer hunter. Why waste tax dollars like that?

I'm curious, what was the fate of the deer in your local park? Almost anything would have been preferable to them starving to death in the winter months, especially considering all the accompanying damage they did to the local plants. I see fair chase rules giving way when the animal and the local ecosystem will suffer greatly without a hunt. For example, in countries like Australia or New Zealand, where numerous non-native animals have killed off local species, there is no consideration of fair chase. While whitetail deer are native here, they have reached highly unnatural numbers, destroying other native species around them. Sorry to sound heartless, but if it's a claw hammer or seeing the entire forest die, give me a claw hammer.

[PapaJoe]

17. Okay by me if it's with bow and arrow from horseback.

[Coventina]

19. And if they get the shot, they have to eat the heart on the spot!

I like it!
:thumbsup:

[BeFree]

24. Hunters

If they did it the real manly way... capture them by hand and use a homemade knife to do the dirty deed, then, and only then, is it real sport.

Standing 200 yards off and pulling the trigger on a wal-mart rifle, well, even a school kid could do that.

[maxsolomon]

22. they are NOT overpopulated

there used to be MILLIONS of bison. there should be millions of them still, but they were wiped out for sport & to pacify the native tribes by removing their main resource.

the "hunt" is entirely rationalized by the BS brucellosis fear.