Animal RightsWhere will it stop? Presently animals enjoy more rights than humans do. We have states now that require drug testing and psychiatric treatment if caught possessing a gun and using birth control on wild animals is considered to be too invasive.

Perhaps you have been following the story of too many elk in and around Banff, Canada. This seems to be a common theme showing up all across the U.S. as well. Wild animals are moving into areas occupied by humans. The reason is simple. There they find protection. They aren’t allowed to be hunted and it is too close for comfort for natural predators like wolves and cougars to be around human activity.

If you look at the progression of our society and how we view and treat animals, it is quickly reaching a point where it is out of control. We spend billions of dollars protecting them often at the expense of creating better lifestyle opportunities than for humans. Every year millions of dollars are spent fighting lawsuits in court merely to fight for what some call “animal rights”.

First of all, animals don’t have rights. They are an animal for God’s sake. If God wanted animals to be able to go to court and fight against humans so they wouldn’t be harmed, He would have given them a bigger, better functioning brain. God gave us dominion of the animals and of course animal rights extremists think that means we can randomly go about killing animals for the mere sake of the pleasure.

The vast majority of humans in this country and Canada have a lot of respect for animals mainly because they are God’s creatures. They give us so much pleasure in more ways than some are willing to discuss. Over time, we Americans have learned to care for our animals – this includes both domestic and wild. We’ve become so good at it that it has actually become a problem. In some cases we have too many animals.

Hunting of wild animals is very much a part of the American heritage. Some people, mostly the city dwellers, have had it drummed into their heads since birth that our society has no need for hunting, that it is barbaric and inhumane. I can say this because they have been lied to and they clearly have zero understanding of anything to do with hunting but I might be better off telling it to an oak tree.

In the battle waged by the animal rights extremists, which by the way proudly boast that their ultimate goal is to put an end to all forms of hunting, they have in many areas been successful in stopping hunting as a viable and proven management tool used by wildlife biologists for decades to provide for healthy wildlife species.

Now, in these areas where they have accomplished that, too many animals are creating a problem. Still wishing to disallow any kind of hunting, protesting that the practice is inhumane, invasive and cruel, these groups fought to spend ridiculous amounts of money on methods they deemed humane, to control populations. One method is the injection of birth control drugs into female animals, mainly tried in bear, deer and other ungulates.

As most of us know, this method has failed repeatedly wherever it has been tried but animal rights insist on doing anything except killing off the excess.

Well, now our beloved animal rights lovers have taken their cause one step further in declaring the act of using birth control inhumane and invasive.

In the Rocky Mountain Outlook, an article tells of events going on in Banff to find ways of reducing the elk population by any means other than the only one proven to work, hunting. The discussion now is about the use of a contraceptive drug called Gonacon.

It seems that Gonacon is a test drug that has never been tried on wild deer and elk, only on lab deer and is not approved by the U.S. or Canada. That’s part of the controversy. Here are some of the other problems officials there face.

There is no hunting allowed. It seems that some want to transport some of the elk out of the area to another location but don’t really have a place to take them, perhaps a case of “not in my backyard”. They wanted to use the drug before the fall mating season but it now appears to be too late. Now, as is usually the case, they are fighting opposition from environmentalists, animal rights groups and others opposed to the use of any kind of chemical to inject in the elk.

Can you imagine? We live in a society that cannot seem to function unless completely injected full of any and all chemicals to assist us through our daily routines. Americans have their veins full of anti-depressant drugs, diet pills, steroids, birth control, nicotine control, etc. If we get a sniffle, we run to the doctor demanding antibiotics. On an aside, I recently gave in a went to my doctor because I fought a sinus infection for about 3 weeks and couldn’t shake it. I hate taking drugs, even aspirin, and will do about anything to avoid it. The doctor said he would prescribe an antibiotic for me and the one he was giving was expensive but most “routine” antibiotics seem to be resistant to sinus infections. He said that for so long so many people have been taking the common antibiotics for colds that the viral strains had built up a resistance to any of the meds. It had nothing to do with whether I took any medications previously or not.

So here we have people who believe that popping pills is a way of life and think nothing of passing them out like candy but we somehow are viewing doing this to animals as invasive.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not an advocate for the use of contraceptives for any wild animals. The most humane treatment for deer, elk, bear, etc. that have grown to too large a population is to reduce numbers. And that can usually be done by hunting and killing them. It’s the most humane and effective treatment.

My point to all this is the progression our society has gone through. Even in the article I mentioned, read what the writer calls the elks.

Elk numbers have more than doubled in the last three years, with a count earlier this year estimating there to be at least 204 individuals in areas around the Banff townsite.

The use of the word individual is readily used in describing the unique qualities of a human being. It is rare to use this term when describing the number of animals in a herd but it is a reflection of our society. We have reached a point where we consider animals on the same plain as a human being.

Gaby Zezulka-Maillou, of UTSB Research, is opposed to the use of Gonacon on the female elk in Banff. Here’s what she said about it.

She said she supports controlling the elk population to sustainable levels by less invasive means, adding Gonacon has not been through enough rigorous testing to know what the consequences might be.

“I don’t feel they have adequately investigated all their options. We feel it’s wrong in national parks to test unlicenced products,” she said.

“First and foremost, we do believe sterilization of a wild population goes against the Canada National Parks Act.”

While I would tend to agree with her to some extent that we shouldn’t be willy-nilly running around with chemicals, injecting them into wild animals, like we do humans (snicker), my gripe is that she is now calling the use of contraception, invasive. What’s next?

Tom Remington

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