The Boston Globe has a typical article today that shows the media’s desire to disregard hunting in favor of wildlife watching at the expense of hunters. It really kind of irks me, the ignorance that exists and then the arrogance from the wildlife watching community as they are continually told they outnumber hunters and are gaining the upper hand politically to have things their way.

And it appears that the Maine Office of Tourism isn’t exactly jumping up and down in support of the state’s thousands of hunters.

“It’s a challenge,” said Phil Savignano, senior tourism official for the Maine Office of Tourism. “Maine is changing . . . There is clearly a decline in hunting and a growth in wildlife viewing. But we want both to exist.”

According to officials at the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, hunting participation has held pretty steady in Maine. I’m sure Savignano is referring to the USFWS survey that I have said for months is not an accurate measure of who hunts and who doesn’t, yet even state officials use that data instead of information from their own agencies. Go figure!

The difficulty, as I see it, does come from the power of the dollar. I don’t want the wildlife watchers taking over fish and game departments. Lee Kantar, a biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and who has recently been put in charge of looking out for the moose, had this to say about the pressures put on the department in managing the moose.

“Our job is to balance the interests of all people – the hunters, wildlife enthusiasts, people concerned about road collisions, and people who don’t care,” said Lee Kantar, a wildlife biologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Population numbers, he added, “can be the stuff of battles.”

Perhaps this is what it has evolved into but it’s not supposed to be the function of the fish and game department to be managing game animals for the wildlife watchers and those trying to make a buck off charging people to go on wildlife watching safaris.

Once again we see history being lost in our society. People forget what state the moose was in not that many years ago and whose dollars it was that were used to restore the moose population. Now we have a seemingly abundance of moose and some hunters are demanding more permits to hunt the creature while at the same time wildlife viewers, who pay nothing for the management of the animal, are demanding more moose to watch.

For many reasons there are people who don’t want the two entities to coexist. I won’t go into all the reasons. The media does little to help as is shown in this article.

I want to see the wildlife watchers pay their share to meet the demands they are putting on MDIFW but separate from the fish and game department. I have said this repeatedly. Fish and game needs to be shrunk in size to a function of, well, fish and game and NOT as Mr. Kantar says: “Our job is to balance the interests of all people – the hunters, wildlife enthusiasts, people concerned about road collisions, and people who don’t care.” This is not a function of a wildlife biologist or the fish and game department in my opinion. Why should my license fee be used to satisfy those wanting to go moose watching, or for pandering to the insurance companies to reduce collisions, etc.?

There are no sour grapes here toward those who want to make a buck or two by schlepping those interested in canned photo opportunities and wildlife viewing safaris across the state. What irks me is their demands that hunters stop shooting the animals in order that they have more animals to watch. All this without paying a red cent to the agency they are demanding provide them more opportunities.

It’s been said countless times. If it wasn’t for the millions of dollars paid by hunters over the years, these viewers would have little to watch and safari organizers would be doing something different. Hunters generally speaking do not resent that people want to go wildlife watching. What we do resent is these groups looking to promote their new-found activity at the expense of running the hunters off the face of the earth.

Tom Remington

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