Can The Real Estate Predators Fight Off the Oil Company Predators? Or is Florida doomed?
Which organization is the greatest threat to the Second Amendment, the anti-gun Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence or Idaho’s pro-gun Sportsmen for Wildlife?
This might seem like a stupid question until you learn that the Idaho organization recently held three “predator derbies” in which competitors vied to see who could slaughter the most wolves over a two-day period. Similar assaults on wildlife occur in other western states. In Alaska “sportsmen” gun down wolves from airplanes.
The wanton slaughter of wildlife for the fun of killing creates hostility toward firearms among the general public. After all the effort environmentalists made to reintroduce wolves into natural habitat, the wolf killing competitions can’t go down very well with millions of Americans.
Trophy hunters, who kill polar bears with high-powered rifles (from safe distances of course), also contribute to anti-gun attitudes. A large percentage of the American population cannot empathize with the thrill of killing a magnificent animal. Many Americans have an aversion to people who get their jollies by murdering animals. Banning guns becomes a way to protect wildlife. People who love their pets have empathy for animals and none for hunters.
We need the Second Amendment for our own protection and for our constitutional rights. If one right can be taken away or marginalized with regulation, so can all other rights. Americans are going to have a difficult time holding on to the Second Amendment. An armed population is not compatible with the police state that President Bush and the Republicans created and that President Obama and the Democrats have ratified.
The danger to the Second Amendment is great enough without waving wildlife slaughter in the public’s face. The National Rifle Association and wildlife slaughter groups need to exercise judgment and not go out of the way to inflame feelings against guns. Recently while visiting a friend, I happened by chance to see a segment of a hunting experience on the television hunting channel, sponsored, I believe, by the NRA. A man and his wife or girlfriend were after a beautiful 8-point stag. When the woman “harvested” the deer, she jumped with joy and flung her arms around her man. It made even my friend, a hardened gun-nut, cringe at the joy she experienced from killing a beautiful animal.
According to my friend, hunting is not supposed to be an indulgence in blood lust. Bringing home venison as an alternative to factory farming’s beef, pork, and fowl pumped full of antibiotics and hormones is one thing. To search out a magnificent animal for the fun of killing it is another.
Hunting African big game has become more a killing experience than a hunting one. The main reason for the hunt is bragging rights. A couple of years ago my friend took me to his gun club to fire an antique Winchester rifle like the ones in the cowboy movies of my youth. A club member was trying to sight-in a .375 H&H magnum big game rifle. His shoulder was taking a terrible punishment, so much so that he was flinching every time he fired. Flinching was throwing him off and he couldn’t get a group in order to know how to adjust his sights.
I engaged him in conversation and learned that he had been goaded by his friends into keeping up with them competitively by going to Africa and killing a lion. He had booked a trip and paid $25,000 for the experience of shooting a lion, but his heart was no longer in it. He had made his deposit before he learned that the way lions are hunted today is devoid of valid bragging rights.
No one is on foot in the veldt with a double-barreled rifle taking the risk of missing or encountering a pride. Here is the way modern big game hunting works. First, he said, you go shoot a hippopotamus. The beast is cut up and the chunks are hung from trees or posts. The hunter ascends to a platform 20 feet off the ground and 50 or 60 yards from the hanging hippo meat and waits for the lion. When the lion rears up for the meat, the hunter fires.
While recounting the procedure, he looked sheepish and regretful. I have often wondered if he went through with the trip or gave up being an equal among his great white hunter associates.
Many hunters understand that predators are essential to healthy ecosystems and are as averse to slaughtering predators as members of Defenders of Wildlife, who are thrilled by the sight and presence of wild animals. These mindful hunters understand that inhumane wolf slaughter competitions threaten the public’s acceptance of hunting and guns as well as the health of deer and elk populations.
The U.S. Forest Service is, alas, showing poor judgment on a par with the organizers of predator derbies. This government agency is fast-tracking oil-drilling in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming. The Shoshone is home to endangered grizzly bears, lynx, and wolf. But the Forest Service thinks that the profits of an oil driller are more important than the health of what might be the last complete natural ecosystem in the 48 states.
This raises the question whether government does protect the environment. The George W. Bush administration seems to have cleaned all environmentalists out of the Forest Service and the EPA, just as it banished civil libertarians and constitutionalists from the Department of Justice (sic) and its appointments list to federal judgeships. As far as I can tell, Obama has taken no corrective measures.
During the 1980s it was an article of faith among conservatives and Republicans, usually the same, that environmentalists ran the government and were destroying the economy. There is no sign of that now. Alaska is faced with a new round of oil drilling in pristine areas. The initial oil onslaught on Alaska was done in the name of “energy independence.” But it was a lie. The oil is “heavy oil,” unsuited for the American refineries. It is exported to Japan.
In Florida I have watched developers, aided and abetted by state and county governments and Florida’s Department of Environmental Policy, destroy the environment and a way of life. Now the beautiful beaches of the Florida panhandle with their clear water and white sands are threatened by Texas oil man M. Lance Phillips.
Mr. Phillips wants Florida panhandle residents to give up their tourist economy, their beautiful beaches and water, the values of their beachside homes, their beautiful view of the Gulf of Mexico and its extraordinary sunsets in order that he can make profits by despoiling the views, the sunsets, the beaches, the water, and the value of residents’ properties by placing his platforms and oil rigs in the Florida Gulf. They will be just three miles offshore, he says, which is in plain view and just perfect for ruining everything.
Mr. Phillips has a stable of minions, and they are at work holding staged “debates” in which they promise a New Florida Economy, jobs, and no oil spills.
It is not clear who can stop him. Not the Republican governor or the Republican members of the legislature. These “representatives of the people” are already in his pocket.
The only hope is the seaside developments that the developers have built. Destin, Florida, would be destroyed if offshore Destin looked like offshore Texas or Louisiana.
In South Walton county, upscale Gulf front developments such as Seaside, site of the movie “The Truman Show,” and Rosemary Beach might have some clout with Florida’s government. Perhaps the best hope is St. Joe, the former paper company, which owns one million acres in the Florida panhandle including miles of beach front. Driven into the real estate business by environmentalists opposed to its paper mill at Port St. Joe, this company has been the 800 pound gorilla of panhandle politics.
It is ironic, isn’t it, that those who care about the beauty of where they live and the livelihood that this beauty provides are now dependent for its defense on the real estate developers who first assaulted the undisturbed beauty of the Florida panhandle.
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Mr. Roberts
I'm curious to know how you get around?
Is it possible to "murder" an animal? If so, I murdered a lot of squirrels and rabbits as a boy.
He's right about the panhandle beaches. Very beautiful. North Florida is much nicer than south and central Florida.
I think PCR has a point. Hunters are some of the most effective and sincere conservationists there are, and most - I suspect - would recognize the practices PCR describes as being repugnant, ignoble and disrespectful. That such practices make it easier to demonize gun owners is, I think, obvious.
In our household, we hunted deer, squirrels, ducks, rabbits, quail and doves. We killed only that which we intended to eat. The dogs got the entrails, and my father often had things made out of the fur and the hides, although not always.
When fishing, we caught a "good mess" and no more, a "mess" being determined by the number of folks who might come to dinner or supper.
My class is now reading The Golden Christmas by William Gilmore Simms. In chaper seven of that work, a Southern fall hunt is described with such clarity that one is there among the horses, dogs and men.
For me, the hunt includes the prep, the actual hunt, the food and fellowship during and after, and the stories.
I begin my fishing trips by getting up early. I make potato salad and iced tea. I also prepare my onions, pickles and olives. I get the ingredients ready for Mexican cornbread. Then I go fishing. I catch the aforementioned mess, fishing hard if necessary. After cleaning the fish, I build a fire and fry the fish in an old iron pot which my father used for years. If I am on the creek bank, I cook my cornbread in a Dutch oven. Such is always done in the fellwoship of others, usually kith and kin. Any extra fish, that being rare, are frozen and kept for a next time. I treat hunting in much the same way, having well prepared fresh meat with the sides on the very day of the kill.
I hunt deer with a single-shot, rifled shotgun, using a slug. The only shot which I will take is that of a sure kill. I hedge my bets by having an excellent trailing dog close by in case I hit but do not kill. Animals should not suffer, and meat should not spoil.
I am a bit conflicted by this column. On the one hand, I am a responsible hunter. I do not trophy hunt. I gave up shooting prairie dogs, because I did not like killing something, even it it is a real pest for the ranchers, without eating them. I hunt deer, and do so for the meat, though the hides are used, too. And, I have known enough idiots in the hunting fields to make me cringe. But, I have to admit that if I were to see a wolf in the woods with me, I would shoot it on sight. I know all the environmentalist rhetoric on this, and some good friends of mine have been involved in reintroducing these great predators into Southwestern ranch lands. I have even wrestled with a timber wolf that was brought around to show wolves are not necessarily bad. But, again these animals are great predators, and while it is nothing personal with them, we humans are just another hunk of meat on foot for their dining pleasure. I have noticed that the people who want to reintroduce these great predators, do not put them in their own neighborhoods, though there is plenty of prey there in the form of dogs, cats, joggers, and children waiting for the school bus. No, they inflict them on the rural folk, and then cannot understand why these unenlightened rustics cannot see the benefits of restoring the balance of nature in their locale. They also cannot see their own hypocrisy. So, while the environmentalists inflict great predators on the fine people of Idaho and other pristine rural places, and not in the Hamptons or in Santa Monica, they do this because they can do so with impunity. It should not be surprising when those most directly affected by these superbly lethal animals get revenge by shooting them as a sport.
It is my understanding that big game hunters in Africa keep the game preserves economically viable which allows the preservation of the species therein (outside the preserves, poachers hold sway). Granted, the hunting methods would not find approval with Hemingway.
The divide that exists in the culture of hunting for the most part is a class divide.
Only a rich man and his kin go on a hunt and automatically expect to kill an animal. They pay top dollar to go into enclosed game reserves, have a guide show them where to stalk, and then have that guide show them where to point their rifle scopes. They usually don't indulge in the meat they have harvested, or take only the best partss, cleaned and butchered by others.
For the rest of society, one must hunt on public lands, and the lands of farmers, which is increasingly more difficult to do.
My father was right, America is becoming too much like Europe. Soon only the wealthy will be able to enjoy hunting or fishing.
PS I for one could never shoot a wolf or a bear, unless it was attacking me or a loved one. I wouldn't even be able to shoot a coyote. The idea of killing God's natural predators for bragging rights does not sit well with me. Perhaps these "tough" men should sign up for the Guardian Angels and patrol the ghettos, barrios, and trailer parks, if they want to prove how tough they are. Not that I'm a fan of the aforementioned organization, of course.
Florida has been totally and completely destroyed. Why anyone would choose to live in such a vile environment is beyond me. Yet it continues. They move in out of the North by the hundreds of thousands, transforming what was a beautiful state into a waste land. I speak as a Florida cracker that now lives elsewhere in the South. With what Florida has become, they can have it.
From #7 "I wouldn’t even be able to shoot a coyote. "
Those things live among us like vampires,they are rarely seen in the light and do their damage at night.Sometimes I catch one out at dusk and dawn and I shoot every single one I can get a bullet in! I wish I could snap my fingers and every one of them in the State would be dead.
Shooting something you don't intend to eat or give to someone else to eat is, with a few exceptions for true pests to humanity, ignoble (good word) as SLT suggested, and I would venture unchristian. So, for that matter, is killing non-venemous snakes out of unthinking hysteria. A pet pieve of mine since I am a herpophile since childhood.
Mr. Howard, I'm curious how coyotes harm you.
I own many firearms, but rarely hunt. When I do, it is explicitly for food. I do not enjoy killing animals. It is to provide for family or defend human life. I have a unique outlook on killing after being paid by our government to target ICBMs on many innocent people in other (unspecified) countries. Long, quiet shifts in the launch control center have a way of focusing the mind on what is important. In fact, I often read Chronicles there, with my hand mere inches from the launch switch.
What an irrelevant topic in a society that legalizes abortion, euthanasia, birth control and embryonic stem cell research. Save the humans!
I have a friend who hunts constantly. He goes from Africa to Siberia and most places in between. He has a hunting lodges in Tanzania, Alaska, and Wisconsin [ which is also a game farm]. He also has a group in northern Mexico he goes mule deer hunting with. He has killed over 40 bears including 2 Polar bears and many Grizzlies. He just got back from Africa a few months back and called me. He said I just got my 16th leopard, 30th african buffalo, and 8th Lion. Of course he leaves a pile of money in all the local economies that he hunts in. He has killed hundreds of deer, moose, antelopes, elks, and thousands of birds. Most of this meat goes to the poor or is eaten by him and his friends. He took me along as camp cook on his last trip to Alaska. Boy was it isolated. The grizzly bears were all over the place and it wasn't hunting season for them. Was I scared. I can't even shoot a gun anymore. We were there for moose and salmon. We got no moose but a lot of salmon. None of these species is rare or endangered. Up to half a million deer are killed in my state every year. Hunting is needed to keep these animals under control. Dr. Roberts is all wet on this issue. He should stick to the good work he does on other issues.