"Dick Cheney style hunting"
Martha Rosenberg, who is officially the staff cartoonist at the Evanston RoundTable (see here), adopts a more serious demeanor to take on the Illinois Department of Natural Resources for funding—at taxpayer expense—the breeding and release of pen-reared Ring-necked Pheasants for “controlled” hunts, a topic she also wrote about here. This breeding program costs Illinois taxpayers $520,000 per year and essentially amounts to a subsidy for wealthy hunters who could afford to pay their own way to participate in these “canned” hunts. This is “old-school” wildlife management that should have been abandoned decades ago. If the habitat doesn’t exist to support a self-sustaining breeding population of pheasants, then it makes no sense to continue these types of “bait-and-take” hunting programs, especially at taxpayer expense.
posted by John L. Trapp at
3/01/2007 07:03:00 PM
6 Comments:
You'll such an anti-elitist.
Don't you know that those Conneticut rich folks who brought pheasant hunting from across the big water were the very ones who supported and indeed often staffed the first Audubon efforts to save colonial waterbirds by staffing the wardens and researchers to protect and promote the nesting islands. And even were the first to insist and believe that the Whooping Crane could be studied and brought back from extinction.
Let's here is for the rich old fart who owns original duck decoys and puts his money and heart where the habitat is.
HIP HIP HORAAY.
I appreciate that members of the wealthy eastern establishment played a big role in early bird conservation efforts. But if some "rich old fart" wants to partake in put-and-take pheasant shooting (I refuse to call this hunting) then he or she can do so at a private preserve where they will pay for the privilege, not on public lands at taxpayer expense.
No, they pretty much get a special dispensation to do what ever they want to do with our tax monies. Most of the great wetland refuges that we have would have been bulldozed long ago without them.
So it's pay back time. Life isn't fair. The rich get to do everything including saving great places. So get back to shooting Mr Rockefeller. And save a pheasant for me.
Amen to your post. And I thought New York was the only state to do stuff like this:
The Game Farm raises 25,000 adult pheasants annually for distribution Statewide. The fully grown pheasants are released on land open to public hunting just prior to and during the fall pheasant hunting season. Birds released at this time provide the highest harvest rates.
The primary purpose of the pheasant propagation program is to provide pheasant hunting opportunity, not to restore wild pheasant populations. The Department releases thousands of pheasants annually. Very few survive until spring to reproduce. Therefore, hunters are encouraged to harvest released pheasants. All three programs require that the birds are released on land open to public hunting.
Aaarrrggghhh...
My friends who do this would laugh at the notion they are "wealthy".
Here in Northwest Ohio I have friends that do this. I'm sure they will be pleased to hear they are wealthy.
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