Antis are at it again

Pecos

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Well the Anti's are at it again, even in this little backwater town. Read on.

Carlton has been trying to contact the author of the story all day today, Monday, with no success.

Pecos

Times Record News Wichita Falls, Texas

Sun, February 10, 2002

Graham varmint hunt draws praise, criticism


Hanaba Munn Noack, , Times Record News

GRAHAM - The call of the wild and the lure of a jackpot is drawing some crack shots to Graham for a weekend varmint hunt.
It's also drawing more than just potshots from critics.
The 24-hour hunting contest officially started at noon Saturday and ends at noon today, but most of the hunting was over night - the best time to shoot coyotes, bobcats and other nocturnal predators. Spotlights and sophisticated animal calls are tools of the trade.
"It's legal," said Brent Isom, game warden. "We will be out working to be sure they're not hunting off county roads."
Enough money is at stake to tempt hunters to break the law plus some rules of the contest - everything from trespassing to killing animals ahead of time. A lie detector test keeps participants honest and makes Isom's job easier.
"That has cleaned it up quite a bit," Isom said.
Deer - out of season - aren't on the varmint list, but Isom still has to worry about them.
The hunter who catches a big buck in a spotlight might like to forget the law.
"There's always a potential for a deer to be killed," Isom said. "Bucks haven't dropped their antlers yet."
Isom will be on the lookout especially for hunters who might like to blend into the night and hunt just deer - not varmints.
Isom won't be the only busy game warden.
"They spread out over several counties," he said. "There's people going all the way out to West Texas."
For different reasons, not all hunters like the idea of the varmint killing contests.
"It may be legal, but it doesn't appeal to me," Young County Attorney Boyd Ritchie said. "I'm an avid hunter and sportsman and have been all my life. I was taught that you respect the animal you hunt."
Hunting at its best keeps non-predators like deer at optimum levels and doesn't cut too deeply into predators, Ritchie said.
Ritchie remembers stories his grandfather told him of rabbit hunts - men armed with clubs to kill rabbits that had overrun the area.
"They did that because we had killed out the natural predators of these animals," Ritchie said. "Rabbits would take over an area and eat it down to nothing."
But even jackrabbits are sometimes on the varmint hunt lists.
The rabbits rob cattle of grazing, said Corky Redden, Throckmorton County agricultural extension agent. Seven jackrabbits eat as much grass as one steer, he said.
Redden sees the hunts as positive events.
"These people are expert shots, good sportsmen," Redden said. "The game wardens are out there watching."
Photographer Wyman Meinzer, who lives at Benjamin, doesn't like the varmint hunts.
"A lot of these guys are good people," Meinzer said. "It's just these little contests they're in I don't agree with."
He disagrees with Redden on other points.
"Try to find jackrabbits any more," he said.
Meinzer, a hunter himself, has a degree in wildlife management. One of his concerns is that the varmint hunts themselves are easy targets for anti-hunting groups.
"This is just a bull's-eye for them to focus on," he said. "The last thing we need is this carnival atmosphere,"
The money and competition bother Meinzer.
"These contests create situations where people will cheat," he said. "The money issue, it's unsavory. ... Running off gloating over a check and having the bragging rights ... it's distasteful to me, and I've been a hunter over 40 years.
"I consider hunting to be a very private thing. That's between me and the quarry.
"To just go out and kill as many as you can kill and then to bring them in for public scrutiny -- the whole blood and guts thing -- it's a circus environment. I think it's just appalling."
Meinzer doesn't buy the argument that the lack of demand for furs has caused predators like bobcats to increase beyond manageable numbers.
"Predators will increase to a point," he said. "They will control themselves by migration and litter numbers. They're not like deer. The herbivores - the grazers, the browsers - will literally eat themselves out of house and home and then die of starvation. Predators do not."
Dean Ransom, wildlife ecologist at the Texas A&M Research and Extension Center at Vernon, voiced some of the same concerns as Meinzer.
"If there's money awarded on the basis of points earned, if I were part of Defenders of Wildlife or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, I would have every one of my people down there," Ransom said. "This is the sort of thing that would set me on fire ... exactly the kind of carnage."
But Ransom belongs to neither group and doesn't oppose hunting.
"I don't shoot varmints," Ransom said. "I see them as part of the ecological system. They have a role to play. They can reach population levels where they become a nuisance."
A studied approach to predator management is preferable, Ransom said.
"Predator control can be useful in wildlife management when it's target-oriented and its effects can be monitored," he said.
Some predators are misunderstood.
"The idea that (bobcats) keep multiplying implies an infinite food supply," Ransom said. "That doesn't mean they can't reach high numbers when rodent populations are high."
Bobcats apparently aren't the cause of a decline in quail numbers.
"The data suggest they take very few birds," Ransom said. "They probably do a good thing by controlling rats and mice."
As for predator control in the context of varmint hunts, Ransom doesn't see it as the hunters' motivation.
"This sounds to me like a romp in the park to have a good ol' time," Ransom said.
But the ranchers often welcome the varmint hunters.
"There will be ranchers that will allow hunters on their property to reduce the number of coyotes," Isom said. "The coyotes don't have any predator except man. There are naturally more coyotes because we've got more fur-bearers (food for the coyotes) than we ever have had."
Even on ranches leased for quail and deer hunting, ranchers sometimes let other people hunt other prey.
"The landowner usually reserves the right to protect his livestock and his livelihood," Isom said.
Again, money is a factor. Leases are costly. For the non-affluent hunter, varmint hunts are a way to get to hunt.
"Hunting opportunity is getting less and less, especially for the local individual," Isom said.
But varmint hunters unknowingly may be killing off their own sport - especially if it comes to a showdown between them and animal activists.
"We don't need to do anything to expedite this confrontation," Meinzer said. "These killing contests, I think they're playing Russian roulette with our hunting heritage. ... We don't need the spotlight focused on our hunting here in Texas."
Hunt organizer Carlton Kendrick couldn't be reached Friday by phone.
 
So bobcats only eat rats and mice, huh? And not many birds, either. And that's from the mouth of a TA&M wildlife "ecologist". I wonder why he failed to mention the bobcats fondness for goat, lamb, and venison? Maybe it was because his mouth was so full of praise for PETA and DOW, and his abhorrence of the "carnage" of hunting.
 
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