"Saving" Hunting & Fishing

THE IMPORTANT STUFF

This is about “saving” and “protecting” the important things in our lives. No, it isn’t about “Wilderness” or “Native Species” or “Wildlands” or “Endangered Species” or any of the other imaginings that many of our fellow citizens think are more precious than our (not their) rights, traditions, and form of government. Truth be told, all of such recent “emergencies” are but tools that radical groups to use to gain power over the rest of us. The vast majority of us would be far better off without millions of acres in “Wilderness”; or a government bent on “fighting” plants and animals (Invasive Species) that some professor says are out of place; or a government using lands set aside for multiple uses (US Forests, BLM lands) or waterfowl (US Refuges) or Parks to introduce wolves, strangle rural communities, destroy rural economies and the use and management of both renewable and energy natural resources. Anyone remember when “Endangered Species” meant “Species” and something that was about to become extinct?

No, this is about the important stuff like hunting and fishing and habitat management for sustainable uses from timber to bird hunting and frogging.

The biggest threat to our outdoor traditions and rural economies is the transfer of legal authority over more and more of our lives and our activities from the jurisdiction of our State government (where the US Constitution placed it) to the Federal government. Just as in the monarchies of Europe from whence we came, when power over day-to-day matters is lodged in a central government, powerful forces will exercise that power for their own benefit at the expense of the rest of us. While the Founding Fathers were familiar with Kings and Dukes and Earls controlling European land for themselves and mutilating poachers and trespassers, today we are faced with bureaucrats feathering their own careers, politicians keeping the reelection machinery running, professors keeping the grant money flowing, and hostile environmentalists and radical animal rights groups steering it all for their ends at our expense.

What can we do? One of the most important things we need to concentrate on doing is to keep our State fish and wildlife agency under OUR control. The last ten years have seen wholesale name changes from names like Fish and Game, and Fisheries Commission to things like Maryland Wildlife and Heritage Service. This signals the shift from “game” and “fisheries” work to everything from “monitoring” “the environment” to “categorizing” all the land and money needed to “restore” the “Native Ecosystem”. Simultaneously our State agencies are closing fish hatcheries, ignoring sport fish restoration needs, letting deer management slide, and preparing to declare pheasants and brown trout as the equivalent of killer bees and brown tree snakes. All this is being accomplished not only with license sales money and excise taxes from hunting and fishing gear but also with increasing amounts of Federal Appropriated funding both through and directed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Many State employees, foolishly in my view, anticipate a future where hunting and fishing will disappear and the Federal Congress will (just like Highway funding) fund the State agencies under the direction of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. As an example today the Federal Highway “strings” dictate what plants may and may NOT be planted alongside roads and no State objects because all State Highway employees are not only dependent on Federal funding for salaries but State politicians measure State Highway employees by how quickly they get “every penny due the State”.

The State fish and wildlife agencies’ national lobby group in Washington is the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (IAFWA). They control millions of dollars, much of it from the excise taxes and from other Federal grants even though they are a Washington lobby group. They just “established two new committees”. “Under the (sic, new) Energy and Wildlife Policy Committee there are two subcommittees”, “Wind and Energy, and Global Climate Change”. The other “new committee” is “Invasive Species”. Additionally, they just announced a new Executive Director who is a former lobbyist that occupied a manufactured and duplicative political Deputy Director job in the US Fish and Wildlife Service for four years. When he left for another temporary political job in the Interior Department the manufactured job disappeared behind him. Consider these “new” directions for State fish and wildlife agencies and where the “new leadership” selected by the State Directors will take them and your State fish and wildlife agency.

Our State employees should work for and represent us. They should remain under the Governor and the State Legislature the WE elect. They may be bums or under bums from time to time but they are OUR bums and we can do something about them. Before any of us leap off into national organizations to (we think) obtain national reforms we need to keep the foxes out of our own chicken house.

Know who is working in your State agency and what the policies of your Director are. Force them to commit to what they are doing. Inform and elect Governors and State Legislators that know you want to keep hunting and fishing and your State agencies under State control. Tell your State government politicians and bureaucrats that they are not to sell your rights and traditions and state bureaucracy for any Wilderness or Scenic Highway or Landowner Incentive or Endangered Species Federal dollar.

Just like the recent UN Gun Control Conference, don’t believe all the “feel-good” hype about “saving” children or “unmet environmental ‘needs’”. National and International forces are after our guns and our 2nd Amendment rights every bit as much as the forces utilizing the UN and Federal agencies are after our property rights and cultural traditions and freedoms like hunting and fishing. Just as a determined Federal government is necessary to prevent a sellout of our gun rights in a UN “Treaty”, so too are determined State governments necessary if we are to protect our rights to hunt and fish.

Jim Beers
9 July 2006
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- Jim Beers is a retired US Fish & Wildlife Service Wildlife Biologist, Special Agent, Refuge Manager, Wetlands Biologist, and Congressional Fellow. He was stationed in North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York City, and Washington DC. He also served as a US Navy Line Officer in the western Pacific and on Adak, Alaska in the Aleutian Islands. He has worked for the Utah Fish & Game, Minneapolis Police Department, and as a Security Supervisor in Washington, DC. He testified three times before Congress; twice regarding the theft by the US Fish & Wildlife Service of $45 to 60 Million from State fish and wildlife funds and once in opposition to expanding Federal Invasive Species authority. He resides in Centreville, Virginia with his wife of many decades.