This year's count consisted of 43 males and 22 females, according to South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department. With the season at its close, officials say they will look over the data and prepare to do a population estimate, and come up with an appropriate harvest number for the upcoming mountain lion hunting season in the Black Hills. [KEVN]So, about the management of apex predators: the only answer to curbing marauding cougars and wolves is to slaughter them while Monsanto, Koch Industries, et al. are allowed free range?
Wolves are leaving Montana for the relative safety of adjoining states.
Coyotes are mesopredators yet Citibank is too big to fail. Think, trophic cascades as applied to economics: if the free market is such a cool deal, why aren’t cougars and wolves protected instead of assassinated?
Money, of course.
The study, Costs and Consequences: The Real Price of Livestock Grazing on America’s Public Lands, comes as the Obama administration prepares Friday to announce grazing fees for the upcoming year on 229 million acres of publicly owned land, most of it in the West. The report was prepared by economists on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity. The federal subsidy of the grazing program goes beyond the direct costs and fees. There are vast indirect costs to grazing on federal lands, including the government killing of native carnivores perceived as threats to wildlife, wildfire suppression caused by invasive cheat grass facilitated by cattle grazing, and expenditure of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service funds from protecting other species threatened by livestock grazing. “The full cost of the federal grazing program is long overdue for a complete analysis,” the study said. [The Center for Biological Diversity]Republicans hate subsidies unless industrial agriculture benefits.
The Rapid City Journal's Seth Tupper affirms what this blogger already knows: the Black Hills are broken because there aren't enough litigators suing Game, Fish and Parks, the Forest Service and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
On the other side of the debate is Sam Clauson, a Rapid City environmental activist who has been involved in forest litigation since the 1970s. When told of the article’s assessment of the impact of decades of litigation on the forest, he said, “I don’t agree with that; I agree that the Forest Service has done a lot of stupid things over the years.” [Tupper, SD Law Review authors: Black Hills reflective of need for 'new law of fire']Humans have triggered a trophic cascade called the Anthropocene.
SDGF&P is now killing the wild turkeys that feed on grasshoppers and locusts to pave the fields for the invasive Chinese Ring-necked Pheasant.
Ted Kaczynski is right: we are truly fucked.
Fewer lions harvested at close of this year's Black Hills Mt. Lion hunting season
ReplyDeleteRapid City, (KEVN-TV) While the sun has set on the mountain lion hunting season in the Black Hills, fewer big cats were brought down than anticipated.
The season came to an end last week, with a total harvest of 43 lions.
This year's count consisted of 21 males and 22 females, according to South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department.
It was just over a week ago on the west side of Rapid City, when a dog was killed by a mountain lion on Galena Street.
While officials at the Game, Fish and Parks Department believe the mountain lion population is decreasing, incidents involving lions entering the city limits like this, still do occur.
John Kanta, Regional Wildlife Manager at South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks said, "Mountain lions are here and you know, people are going to see mountain lions potentially, and in some cases we may have interactions with mountain lions, now certainly we hope that those aren't negative interactions but of course we know that some of those do happen, the most recently the dog that was taken. While that's very unfortunate, it's very unlikely to happen, it's an unusual event."
The mountain lion hunting season ran from December 26th to March 31st, and with the little amount of snowfall, officials say it played a role in the fewer number of harvested lions.
Kanta said, "We did harvest fewer lions than last year, a lot of that is due to some of the lack of snow. Snow is a great tool for hunters to use to track mountain lions and it certainly improves the success, you don't have to have snow, but it most certainly helps."
With the season at its close, officials say they will look over the data and prepare to do a population estimate, and come up with an appropriate harvest number for the upcoming mountain lion hunting season in the Black Hills.
See this? Betty Olson blames deer for bovine TB and wants to kill cougars that control the deer population.
ReplyDeleteSouth Dakota: Land of Infinite Villainy.