Dear Uncle Jim,
Don’t you people at C.A.S.H. at least agree with hunting seasons to keep animals like deer from becoming a road hazard?
Chester Boswell,
Reedsport, Connecticut
Dear Chester,
Driving late for work early one morning, I came within inches of hitting a bull elk who decided, at the last minute, to run across the highway right in front of me. Fortunately no one else was on that lonely stretch of road at the time, for if I hadn’t stomped on the brakes and cranked the wheel, we would probably both be dead. I saw up close and personal how hitting an animal as large as that could do lethal damage. But the experience did not change my attitude on whether migratory wildlife should be considered a road hazard.
There’s no doubt that we humans—in our full metal jacketed projectiles, lumbering headlong 60 mph through the former wilderness—are the real hazards. We’re the ones breaking nature’s rules by inventing machines that can go so fast they can put an end to anyone they run into. But we drive like we’re saying, “We have important places to go—everyone else beware or be damned! No lowly animal better get in our way!”
If this incident had proven fatal for us, I would have wanted my epitaph to read: “I’m sorry beautiful creature. There’s nowhere I had to be that was worth the risk of ending your precious life.”
Dear Uncle Jim,
I’ve been a Montana hunter for the past 27 years, but lately I’ve found that the wolves have made the other game too hard to hunt. It used to be a cinch to shoot a deer above a cut bank and roll it into the back of your rig. Can you give me one good reason we should allow predators in this state when hunters were doing a fine job controlling deer and elk populations before wolves were reintroduced?
Hank Chapman,
Livingston, Montana
Dear Hank,
I can think of a lot of good reasons to have wolves around (not to mention the fact that you don’t have the right to decide which species should exist or not).
To give you a reason you should be able to relate to, wolves are just doing their job of preventing deer and elk from over-grazing. The fact is, wolves keep browser and grazer populations healthy precisely by keeping them on the move, making sure they don’t get too complacent. As with human beings, inertia can set in from staying in one place, causing individuals or entire populations to get fat and lazy.
(Note to C.A.S.H. members: The next time you hear hunters complaining about wolves, remember, it’s not because they really think wolves are going to eliminate all “their” elk—they just don’t want to have to walk too far from the pickup truck to make their kill.)
Dear Uncle Jim,
Why do you hate hunters so much?
Denton Kirby,
Gary, Indiana
Dear Denton,
I’m sorry if some of my writing is leading you to believe that I hate all hunters. Not so, what I hate is the act of hunting and its end results. It’s the ignorance and the killing I hate, not necessarily the people.
I know that many hunters are just doing what they do to animals because it’s the popular thing to do if they want to fit in with the people they associate with. In that case I hate the peer pressure that seduces them and their weakness to resist it. But I don’t outright hate those people because I know if they were influenced by peer pressure to take up hunting, there’s a chance they’ll respond to social pressure against hunting one day and join their fellow hunters who have turned away from the sport.
Then there are those hunters who sadistically enjoy killing or making animals suffer. That’s a different story.