Though allowed to use bait and traps, and with license fees halved to a mere 49 bucks, Wisconsin hunters are still unable to kill all the wolves the DNR put on the block in a zone of land from Burnett County in the Northwest all the way east to the Wisconsin River.
There's a good summation of the slow-going kill in the LaCrosse Tribune; DNR records show 38 wolves still available for 'harvest' in the so-called Zone 3 - - or about 15% of the entire allowable kill.
Are there smarter wolves there - - or were there simply fewer to begin with as the result of a DNR miscount? And maybe the other zones have now been over-hunted?
In this second year hunt, the DNR jacked up the available statewide killing from 116 to 251 - - an increase of 135 animals.
All based on guesstimates of a statewide pack of perhaps 800-839 - - with the DNR aiming to eventually let hunters reduce the number to 350, though experts have said 350 cannot sustain the packs, as cold weather, collisions with vehicles and illegal hunting also kill wolves annually.
The quotas and zone distributions are based on DNR estimates, but sport hunting interests and not scientists are in control of the agency and its advisory committee process, so rather than a calm discussion of whether the statewide pack numbers were good in the first place, look for the agency to add even more killing next year in one or more of the other zones where quotas were filled relatively quickly, with Zone 3 reduced somewhat to a more attainable toll.
The Walker administration has disregarded science and its role within the developer-managed DNR on matters from wolf hunting to iron mine analysis to wetlands management.
Walker has extended the 'Open for Business' motto even to the DNR, its operations and policy-making.
It's all for sale now - - clean water, the pristine Penokee Hills, fresh air along the Wisconsin River as frac sand is hauled out by the county-full. In this environment, wolves reintroduced here under federal and now-defunct state protections don't have a chance.
I would not doubt there was a concerted effort for hunters, trappers to back off before Dec. They were going through wolves like a hot knife through butter, but now the killing has dropped off? Or the DNR, so blindly, set an unscientific quota, based on politics instead of factual information? Naah, that couldn't be it. I wonder just how many cows, deer those young wolves took down? Unless they were over two years of age the answer would be very, very few. Wisconsin, or East Idaho as it should be called, is the biggest puppet state thanks to Walker and his master, the Koch Bros. Well done, WI. You should be ashamed. And, normal citizens of WI, you seriously need to remember that at election time.
ReplyDelete