Dirty Dawg
Member
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2008
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Got my copy of Sports Illustrated today and found this story:
http://tinyurl.com/6l2shy
It's a pretty good, albeit lengthy piece, too long to post in it's entirety here. So I'll post up the first bit and hope you take the time to read the rest. Moderators, if this is too long please remove the piece if you must but can we keep the link?
EDIT: This article will not fit in it's entirety in one post. There are still a couple of pages to this story that aren't included here.
http://tinyurl.com/6l2shy
It's a pretty good, albeit lengthy piece, too long to post in it's entirety here. So I'll post up the first bit and hope you take the time to read the rest. Moderators, if this is too long please remove the piece if you must but can we keep the link?
Sports Illustrated
November 24, 2008
A More Dangerous Game Bears On The Golf Course, Deer On The Windshield, Wolves On The Walk Back Home
How the decline of hunting is changing the natural order of predator and prey
MATTHEW TEAGUE
THE TWO WOLVES emerged like specters from the tree line and crossed a field of snow. From that moment, and even after everything that followed, no one disputed their penetrating beauty. Silver on white.
Two men watched them approach. The men—a pilot named Todd Svarckopf and an aviation worker named Chris Van Galder—worked at Points North Landing, an outpost that serves local mining camps in Saskatchewan province, about 750 miles north of the U.S. border. On this particular day in November 2005 a low cloud ceiling prevented aerial surveys for signs of uranium, so the bored men had struck out, walking toward a nearby junkyard to kill a few hours looking at a collection of abandoned airplanes.
They had crossed the camp's snow-covered airstrip and started across the moss-sprung landscape when the wolves appeared. One darker, one lighter. The darker one approached Svarckopf. He yelled at it, and it retreated a few steps.
"Whatever we do," the pilot told Van Galder, standing nearby, "we don't turn and run."
Since they stood just a few hundred yards from the camp, the men tried to back away toward safety. As they did, though, the wolves grew more aggressive: The light gray one approached Svarckopf, and he turned to face it; when he did, the dark wolf moved on Van Galder, the smaller man. He shouted at the animal, but the wolf held its ground, squatting on its haunches almost within arm's reach. Van Galder called to Svarckopf, who turned toward his friend. When Svarckopf took his eyes off the light wolf, it ran at him.
Svarckopf quickly grabbed two stout spruce branches from the ground and brandished them at the wolves. Prodding and swinging, the men inched back toward the camp. The wolves, pressing forward, held eye contact and swished their lowered tails, as though stalking prey. It was a disturbing sight, and yet the men did have one statistic on their side: In more than a hundred years, only one human death in North America had even been tentatively linked to an attack by nonrabid wolves in the wild.
After about a quarter hour—an eternity, it seemed, with the wolves snarling and snapping their teeth—Svarckopf and Van Galder made it back to the camp's airstrip, where the animals broke off the hunt and returned to the woods. Moments later, in the safety of the dreary mess hall, the breathless men related their story to the miners. Van Galder had brought a camera for the walk to the airplane junkyard, and he had managed to snap a few pictures of the wolves at the camp's edge. He showed them to his colleagues.
The photographs impressed one young man in particular. Kenton Carnegie, a shy 22-year-old geological engineering student at the University of Waterloo, had flown to Points North Landing for a temporary work-study job with Svarckopf and Van Galder. He loved animals to the point of becoming a vegetarian, and the story of the encounter with the wolves intrigued him. Soon afterward he called his mother, Lori, back in Oshawa, the Toronto suburb where he had grown up.
"Oh, yeah, it's a really neat place," he told her about Points North Landing. "There's not a lot to do up here, but some of our guys saw some wolves."
A few days later, after the excitement had subsided and as the snow continued to ground flights, Carnegie told his colleagues he felt stir-crazy. He said he planned to take a walk along the lake, the way many of the miners did to stave off boredom between shifts. "I'll be back for supper," he said.
USUALLY WHEN wild animals change their behavior and become more visible to humans, it is because they are diseased or hungry, or they have been drawn out by Dumpsters, dogs or other signs of human development and urban sprawl. These factors explain in part why there have been so many recent sightings of bears on golf courses or in suburban trees, why a herd of bison wandered into the Canadian village of Fort Providence two years ago, why deer have become a traffic hazard throughout the U.S. and why coyotes sometimes show up on Sunset Boulevard.
But over the last decade the North American ecosystem has also seen an unanticipated trend upsetting the always delicate relationship between man and wildlife: The hunters have been going away.
Surveys by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service indicate hunting in general has tumbled precipitously, down 10% in the past decade alone. Bird hunting has dropped by a quarter during that time, and small-game hunting by 31%.
Once common fall rituals are fading. In rural New England not long ago hunters walked logging roads, shotguns in hand, looking for grouse. On the Great Lakes hundreds once lay in flatboats amid flotillas of duck decoys, waiting for the great formations of ducks to darken the sky. And in the South men gathered in teams to hunt wild boar, to be roasted afterward on a spit. Those days are gone, or going fast, and traditions like fathers teaching their sons where to place a tree stand or how to field-dress an elk are, in many families, dying. Stricter gun control regulations have made simply owning a gun far more complicated. In some communities it is easy to find game on the golf course or your neighbor's lawn but almost impossible to find a place to hunt safely.
The news of hunting's decline will no doubt cheer those who see it as a cruel pastime. But what the critics do not realize is that as the hunters have stepped back, the animals (especially predators) have come forward—with potentially disastrous consequences for all.
Valerius Geist, a professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Calgary and an expert on the behavior of large mammals, calls what is happening "the recolonization by wildlife." The first sign, he says, "was when the herbivores returned," a reference to the overabundance of deer, moose and elk in North America. After the herbivores, Geist says, the carnivores are never far behind. "We are just now beginning to experience that phase," he says. As recently as 1994 there were about 50 wolves left in the Yellowstone region (Idaho, Montana and Wyoming), but the population there now stands at more than 1,500; in Minnesota wolves climbed from about 500 in the 1950s to more than 3,000 today.
The third phase of animal recolonization, Geist says, is "the parasites and diseases returning in full force."
ON A sunny July day, Adam Walker drives past a stately Long Island home in Westhampton, N.Y., then eases his white Chevy Malibu to a stop on a wedge of land between the main building and the water. "That's where I'll set up my shot," he says, pointing to a cedar tree. "Yeah. Good site." By day Walker, 32, works as an arborist for a Long Island tree company. He moonlights as a deer hunter.
The Hamptons, like a lot of New York State, are lousy with deer, and have been for at least the last decade. At first the animals presented a sort of graceful nuisance, wandering out of the shrinking woodlands to eat the roses behind the poolhouse. Yet with fewer hunters taking their limit and the likelihood of fewer deer dying in the generally less severe winters, the animal's numbers became unmanageable. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation estimates that Long Island's deer population is 20,000, up from about 3,000 in the late '70s. And the consequences have escalated.
In Brookhaven, N.Y., officials are pondering how to handle the deer carcasses scattered across the town's roadways. In 2006 they removed 265 deer hit by cars. Last year they found 282. This year they're on track to remove at least 370 deer, and the cost—at $400 per animal—is straining the town's budget. (Across the U.S. deer-car collisions rose 15% over the past five years, costing annually more than a billion dollars in property damage and 150 human lives.)
At the same time Lyme disease—the crippling illness borne by deer ticks—has gripped the Hamptons. Suffolk County reported an estimated 585 cases last year, up from 190 two years ago. In response, some town leaders across the area turned to what they saw as the only practical solution: They contracted licensed hunters to stalk and kill deer in the tony beach towns along the Island's North and South Forks. Some residents ask that men like Walker do their work discreetly, so that their neighbors, or even their spouses, remain unaware of exactly what's going on in their backyards. But few protests are heard, in part because the deer, which eat expensive shrubbery and virtually everything else in sight, are often butchered for venison and donated to local soup kitchens.
"I could shoot a deer every night," says Walker, as he stares out at the tree line, waiting for a deer to emerge. He is not complaining. He learned bow hunting from his father and his uncle, and he enjoys his night job, to the point of performing it as a free "friendly customer service."
THE RELATIONSHIP between the hunter and his game is ancient, a give-and-take described in its simplest terms by prehistoric men drawing on cave walls: They showed figures of deer, of man, of deer felled by arrows. The hunting half of the hunter-gatherer model came about because man's brain—the thing that sets him apart from many of those other animals—demanded meat. The brain burns through a quarter of a resting human's calories, and gathering alone couldn't provide enough nutrition to maintain "our most costly instrument," according to Harvard biological anthropologist Daniel Lieberman. "Hunting made us humans who we are."
But hunting depends on a healthy regard for the animal population, a point underscored by a previous ecological crisis. Starting in the late 17th century, commercial hunters and trappers began to fan out across the North American continent, systematically stripping the land of its wildlife. The passenger pigeon population famously declined from probably a few billion in the mid-19th century to zero in 1900, when the last wild one was shot. Buffalo, occasionally picked off along the prairie by men firing from the windows of passing railroad cars, nearly suffered a similar fate. "The game population almost collapsed," said Nicholas Throckmorton, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Reform didn't come until the early 1900s, when individual conservationists—led by President Theodore Roosevelt—pushed federal and state governments to begin enacting a set of laws that became known as the North American Wildlife Conservation Model. The legislation restricted the sale of meat and fur from wild animals, effectively curbing the commercial hunting market. Just as significant, in 1937 Congress approved the Wildlife Restoration Act, which imposed special taxes on guns, ammunition and other hunting equipment; the revenue is distributed to state governments and earmarked for state wildlife agencies, the hiring of biologists and other expenses related to game conservation. By the middle of the 20th century, the animal population had begun to rebound, and our fathers and grandfathers could again satisfy what Charles Dickens called "the passion for hunting ... implanted ... in the human breast."
But in the decades since, attitudes have shifted and hardened, and the very idea of hunting as "sport" has come to imply something cavalier. Among animal-rights advocates it indicated indifference to wildlife. In two generations the lone hunter—once exemplified by Teddy Roosevelt—found himself accused of enmity toward nature. Hunting had become a question of morality.
EDIT: This article will not fit in it's entirety in one post. There are still a couple of pages to this story that aren't included here.
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