Thursday, January 26, 2012
Let FWP starve!
Posted Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 4:00 AM
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks is reported to be running out of money because of decreased hunting license purchases, and is considering asking the legislature for license fee increases. This is the first obvious symptom of something known as agency “death spiral” for FWP.
Over the past two decades, FWP has come to focus on wildlife and biology when it should have been focused on fish and game. This includes FWP’s shocking tolerance and support for large predators. FWP’s total, willing, even eager cooperation with fostering excessive populations of large predators has long been predicted to end in a financial crash for the agency as word unavoidably spreads that there is no game left to hunt so there is no reason to buy a license.
For too long, FWP leaders have leaned on the scales of public policy by making excuses for the devastation wrought upon game herds by large predators, by fudging game counts and census numbers and by blaming any game population declines that could not be covered up on climate change, sunspots, lazy hunters or aliens—anything but the truth. This cover-up culture has been fostered by senior staff, always near retirement, who knew they’d be long gone from the hot seat when the FWP financial bus blundered off a cliff.
If the overall FWP attitude had not been so hell-bent on “ecosystem management,” “biological diversity,” “natural balance” and other similar catchy but terminal “green” ideas destined to end hunting, FWP managers would have predicted the current agency financial crisis years ago. Nobody at FWP noticed or cared several years ago when the editor of the NRA’s nationwide American Hunter magazine published a feature article about his fruitless elk-hunting trip to southwest Montana, a trip where the only tracks he saw were wolf tracks. Nobody at FWP noticed or cared about the other hundreds of warnings from Montana citizens. Worse, those warnings were even ridiculed by FWP in mad pursuit of its own agenda.
The stock mantra from FWP managers has been: “We’re the professionals. We know best. The outcome that concerned citizens predict will never come to pass.” The “evidence” of crashing game herds that citizens offer is just “campfire stories” and is without merit because it doesn’t come from paid FWP “professionals.”
Yet when retired FWP employees, freed from the institutional FWP muzzle, tell that FWP-tolerated wolves are turning the Montana landscape into a “biological desert,” FWP dismisses such comments summarily.
For the last two decades, FWP has been busy digging a hole for itself. As it sees daylight disappearing around the edges of the hole, it still won’t quit digging.
Of course, the obvious solution for the bureaucratic-bound and reality-disconnected FWP will be to announce, “We’ve been managing wildlife for the general public (including the non-Montana public) for years. Now we need the general public to pay the bills.” FWP has so fouled its nest by wasting the Montana hunting resource on predators and inadvisably removing hunters from the economic equation that it will now go to the legislature asking for relief, including increased fees that hunters simply won’t pay to access a vanishing resource, and, ultimately, tax increases on the general taxpayer, seeking a bailout from the results of its bad decisions.
You can bet that when FWP approaches the legislature demanding an allowance increase as a reward for having flunked Econ 101, the Montana Shooting Sports Association and thousands of Montana hunters will be there to say “Absolutely no way.” FWP has not only ignored the many warnings from Montana hunters, it has mocked and disrespected them. Also ignoring a state law requiring it to control large predators to protect game herds, FWP has bulled its way down a path surrounded with warning signs.
What FWP needs are not more or alternate sources of money, but a total change in attitude and culture. Until that happens, let FWP starve. It is not serving Montana.
Gary Marbut
Montana Shooting Sports Association
Missoula
Comments (3)
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Their title is Fish, Wildlife and Parks, NOT the department of hunting. The reason license/license fees are down is due to a poor public perception of hunting; thus generally nobody cares to join their ranks. Why is that?... because of the perception that hunters are no longer conservationists; but rather they are increasingly viewed as myopic ungulate harvesters, trail-camera parabolic microphone ambushers and assassins of pregnant wolves. The true fair-chase rational hunters must step-up and quell the wolf-haters and people of similarly extreme views, or else public support of hunting will continue to decline.
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Gary,
This is way more about your politics than it is about your concern for wildlife.
You're not helping anything, pardner. "Let FWP starve!" Nice title! Then what? Let the private sector take over and show us how great they are at wildlife management? Come on! You need to get with the only program we're ever going to have, MT FWP, chip in, and help make it work. Stuffing your politics into FWP isn't good for wildlife.
Tell us, Gary, about your predator hunting. How many days have you hunted wolves this year? Have you gotten one yet? Have you killed a lion? How about a black bear? I'd be willing to bet that all of your complaining about predators is getting in the way of your predator hunting. Time to put your flaming keyboard away and start hunting.
In last week’s letter, entitled “Let FWP Starve!,” Gary Marbut will have us to believe that there just aren’t any game animals left to hunt here in Montana because the wolves have eaten them all. Furthermore, he blames Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks’ “shocking tolerance and support for large predators” as the primary reason why fewer folks are purchasing hunting licenses here in Montana. In his attempt to portray Montana FWP as a villain “hell-bent on biological diversity” while simultaneously painting a broad and tragic scene of a vast Montana landscape lost of its big game hunting opportunities, Mr. Marbut fails to mention any other possible explanation for the recent decline in hunting license sales. Could it be that there are more variables to consider other than those presented by Mr. Marbut? What about the poor economy? It seems like the nation’s economic downturn may have something to do with a decrease in sales of hunting licenses. What about the rise in unemployment? What about the increase in fuel costs? What about environmental conditions that decrease the amount of hunting and fishing licenses sold, such as severe winters and high spring runoffs? Surely all of these factors must mean something. What about the effect of letters such as Mr. Marbut’s? He suggests that word has “unavoidably spread that there is no game left to hunt so there is no reason to buy a license.” Does the viral spread of factually insufficient word of mouth have an impact? I believe it does. Thankfully, I do know many Montanans that did buy a license and many of them will be eating well. Although Mr. Marbut may wish to “let FWP starve,” his obvious bias leaves others such as me hungry for more facts.
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