Re: The future of our wildlife management plans.
Originally Posted by
horshur
The issues with USA stats is so many of the conclusions were made on what could be called a closed system. They had little natural predation and need to be managed kinda like a lake.
But here is the rub. Local here I could with current regulation ,family and friends make a big dent in cougar population. Just my immediate family we can kill ten..I can catch them too. But that would be stupid. The cougar's been doing a good job keeping the deer numbers down across age classes. I already got a first hand view of winter kill. 75% of fawns just up and died. And on the heels of that winter the wolves moved in and camped. F! Me was that hard to watch. But I will tell you the deer were ripe for the wolves.
It is clear to me that any predator control has to be matched with compensatory regulations to insure BC hunters take up the slack. Our harvest should be to emulate natural mortality if it's not nature will step in.
At current time I am not sure hunters are ready for that.
Agree on practically everything you have and are saying.
The good thing about the money they have south of the border is they now have cougars, wolves, black bears and grizz and they are busy monitoring the entire system. Idaho has a huge project on the go, including a wolf/cougar monitoring project, Washington, Montana, Colorado all working on wolf stuff including interaction with mule deer. Idaho also has 400 collars on mule deer does/fawns and 360 collars on elk every year.
Imagine the power we could harness if we had money to work collaboratively with them on cross-border research and enhancement projects.
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Mandela