Originally Posted by
Retiredguy
Many of you on this forum were not even alive when it happened, but BC lost its ability to effectively manage wildlife back in the early 80's. That was when the province came under a controlled and systematic attack by international anti-hunting/wolf loving groups spear headed by Paul Watson of Greenpeace (at the time) and their movement Project Wolf. Dr. Elliott was a provincial biologist that was doing wolf control in NE BC, which was using poison originally, until he initiated the shooting from helicopters method.
The international press went after the wolf cull like a dog with a bone and the general public lapped it up. This was also the period when trapping was also under attack globally and the anti-grizzly hunting movement, as well as the anti-trophy hunting push really started in earnest. Nothing has been the same since. The provincial government lost its backbone back then. It took a long time and pushes by the anti groups every few years, but their tactics have proven very effective. Along the way they have managed to create a situation where global hysteria erupts at the hunting of all charismatic mega fauna...you know, wolves, big cats, pachyderms and bears. Wolf control and grizzly hunting has become a topic for the provincial government that seems to have the same effect as the topic of abortion to the federal government.
All these years later we now see that grizzly hunting is no longer a legal activity in Canada except in the Yukon and to a very limited extent in the NWT and Nunavut. Any wolf control is done under a cloak of secrecy, because if word gets out to the wrong people the backlash can be swift, and is potentially both a political and career killer. Then when you factor in the Supreme Court of Canada decisions regarding First Nations and Metis "harvest" rights...well the province no longer really practices game management. They practice hunter control, but there again it really only amounts to control of "licensed" hunters.
With the caribou, well it has become a global issue as caribou herds are experiencing huge declines in many places and the woodland caribou are just one of the various areas of focus with caribou management. In Canada there are not just the mountain caribou herds in BC in trouble, there are the woodland caribou across the country in the northern boreal forests (and we won't get into the problems with the central Canadian barren ground caribou herds, the Arctic Islands herds or the Quebec/Labrador herds...all of which are tanking).
Fortunately for the woodland caribou in big chunks of northern Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec, there are lots of forested areas where muskeg limits access and the timber itself is of such poor quality and size that it is not worth harvesting. Those areas have next to no roads and limited access...unlike BC.
Truthfully, there are a number of the so called mountain/woodland caribou herds in BC that are just not likely to survive. You can shoot the shit out of the wolves all you want but you cannot magically get rid of the hundreds of thousands of km's of resource extraction roads, cut lines and pipeline right-of-ways. We are/were blessed as a province with vast forests, outstanding mineral reserves for both hard rock and placer mining and oil and gas. But all of that resource extraction comes at a heavy price for some wildlife due to the access it creates and changes to the environment that result. Caribou do not do well around humans and our activity. You also can't magically replace the vast areas of old growth forest that have been levelled and were the key wintering areas for these caribou. To compound the problem many of those old growth forests were high elevation forests where the trees take a hundred to two hundred years to grow and much of the current silviculture practices do not work well in those areas.
There is no easy fix to the caribou problem. One thing I do know is that lowering the moose population to control wolves and save the caribou is not going to work. It is being picked as a possible bandaid solution because it is cheap...let the hunters do it. Culling wolves by helicopter is expensive, the last figures I have seen seem to indicate a cost of about $4,300 per wolf but can clime to as high as $10,000 per wolf in some instances. Trapping them is problematic because there just aren't that many trappers out there any more that are really good at it and the same forces that want to protect the wolves killed off a viable trapping industry. Fur prices suck and no one is going to spend more money to trap a wolf than they can get back for selling the hide, even if you are just doing it for recreational purposes. Going in the hole monetarily gets old pretty quick. So a "bounty" is needed if you really want to get trappers out there and reducing the wolf population, but there is no way the government is going to talk about a "bounty" and suffer the onslaught of the global anti movement. No better to just let the "licensed" hunters take it on the chin reducing the moose population so it looks like they are doing something.
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Re: moose cull to save caribou?? wtf
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