Re: John Horgan - Hunting of Wolves
Excellent catch. Thanks for that.
As most should understand there is a new development on the....political landscape. The aim is to introduce the idea of a Social License to Hunt, with the clear goal of removing that license incrementally. It's a manufactured issue, in my opinion, but it is very effective by muddying the requirement for science.
The way it will work out is that there will be a call to remove social license to hunt in the absence of enough science to justify the hunt.
Of course, as anyone who tracks this understands, hunters are committed to science but we recognize that the problem is that the science is usually lacking.
The who want SLH reduced are very happy that the science is lacking, because that helps promote their agenda.
They also want to expand the definition of science so that mere wildlife biology is reduced in importance and softer social sciences are able to play a bigger role.
You can find that tactic used in other applications, and we've seen it recently with Covid, protests, and whether the protest is acceptable despite protest. Racial equity is huge health concern, so an anti-racist protest is absolutely fine during the pandemic, while other gatherings that don't qualify as equally important don't get that pass. We witnessed that during 2020.
What that was is a combination of hard medical science (don't congregate during a pandemic) and softer social science (sometimes it's ok to congregate during a pandemic). The combination leads to an internal conflict.
The idea that we can do wildlife management on a hard science basis (an intact, balanced ecosystem as the measure of success) combined with the softer social science (a balanced system is desirable, but not if we need to kill something big, furry and cute) will lead to the same sort of conflict.
Rob Chipman
"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders" - Ed Abbey
"Grown men do not need leaders" - also Ed Abbey