FRIENDS
A Midwestern reader has written the following to me while I was away on a fishing trip:
"I have some friends who are either non-hunters or anti-hunters. I haven't figured which yet. Last night at dinner they were complaining about hunters who hunt over feeders saying it's unfair, not really hunting, etc. I said it's not much different than raising a cow to be killed for food and pointed out they eat meat, at least he does, not her..I don't have a problem with hunting over feeders but didn't have much in the way of a defense..I have never hunted over a feeder, but I would if I had the opportunity..I am tempted to just let it go because I know I won't persuade them to view it any differently...Any thoughts on it?"
Read More...

I have worn out keypads trying to energize hunters and fishers and trappers about how the US Fish and Wildlife Service, hunting and fishing equipment manufacturers (that are supposed to pay the excise taxes that support hunting and fishing), State fish and wildlife bureaucrats, and conservation organizations (whom we mistakenly assume are our protectors) are really in league with environmental and animal rights zealots to quietly abandon hunting and fishing programs for the promise of Federally funded environmental and animal protection schemes that are immeasurable and are touted to pay higher salaries to bureaucrats as they keep getting politicians reelected ad infinitum.

Wow, an eight-line sentence (97 words!): raise your hand if you are you still awake.

Read More...

The basic distinction between a Republic and a Dictatorship is the existence of private property. Private property exists in a Republic and it does not exist in a Dictatorship. Dictatorship covers the spectrum of oppressors from the Mugabe Dictatorship in Zimbabwe and the "limited" ("limited" meaning the government can rescind it in a heartbeat at their pleasure) communist governments in China and Vietnam to the "on-again, off-again" Russian "democracy" and the socialist rulers in places like Venezuela and Bolivia. Dictatorships "nationalize" property, dictate the use of any property, and take property from those they wish to punish and give it to those they wish to reward. In Dictatorships government "owns" everything: in a Republic the citizens "own" everything while giving limited control of certain property to government to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" per the opening words of the Constitution of the United States.

Read More...

Indications are everywhere. They remind us where we've been. They tell us where we are. Often, we believe they tell us the future.
Abortion, euthanasia, and "a life worth living"; like our policies to force Africans and Indians and other "native" people to coexist with deadly snakes and crocodiles and tigers and wolves tells us much about our perceived value of human life and true equality. "Gay marriage" and the correlation between widespread availability of pornography and the incidence of formerly unimaginable sex crimes likewise tell us much about our concept of morality and the purpose of our lives. The "hourglass" decline of every measure of academic quality in our schools; while environmental and animal propaganda, campaigns by teachers (increasingly abusing students) and administrators to indoctrinate values (trips to Planned Parenthood Abortion Centers and Mosques) and programs to destroy parental rights (sex-ed of every conceivable aberration and the "right" to provide birth control and abortion services without parental knowledge or notification to children) explode across the national landscape is an indicator of some very disturbing future developments for a nation facing the challenges of our world.

Read More...

Case #1 "Robert Wudzinski, 70, of Richmond (Michigan), appeared in 98th District Court in Ontonagon County last month before Judge Anders B. Tingstad, who also serves as judge in Gogebic County.
Wudzinski entered a guilty plea to shooting a radio-collared wolf while deer hunting. A wildlife biologist with the Department of Natural Resources was patrolling in an airplane, tracking radio collar signals on wolves that day, when the collar on the wolf went into mortality mode.
MDNR conservation officers were able to locate the carcass of the animal and conduct an investigation, which led to the arrest of Wudzinski, who entered the guilty plea to one count of taking a protected animal. Read More...

None of us would drive down the road in reverse. In spite of it being possible, reverse is only intended to take you where you've been, not where you want to go. Sadly, today many of us have been convinced by special interest radicals and socialists playing on our own narrow self-interests that going in reverse is somehow "progress" taking us where we want to go. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A few examples of this phenomenon using Constitutional matters should suffice to make this point.
Read More...

The front-page news article and the opening paragraph said it all.
"Whaling ban strains US-Japan relations"
"The U.S. is locked in a power struggle with Japan over control of the International Whaling Commission, with the winner to decide whether whales can be legally hunted for PROFIT" (my caps on this last word).
Read More...

Two news stories have crossed my desk this morning that say mountains about what they don't say. One article from the New York Daily News goes under the banner:

"Save tot from coyote's jaws"

"Beast tries to drag baby into N.J. woods but is chased off by gutsy 11-yr.-old boy"

The second article, from the Idaho Statesman, runs under the banner:

"Grizzly bear recovery presents new challenge"
Read More...

The US Congress has vowed to not renew the Federal tax cuts that expire in 2-3 years. Although this will increase everyone's (that pays taxes) tax bill we are told that it is not a tax increase. What do you call a statement that is neither true nor a lie?

A half million people (kids?, urban elites?, anti-hunters?, students as an assignment?, socialists?, all of the above?) have written into the US Department of the Interior asking that the US Fish and Wildlife Service List the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act because of global warming threats to it's habitat. The Interior Department and the US Fish and Wildlife Service in particular need little encouragement to set this legal hammer in place for every lawyer from "Hades to breakfast" to pick up and go into US Courts to seek "redress" to stop roads, the auto Read More...

"Bushmeat", like "Invasive Species", is one of those colloquial terms that has been hijacked by environmental extremists, animal rights radicals, Federal and UN bureaucrats, and politicians in search of the means of holding onto and increasing their power. "Bushmeat" is an African term commonly used to refer to wild animals (hence the "bush" term) eaten by native residents and visitors to rural areas. The term encompasses any animal that is abundant (easily located) and edible from monkeys and baboons to various deer, zebras, and hogs. There is currently a bushmeat.org site on the internet and a "Bushmeat Task Force" made up of a gaggle of bureaucrats and radicals in desperate search of an example that justifies both their existence and new laws and bureaucracy to solve yet another Ecological Apocalypse.

Read More...

The "Best Science" that each new environmental law and regulation claims as a basis today is at best "snippetology science". A snippet is a "small piece", a "fragment", or a "scrap" according to Webster. Adding the suffix "ology" means "the study of" thus the study of fragments. These "fragments" or "snippets" are used as legal justifications and as propaganda in the media to advance the expansion of government authority and to evangelize the public with myths and bogeymen for the purposes of radical and hidden agendas of various factions both within and outside this country.

Read More...

(FOR HUNTERS, FISHERMEN, TRAPPERS & OTHER NEOPHYTES)

This morning I had breakfast with an old friend. He mentioned the continuing misuse of the hunting and fishing excise tax money by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. These are the hundreds of millions of dollars collected annually as taxes on arms, ammunition, fishing tackle, and motorboat fuel. These funds are specified for sport fish and wildlife programs managed by State (not Federal) fish and wildlife agencies. The only portion of these funds that may be used by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (the Administrator of the funds) is a specified amount for administration. The US Fish and Wildlife Service not only continues to withhold more than this amount, they are cleverly influencing the use of the funds to advance the environmental and animal rights agendas so in vogue in Washington these days.
Read More...