Now they've made it all wilderness and there's no deer left

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 May 2001 10:03:12 GMT
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JAN. 21, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
'Now they've made it all "wilderness" and there's no deer left'

Last time we were talking about the official state Department of Wildlife study on sage grouse eggs being eaten up by ravens -- a report which Dr. Bruce Wilkin of Ely contends Willie Molini's Department of Wildlife managed to keep "buried" since 1990, since it gives solid evidence that the decline in sage grouse populations must be attributed to the end of the predator control programs that worked so well from 1948 into the early '70s -- not to ranchers or hunters "overusing the land."

Joining me and Dr. Wilkin for our Friday dinner in Ely, Harry Pappas, who was appointed by former Congresswoman Barbara Vucanovich to the BLM Citizen Advisory Council and later represented the State Rifle & Pistol Association on the Clark County Tortoise Advisory Council, chimed in with a few tales of the absurdities he's witnessed over the years.

"They said the tortoise was threatened, so they had to fence off these huge areas and shut out all the cattle, which means no one is out there shooting the coyotes and the raven or trapping the lions any more, so of course that wrecked the hunting. They said anyone who found a tortoise had to turn it in.

"So what happened? They got so overrun with tortoises being turned in that they told us they were going to have to start euthanizing them. I said 'Hold on a minute, here. Euthanize them? Why don't you just drop them out in the desert?' They said 'Oh no, they'll fight with the native tortoises that already live out there and they'll kill each other, because all these lands are already at saturation levels.' I said, 'Wait a minute, now: Which is it? How can they be 'threatened,' or 'endangered' ... but now you tell us all these lands are at 'saturation levels' for tortoises?"

Harry recalls a wildlife biologist from California who, years earlier, spoke before the BLM's Citizen Advisory Council (on which Harry also served), bringing in "two huge plastic garbage bags full of baby tortoise shells -- there had to be hundreds of them, probably thousands. Every one of these shells had a hole pecked through the top where the ravens had carried them off and pecked through the shell and eaten the baby tortoise right out of the shell, and he said they picked these up in middens around the raven nests, just thousands of them.

"Well, he showed up once, and then we never saw or heard from that guy again."

In fact, when "desert tortoise preservation" became the main rationale for pushing most of southern Nevada's cattle ranchers off the land, Harry remembered the ranger from California with his bags of tortoise shells, and asked if he couldn't be brought back to address the Tortoise Advisory Council. "At that point they all said they didn't know who I was talking about; they couldn't find him.

"I followed him out to his truck that night and asked if I could have one of those shells. He didn't want to do it, but I talked him into giving me one." Harry carried with him a photographic slide showing the baby tortoise shell with the hole pecked in its back. He delivered it to Cliff Gardner at the Gardner Ranch in Ruby Valley the next day.

"But now they say the way to protect the tortoise is to fence off the land and not let the ranchers and the hunters in, when the biggest tortoise populations we ever had were in the '50s and '60s, when you had plenty of ranching, and plenty of hunting, and plenty of predator control," Harry continues, turning back to his spaghetti and meatballs while eyeing with considerable skepticism the carrot and cauliflower vegetable medley.

"I hunted the Star Valley (east of the Rubies) for 10 years. There used to be lots of deer there, but now they've made it all 'wilderness' and there's no deer left. But where Cliff has his cattle running up and down the east side of the mountain, there's plenty of deer." (Harry turned out to be right; the next day we spotted more than 80 deer just driving the snowy road through Harrison Pass with Walt Gardner, who hires out as a hunting guide -- mostly does and fawns, and the tracks of a 150-pound lion.) "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out."

"The Fish & Game data show they're losing 60 to 80 percent of the fawn crop each year -- not to hunters, to predators," Dr. Wilkin concludes. "A lion will take one deer a week; 50 in a year. You can't sustain a herd at that rate. Not without predator control."

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and editor of Financial Privacy Report (952-895-8757.) His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.

Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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